Seven Saltines

Warning: If you are my brother, the one that is younger than me, don’t disregard this post just because it has no pictures. At the very least have your computer read it to you.

For some reason when people dare me to do something I have to do it. Not illegal or dangerous tasks just dumb ones. I have balanced myself over a couch arm on my stomach for an hour, kept my right arm raised for several hours, and stayed silent for an hour (which was actually the most challenging for me). All these were because of dares. One of the dumbest was trying to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon. It didn’t end well, especially since I refused to open my mouth. The cinnamon decided to exit through my nose. The best, however, was the time I tried to eat seven saltine crackers in a minute.

I traveled to Egypt during the semester I went abroad to Greece. We took a train from Cairo down south in order to take a cruise up the Nile. The train ride/station need a post of their own, so I am going to jump ahead.

While on the train, we were given some unappetizing meal. Think airplane food, just worse. (Slightly better was breakfast, which consisted of five different pieces of dried out bread). But back to dinner, I ate the roll and pear and stuffed portions of everything else into a ziploc bag that I place in the small waste holder built into the wall. I didn’t want the attendant who brought the food to think I was a picky American. But I am a picky American and I’m sure he found that out when emptying the trash the next day. 

It was late, because our train wasn’t on time, so my roommate and I were still hungry. She pulled out saltine crackers for us to eat. This triggered a memory of the guys in our study abroad group discussing a challenge: eating 7 saltine crackers in a minute.

I told my roommate about it and she was all in. We got our watches ready and stuffed all seven crackers in our mouths in a matter of seconds.  After twenty seconds of chewing, to our dismay, the attendant, an older man, came by to pick up our food trays. Our door was open and when he saw us we started laughing because of how ridiculous we looked. Every chuckle brought spews of crackers from our mouth all over our trays and luggage. We couldn’t get ourselves under control and he said, “I come back later when you are done” after standing there for a while. When he came back we spewed crackers again, but the third time was the charm. We finally had the cracker situation under control.

The amazing thing is he seemed to like us better than some of the other people in our group. He smiled when he passed us on the train, despite the fact that we spewed crackers all over him.

So in the end we failed at eating seven saltines in a minute, but I still laugh when I remember the man just staring at us with our cheeks full of crackers and pieces flying all over the room.