I saw a video of a young girl trying oysters for the first time; she was not impressed. I laughed at her expressions as she was encouraged to try it without being able to swallow it. This jogged a memory of the first time I ate oysters.

It was 1976 during my first trip to El Salvador. There I met a man, Pedro, who owned the local gas station in Usualtan. He needed to go to the coast on a business trip and invited me along.
The drive to the coast was beautiful. Pedro did his best telling me about his country with his poor English and I tried to talk back with my poor Spanish. It was quite the conversation. That evening we stopped at a restaurant on the beach for supper. Not so much a restaurant as a hut with a few tables and chairs sitting on the sand.

He ordered oysters and soft boiled turtle eggs for us with supper. I grew up on beans and cornbread and didn’t even know oysters were considered a food. My face probably looked about the same as that little girl that couldn’t swallow her oyster.

But before I went to El Salvador I’d decided that whatever food was offered I was going to eat it. As I watched him pour the oysters straight from the shell into his mouth I regretted that commitment. Yet, I swallowed mine the same way.

He washed his down with a beer; I washed mine down with an orange Fanta.

I don’t know if it was the seafood, or if I caught a bug, but the next morning I woke up to a nasty upset stomach. By the time my co-traveler arrived on our borrowed motorcycle I was not feeling the least bit well. He wanted to spend the morning driving up the beach, and asked me if I thought I could make it. I told him yes.

Seldom have I ever been more wrong. We spent the morning frequently stopping the motorcycle so I could dig holes in the sand and purge my body.

It was a long time before I could ever look at oysters again, let alone eat one.

When I got back home, beans and cornbread never looked so good.