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Edited on Fri Jun-04-10 07:40 PM by onager
When I was in Egypt, a few times I drank water-buffalo milk literally straight from the animal. I did this because it would have been rude not to, in the circumstances. I didn't want to piss off the local village folks who were nice enough to offer me something they considered a great treat.
I never got sick, so I'm shopping right now for a good water buffalo here in Los Angeles. I live in a condo, but it has a garage.
Of course, those local folks drank raw milk every day. From cows, goats and water-buffalo. I was in Lower (Northern) Egypt, but I hear that in the deserts, a yummy treat is sour camel milk. If offered that one, I might have risked pissing off the locals...
Then there was another treat I was frequently offered, one I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot yak pole. During festivals and the like, Egyptian kids eat some no-god-awful concoction of milk, sugar and flavorings in a plastic bag.
The kids in my neighborhood (in Alexandria) were always offering me that stuff. (I lived in Alexandria, but worked out in the country, in the Nile Delta. For Egyptophiles, near the city of Dammanhor - one of the very few Egyptian cities to retain its Old Egyptian name. It means "City of Horus.")
Occasionally, some Alexandrian vendor would pull a fast one and use bad milk. A bunch of kids would get sick with raging diarrhea. (Reported in the newspapers as the neat euphemism "cobbly-wobblies."). Then the parents or cops would track down the vendor and have a chat with him. Sometimes these chats also made the papers, generally with the headline "Sweets Seller Beaten."
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