MY FEAR FACTOR
My two meals at the Balmoral could have been used on the TV show Fear Factor. The first test -- I mean, dish -- was at the hotel's fine dining restaurant, appropriately named Number One (it has won all kinds of awards). This was where I tried sweetbreads for the first time. Of course, I didn't know I was having sweetbreads because I was dining with a bunch of tourism people. When the fish appetizer came out I asked the waiter if I could have something besides seafood. He promptly brought out what looked like chicken ravioli. I didn't think anything of it until he came back around and asked, "How are the sweetbreads over the ox tail?" I had one more bite left, and my jaw (and stomach) dropped. My face turned white. I felt like standing up and start yelling, "You just served me cow balls?!" But before I did that I whispered to my seatmate, "Excuse me, what's in sweetbreads?" She assured me they weren't cow balls (phew!), and said I had just ate either the pancreas, neck or thymus gland. That didn't make me feel better, but the beef and pecan cheesecake did.

HAGGIS
If that wasn't bad enough, when I sat down the next morning at the hotel's Hadrian's restaurant I ordered the "Full Scottish Breakfast" (�18.50 = $32 ouch!). It sounded good, and I figured what the heck, When in Rome, I mean Scotland� Anyway, when the waiter brought my plate I realized why Scottish men have one of the shortest life expectancies (69.1 years) in the world. These guys seriously need to change their diet. My plate was filled with eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding (fried pigs' blood) and haggis -- along with baked beans, cooked tomatoes and mushrooms. I knew haggis wasn't made of anything I wanted to eat, but what the heck -- it couldn't be as bad as what I ate the night before, right? Wrong! That's what I get for trying to be cool and fit in like a local. I was later told that nobody eats haggis anymore except tourists. To find out what Haggis really is I logged onto Wikipedia.com, and found: "Haggis is a traditional Scottish dish. Although there are many recipes, it is normally made with the following ingredients: sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver, windpipe and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally boiled in the animal's stomach for approximately an hour." Now if you'll excuse me a minute, I'll go get sick... For more click HERE.