hehe this thread reminds me of when I lived in Saudi Arabia for 6 years as a little kid. We had gross, giant bugs there too but what I really remember are the little bugs...

the weevils in our cereal, to be precise.

We lived in a rural town in Western Saudi for 6 years and they would ship boxes of American cereal over to Saudi - along with various other foodstuffs and grocery items. The cereal boxes would inevitably get infested with weevils during transit as well as while sitting in the warehouses at the Red Sea port for weeks and weeks before being released to the store in our town.

So we'd get all this American cereal, pour ourselves bowls, and it'd be fulla weevils.

The first year or so, we'd just throw away a box that had weevils and hope the next one got through without any.

But that didn't work cuz it was such a waste to throw out 9 outta 10 boxes so after a couple years we would just pour the cereal on the table, go thru with our fingers and pick out all the weevils and throw them in the trash, and then eat the cereal once we were satisfied we got rid of em all.

But that just got annoying and too time consuming so after about 3 years we would just eat the cereal with the bugs in it.

We'd put cereal in the freezer so that the weevils were all frozen and immobile and then you had to eat the cereal real fast before they had a chance to thaw out in the milk and start squirming around and stuff.

You could always tell how long a family had been in Saudi by how they ate their cereal.