Preparing your stomach for travel

Pre departure:

I decided that my stomach (and taste buds) needed some priming before I leave on Saturday so a friend and I decided to go for sushi. I am not a big fish person but I am assuming there is going to be a ton of it over there. My friend is also a big sushi enthusiast and likes the out-of-the-norm kinds.

Before you there are four kinds of nigiri sushi: octopus, eel, tuna and snapper fish as well as two different kinds of rolls. Really it was the octopus and the eel that had me freaked out.

Octopus is chewy as all get out but really didn't taste like anything and the eel actually had a decent flavor. Everything else we had was really good.

One trepidation that I have moving forward is that everything is going to be really spicy. I am way to Nordic for my own good sometimes and cannot handle anything even remotely spicy (the orange sauce on one of the rolls was spicy and that was hard to power through) and I don't think they have ranch dressing in China to cool things down so I'm either going to have to stick to a rice diet while I'm there or learn to deal with spicy food.

I am told that I have to eat at least one scorpion while I am in China . . . I think starting with octopus in Colorado is a good jumping off point, we will just have to see if I work up the courage to go as far as a scorpion.