Feet Eating Fish and Whitebait: No Thanks

Greece has not escaped the global craze for opening salons where you can have your feet chewed away be small fish who like eating dead skin. In fact these salons are everywhere but they are having to survive without my custom. Call me a dull old traditionalist but I rather think that humans should eat fish, not the other way round. But it is not the reversal of the natural order that repels me.

It is the thought of where those fish who might nibble at my feet were snacking beforehand. Were they chomping away on the toes of some tattooed junkie from Coventry? Or was breakfast a pair of fat German feet. Before any of my readers in the Fatherland (there cannot be many as you would have to be a fairly masochistic German to read this blog) claim that I am bring up issues of blood purity as a reminder of events 60 years ago which they all claim to have known nothing about but really all did, hang on. This is just about simple hygiene. I just cannot see that it can possibly be healthy.

Nor is it really necessary. As a fairly metrosexual sort of guy I make sure that after I shower or bathe I have a gentle scrape of my feet and remove dead skin myself. So I have quite well maintained feet. I shall spare you a photo. But I do not need fish to assist me. Indeed the whole idea just strikes me as be of those decadent fripperies allowing Westerners to waste (usually borrowed) cash. But it is also a fundamentally disgusting decadent frippery.

The feet eating fish have, however, caused me another panic attack. I rather worry that the total lack of tourists here means that in the local salon some of the fish must be going hungry. And for the same reason so too must the owner. In a desperate attempt to realise cash and knowing that she cannot guarantee enough “meals” for her fish, might she not strike a deal with a local tavern owner and treat some of her employees as a cash crop. I know this is an irrational fear but Greece is an odd place and desperate times call for desperate measures.

As such when I stare at a bowl of whitebait ordered by another customer I just cannot help but wonder. The nightmarish thought will just not go away. For once, I am not ordering whitebait at all.