Dirt cheap: take a second look

I take to eating at the market in town. It is dirt cheap, the cheapest food I have eaten in Southeast Asia in fact, and I am the only tourist. This morning, I eat a bowl of noodle soup. I have two choices: kao soi, made with fermented soybeans and pork, or another one, which has tiny brown cubes that look like tofu which I understand to be beef liver.

Of the lesser of two evils, I choose beef liver. It is only tomorrow, after a bout of wicked food poisoning lasting 14 hours, that an American will laugh and tell me I was eating congealed blood.