To ask you what your most unusual/unexpected overseas food experiences are

[Bunnyfuller]

I mean as in you order something, and the interpretation of it is so vastly different to expectations...

Sometimes this might be from fucking picky kids unrealistic ordering or just from a local idea that this is what people from your country eat.

My two favourites - a portion of fries on a side plate with a useful portion of cold tinned peas. And a full roast dinner. Pre cooked and straight out of the fridge (not reheated at all). The latter was put on for an official dinner, spectacular. Luckily there was lots of booze and some divine doughnut-y things I completely gorged myself on had a couple of for pudding.

I thought I was buying a cooked egg when on holiday a few years ago.

balut

Street cafe in Shanghai where you get your bowl and point at things:
Lovely broth. Check.
Chunks of veggies. Check.
Get to the end and before I could swerve there was a huge dollop of jellied blood dropped into the bowl. Think blancmange. But blood.
Bleuurgh.

On the other hand tako tamago (octopus with quail's egg in their head, on a lolly stick) at Nishiki Market in Kyoto were wonderful:

SabineUndine

I've had fish in banana sauce and fish in honey sauce on Madeira. Really enjoyed both, but then I'm a big fan of sweet/fruity things with my savoury stuff, so no big deal! Not sure how I'd have felt about fish with random banana fritter accompaniment though.

DB ordered a Hawaiian pizza in Hran Canadian when we were teens. Came topped with ham and BANANA! Boak!

Gran Canaria!

Singapore, we were looking for something for breakfast, dh said you can't go wrong with eggs, so we ordered boiled eggs for breakfast. Turns out they are only heated to lukewarm, runny, raw eggs

garlic bread in a small non-EU holiday

sliced up bread (normal enough, delicious)
little unwrapped cloves of garlic on the side, delicately sliced.
a little pat of butter.

it was like assemble your own garlic bread.

bizarre but fun and totally unexpected.

Ordered an iced coffee in a little cafe in Venice - what arrived was an espresso with a block of vanilla ice cream floating on top...

I especially like the things clearly intended to be UK' but a completely different interpretation - vol au vent Yorkshire.

I get the exotic weirdness in the more off the track places and wouldn't expect anything different tbh.

The ones where for whatever reason you think you're 'playing safe' by ordering something relatively familiar and some oddness arrives. No wonder they look at you weirdly when you order!!

Menu in China said 'seasoned steak'. Duly ordered and put in the middle to share. No one could figure out what it was. QUite fatty and fried a bit like KFC but not the right bones. He waitress told us, by meowing, that it was cat.

One that caught us a bit unawares the first time we drank it was in Greece. Kilo krasi (I think the literal translation is a kilo of wine!) but, I guess, it's just the house wine. It came in a very deceptive looking round, pottery jug, which didn't look as though it held very much .... except the jug seemed to be bottomless as it took us quite some time to work our way through it

Andouilllette. It looked like a lovely plump juicy sausage. Lets just say it is now known as poo sausage amongst our friends.

Pickled pigs foot in Florida, you are supposed to suck out the flesh/meat from between the trotters.

trixymalixy

I went to a Louisiana style restaurant in London and their andouilllette was actually sausage. The chef was from Louisiana and explained to me that the sausage was imported from there. Nothing like the original French product - even more confusing!

Pizza and chips in sardinia for DO. Really nice restaurant full of locals. Pizza arrived with the chips cooked on the top. Un fucking believable

In a pub in Posnan, starving, didn't fancy the burgers and pizzas on the menu but saw 'Chinese chilli noodles' and thought I'd go for that.

What arrived at the table was an enormous (enough for four people) bowl of spaghetti with the contents of what I can only imagine must have been a whole bottle of sweet chilli sauce poured over the top. That was it.

I was so hungry I actually ate (about half of) it.

DH once ordered a 'fruits of the forest' meat dish in Germany, with vague expectations of venison and blackberries or similar. What arrived was various forest meats, including but not limited to stoat and squirrel ... and not a blackberry or any other fruit on the plate!

echt I took pictures of thise egg stuffed octopuses but wimped out of actually eating them (I too had just had a run in with a pot of custard with Fish Surprise at the bottom).
But we loved Japanes food and I think it is the only holiday that we've come back from feeling healthier than when we want - so much beautiful seafood and veg.

Cucumber on pizza in Russia

I decided to tripe because I had heard that it is very unusual. The manager came over and made very sure I knew what it was (using miming to back up his English). It was disgusting! But I ate a lot of it to show that I wasn't a silly tourist.

Not really that unusual but in Naples mum and I had gone for a wander, got lost and hungry. We had a small amount of money so decided we could go to a restaurant if we were careful. My mum pointed on the menu to seafood pasta dish. They came back and confirmed that she was wanting seafood. Yes seafood. Out came a whole lobster! We looked on the menu and it was the thing above on the menu -and a LOT more expensive. Thankfully we could just manage it with no money for desserts. But it was just a lobster -nothing else with it. Luckily we always share our food so she did get some variety.

Somebody brought this thing called chak chak back from Kazakhstan to my work. It looked like a massive Rice Krispie square but was composed of what seemed to be pale, flavourless Wotsits stuck together with honey. Still ate it.

Panama - we had some language barrier issues and after a while we're happy we'd ordered a chicken wrap. They didn't lie - it was indeed one wrap with an entire whole roast chicken on top, each