Most people consider it unfortunate when they find something in their meal that's not supposed to be there.
To be fair it's usually a hair, fly, or piece of bone.
But for Rudy Pospisil it was a lucky moment.
Pospisil, a Vancouver-area firefighter, was shopping on Granville Island this past weekend when he stopped in for a meal at Tony's Seafood and Oyster Bar.
"I rarely eat oysters but they were on special so I thought "Why not get the half dozen?'" he tells Vancouver Is Awesome.
The food arrived and he got a friend to take a photo of the fancy meal before digging in. Then, when he put one of the oyster shells in his mouth, he felt something hard.
"I thought it was a piece of shell," he says.
He pulled the hard, little object out and it turned out to be a wee white pearl. The photo his friend had taken earlier actually captured the pearl sitting in the oyster.
Pospisil's server said it's an extraordinarily rare occurrence. "It's a 1 in 10,000 chance to find a pearl in an oyster," he says. "The server told me to buy a lotto ticket, that it's my lucky day. So I did and I won...another free ticket."
Aside from the advice, the server also gave him the shell the pearl came from.
"I'm going to mount this pearl in the shell and give it to a special girl at Christmas," he says.
Pospisil just finished a global bike ride, raising money for charity and says on that massive trip, eating food in over 30 countries, he never had a meal like the one on Granville Island.
"I have never found a pearl or anything of value in a meal before, except indigestion in some rough places," he says.
