...

In leiu of the usual "why Spain is awesome and traveling rules," I would like to present something a bit different today. Something called
I may have eatten brains

For lunch today I arrived a bit late. It was raining out. In the dining room, everyone was finishing eatting as I arrived, and no one had bothered to turn on the ligths, leaving the gloomy gray sky as our only illumination. The meal started with spinach soup, one of the few Spanish dishes I cannot really stand. But I ate it all. I am not one to snub food that´s been graciously prepared for me. And there were fried potatoes and some sort of meat coming up for the main course, which pointed to brighter horizons.
If only it were so.
As my señora prepared a plate of food for me she asked if I thought she´d given me enough meat. "Of course," I told her sincerely. "There are a lot of bones in it," she explained, "maybe I should give you some more." I did not protest.
There were indeed a lot of bones in the meat, and removing them was made a bit difficult by the thick sauce which contained all sorts of vegetables and who knows what else. There was a subtly strange, slightly familiar taste to the food, which did not completely agree with me, but I cheerfully ate it anyway. Were I eight years old again, surely I would have cried or complained. But I´m 21 years old and I am no longer "picky."
Then I found a piece of meat that was stubbornly attatched to the bone. I had already been having a hard time distinguishing between meat and fat or skin or sauce or whatever exactly it was that I had been eatting, so I decided to fully uncover this odd piece of flesh and see what exactly it was connected to and whether it was worth eatting.
What I found was yellow, with slight ridges and a very defined, almost plantlike shape. It was squishy and I could not easily cut it with my fork.
But I´d seen tissue like this before. I the air had been thick with the smell of phermaldehyde, and I had a scalpel in my hand. Mrs. Ambert´s class, probably fifth grade, when we disected sheep brains. Perhaps there had been no smell underneath the preservative chemicals, but I was sure now that if the brain itself had smelled like anything, it was that strange taste I´d detected the lunch currently set before me.
I swept more of the sauce and vegetable bits away and saw that the bone was a vertebra. Which fit my theory exactly: on my plate, amid tomatoe sauce and aside fried potatoes was a very significant piece of SPINAL COLUMN.
Just to be sure, I asked my señora about it when she returned. She struggled a bit to explain the concept of "lamb" to me, since I did not know the Spanish word, then when I pressed her further, freely and cheerfully admited what I already knew to be true. I had been poking sheep brains with my fork. And then I had eatten off of the fork.
And who knows what other bits of spinal tissue I ate before I discovered this spoungey yellow bit.
I remember learning back in high school that bits of brain and spinal tissue that made it into hot dogs are what spread Mad Cow Disease to humans. Can anyone verify or deny this?
And can anyone wipe this incident from my . . . brain?