I never thought I’d be caught eating out of a toilet bowl, but there I was, scooping out chunks of brown stuff from a lime green loo. The loose watery goo looked remarkably like you-know-what, but I tried not to think about it. Instead, I chose to wash the slop down with yellow liquid served from a plastic bed pan.

This is a typical lunch at the Modern Toilet restaurant, a kitschy café in the heart of Taipei’s Shilin district.

It’s fair to say that the restaurant’s theme is crap. The décor is bathroom-like: blue tiles, toilet paper dispensers, mirrors along the wall and shower curtains hung from the ceilings. Guests sit on toilets (seats down boys) and eat over sink-style tables.

Actual dishes take the form of toilet bowls, while cups look like mini urinals. There are toilet chachkas around the room and spiral brown clumps of doggie doo-doo on the tables.

It’s an unusual gimmick but given the first Modern Toilet restaurant opened four years ago and has expanded into a franchise of some 10 restaurants around the city, it’s clearly a hit, drawing a clientele of mostly young people in high school and college.

Sitting atop my porcelain throne I had a look at the menu. According to a small poo symbol (located beside certain items on the menu) Japanese-style hot pots, hot chili chicken and the cheesy noodles are some of the most popular dishes.

Dessert turned out to be an obscene display of sweets on a mound of shaved ice. It was smothered in strawberry sauce, topped with marshmallows, raisins and cubes of unidentifiable green jelly.

Though the food was decent, gourmet cuisine certainly isn’t the main reason that most people come.

A visit here begs the question: Why would anyone want to eat out of a mock toilet bowl? There’s something truly revolting about combining human waste with food, yet Modern Toilet makes this concept fun, subtly challenging the cultural taboos of poo.

Back at home, dinner discussions about bowel movements aren’t exactly encouraged but here, toilet humor is an inescapable topic of conversation.

Sitting at a table nearby were Helen and Rachel, two twenty-somethings who just graduated from the University of Toronto. On their celebratory week-long trip to Taiwan, the toilet restaurant topped their list of local tourist attractions. After visiting Taipei 101, currently the world’s tallest building (a record soon to be overturned by Shanghai and Dubai), Modern Toilet was the next hotspot on their list.

Between bites of stool-colored curried chicken, they admitted that a trip here made great fodder for Facebook photographs. “This toilet restaurant is fun,” said one of the girls, taking a sip of strawberry milkshake from her bed-pan inspired cup. “It’s the shit.”

With their big innocent eyes, cat-like whiskers and soft fluffy fur, guinea pigs make for great family pets.  But here, in the Andean mountains of Ecuador, guinea pigs aren’t treated as cuddly companions; they’re bred, boiled and deep-fried for dinner.

Guinea pig or Cuy as it is called in South America is a local delicacy that’s unique to the highlands of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.  Cuy is most often eaten for special occasions, an indigenous tradition that dates back hundreds of years to the Incan empire.

I was curious to learn more about this unusual cuisine, so I set out to the region of Otavalo, a two-hour drive from the capital city of Quito, to find out more.

I found myself in Peguche (a tiny village traditionally known for its weaving culture) to visit a typical Andean family.

Two elderly women shared this dimly-lit house, with only the basic of necessities between them.  What they lacked in material possessions, they made up for in over forty-odd guinea pigs.

The ladies shared a few fascinating facts about cuy: The origin of the word is onomatopoeia for the sound they make, a high-pitched, bird-like series of chirps.  Nearly every rural Indigenous home has at least one or two guinea pigs roaming around.  The amount of guinea pigs one owns is a symbol of social status and wealth.

Cuy are not only used for food. They warm the house, keep the rats away and are used for medicinal purposes.  I’m told that local herbal doctors use cuy in their healing rituals.   In one ceremony, a shaman will rub the sick person in question with a black cuy for about 15 to 30 minutes, or until the guinea pig suffocates.  He then diagnoses the patient’s illness by cutting the animal in half and interpreting the malady according to animals’ spread out innards.

It is also believed that cuy carries positive energy when eaten.  A lover of all strange foods, I couldn’t help but want to try guinea pig for myself.  I found my way to the popular restaurant La Hornilla, one of ten restaurants in the tiny town of Chaltura that specializes in cuy.

Cuy is prepared differently across the highlands, but here in Chaltura, they deep-fry it multiple times at varying temperatures.  I watched as a cook tossed a de-furred, whitish/blue cuy carcass into a pan of sizzling hot oil.  The lifeless meat slinked into a deceptively hot vat of placid oil.  There’s nothing quite like the sight of a dead guinea pig in a deep fryer….disgusting!

Once sufficiently crispy, the cuy was served spread eagle on a plate.   Head, teeth and claws still attached, it didn’t look terribly appetizing but, having come this far, I had no choice but to dig in.  The meat was moist, tender and, like most things in this world, tasted just like chicken.  Having been deep-fried three times, its skin was extra crispy, leaving a heavy oil residue on my fingertips.

While the meat is a bit scarce and you really have to work for it, I have to admit – guinea pig is not that bad!  It likely won’t become part of my daily diet but it’s fun just to try it!  Sampling unusual local cuisines, be it foie gras, skewered-scorpion or deep fried cuy, can challenge food taboos.  It can expand the mind… and, at the very least, the taste buds.

Would you sample guinea pig?  Leave me a comment below!