Common Sense and Whiskey

Now with Fresh Aborigines!

Here's a page from a menu in the Miraflores district of Lima, Peru, seen in December. Consider the Lasana Vegeteriana. There's a closer view below:

Yum. Maybe they meant aubergines?

 

Rainy Day Reading

We've been a little scarce here at CS&W as we try to finish up some longer-form writing and get set for a trip to Rapa Nui that's about a month away. More on that as we get closer.

For now, here are ideas of interest from all over, if you're so inclined:

- Not long ago, my pal Rick Lewis moved to Cotacachi, Ecuador. He blogs about it at brokedownpalette.
- Alfred Molon, a Dane, has some 23,000 photos here, from much of the world.
- Albanian Tourism Project Puts Beds in Bunkers, from Der Spiegel.
- Kebabistan, a Eurasianet food blog, is worth a look.
- Update on the state of things in Ukraine, from Salon.
- The Enclaves and Counter-enclaves of Baarle, on the Dutch/Belgian border, from Big Think's Strange Maps.
- And you might have seen that the British have invaded nine out of ten countries, from an upcoming book.

Fruits of Labor - Wednesday HDRs

Both Labor Day in the U.S. (the first Monday in September) and the International Worker's Day (or May Day, May 1st) seem to have sprung up almost simultaneously in the 1880s. The U.S. Department of Labor says that the first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882.

The movement in Canada may have been a little out in front of the U.S.:

"Labor unions existed in Canada in the early 1800s but legislation was adopted to make it illegal for workers to form unions.... At the beginning of May, thousands of workers and their families would march peacefully through the city streets into the parks where they would enjoy picnics, and listen to speakers talking about working together to force employers to reduce working hours.... In 1872, the Canadian government changed the law so it was no longer illegal to be a member of a trade union."

Martyred Communist Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the Americans were also behind May Day:

"The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia" in 1856, she wrote, and "The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage." 

Ms. Luxemburg never got round to how Labor Day moved from May to September, and it's a good question, since today some 80 countries celebrate Worker's Day on May 1st. Here is Britannica's answer:

"In 1889 an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions declared the date of May 1 as Workers’ Day to commemorate the  Haymarket Riot in Chicago (1886). Five years later, U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland, uneasy with the socialist origins of Workers’ Day, signed legislation to make Labor Day—already held in some states on the first Monday of September—the official U.S. holiday in commemoration of workers. Canada followed suit not long afterward."

So, both Americans and Canadians celebrated a holiday with a day off last weekend. Montrealers were out in unusually warm weather for a street festival in Old Montreal. Here are a few HDRs. Click them to make them bigger:

All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here.

No Pad Thai in the Sixties

This says the first Thai restaurant in the entire United States opened in 1971.

"Evidently, denture adhesive is improving"

Oktoberfest ended yesterday in Munich with the loss of

"a Viking helmet, two crutches, an electric wheelchair, a rucksack containing two foldable camping chairs, a case full of musical notes, 1,300 items of clothing, 520 wallets, over 1,000 identity cards, 390 mobile phones, 370 pairs of eyeglasses, 90 cameras, 80 items of jewellery and watches and 425 keys..."

and only one set of dentures, down from previous years.

"The year I started," a worker in lost and found said, "I remember we had five or six sets of false teeth in, and a pensioner walked in and tried them all on. Unfortunately, his weren't among them."

Read all about it here in Der Spiegel.

The Englischer Biergarten, Munich.

Hoi An, Vietnam Morning Market - Wednesday HDR

Colorful, and one of the top 100 most popular on EarthPhotos.com, this is from the morning market at Hoi An, Vietnam. Click it for the full treatment.

Words You Can Use

How to say cheers in fifty languages.

"I bet it will be vaguely disappointing."

Featuring "soft tortillas overstaffed with supper tangy chicken."

Cooking Tips from People Who Serve You Airline Food

This is pretty funny:

"In this episode Bobby and Sara test the myth: Can you make a grilled cheese sandwich in your hotel room with the hotel room iron?"

The Latest Turkish Treat? Introducing the French Fry Burger

We admit to not picking up on the craze on past trips to Turkey. It seems the Patso, or french fry burger, all started when a group of students

"insisted on extra fries in their sandwiches and burgers. And the boss never turned them away, adding more and more fries to each serving, and thus a new item was added to the menu: patso. In time Aktaş expanded the types of patso available: sausage, cheese, chicken and döner. And the rest is evident from the lines in front of his store late into the night."

So the rest is history. But you can revel in it. It's all here: Join Mehmet Usta for the "tale of the transformation of what was essentially a potato sandwich into patso," and find out where the patso craze began.

And click through the logo to the store's web site.

(Turkey is one of the great places on the planet, and there are hundreds of photos from all across Turkey in the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. But not a single patso burger.)

Ethnic Food Blog

Nicely done food blog centered around Central Asian & Turkish cuisine: It's called Kebabistan.

The Camping Cook

 

Jeff Bartlett's got a nice niche. His blog promises camping cooking made easy. He says his recipes teach travelers how to cook nutritious meals on a single-burner camp stove. Does camping cooking gear reviews, too. Check it out at The Camping Cook. I'm putting it in CS&W's "Worth Your Time" links.

 

DPRK Dining

More strange North Korean doings: "the food here is fresh and abundant. The menu features specialties such as Pyongyang "cold noodle" (served encrusted with ice), barbecued cuttlefish, stringy dangogi (dog meat) soup, and countless variations on the kimchi theme, all served with glutinous white rice. Also available for sale are a series of North Korean products, including ginseng wine and some nameless bear "product" promised to increase sexual virility."

Little Culinary Horrors

From our most recent trip abroad, we brought home scorpion vodka and Thai green curry crickets. I don't imagine they'll ever come out of their packages, though. Just interesting items for the kitchen counter.

I've just seen a discussion on Flyertalk about the strangest things people have ever eaten. Among them: dog and slugs and durian, of course, and live octopus and insect pupa. (We watched a man buy and enjoy a caterpillar in Burma. Said it tasted like butter.) In comparison, I guess my list is fairly conservative: fried scorpion in Beijing and crocodile tail in Cape Town. Scorpion was fine. Had a little problem with the croc.

The picture is from a visit to a big farmers market in Hanoi. The ladies we talked to were disdainful. Only men ate dog. Usually when drinking beer.

*****

There are 274 more photos from around the world in the Food and Drink Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Tarantulas Deep-Fried, not Baked

A couple of tasty treats brought home from our last trip:

 

And there were deep-fried tarantulas on offer, too. The culinary wilds of exotic Southeast Asia? No, er, um, Fortnum & Mason, London, actually.

We passed on the tarantulas, but Leo Laksi, who's been on a swing through Laos and Cambodia, tried them.

A Day in the Scottish Sun for American Haggis Lovers

There's a dusting of snow on the mountains around the farm. Feeling like a pioneer woodsman (I must buy some big flannel work shirts) this morning, I fed a fire until it crackled furiously in the wood stove, situated a mug of coffee so that little rings of steam rose between me and the window, and settled in to take in all the world's overnight developments via our so-called DSL, way up here at the far end of the last twisted pair on this entire gravel lane.

While reading "6 Reasons Bacon is Better Than True Love," I remembered that sometimes the internet can be just a wee bit of a time waster. But, if you knew where to find it, there was real news; It seems the U.S. is lifting it's 21 year ban on sheep offal!

And this is news because?

Because of haggis.

"... butchers in the US have tried, and failed, to make their own versions of the pudding without using the vital ingredient: sheep. "It was a silly ban which meant a lot of people have never tasted the real thing," said Margaret Frost, of the Scottish American Society in Ohio. "We have had to put up with the US version, which is made from beef and is bloody awful," reports the Guardian.

No need for bloody awful haggis anymore. And to top it off, the news comes in the same week as the observance of Robert Burns night.

*****

A week and a half ago Mirja and I took a London Cab over to the Royal Academy of Arts for the new exhibit, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. The only trouble: that exhibit started the following Saturday. So we walked back out across the street and into Fortnum & Mason (Piccadilly since 1707) and there, in cans just as readily available as Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, were rows and rows of haggis.

Not knowing they were contraband, it was good that we didn't buy any. The next day was our flight home and big metal cans were going to have a hard time finding their way into our laden bags. Instead, our shopping cart was filled with smaller, handy travel-sized extra strong English mustards, special flavored Welsh sea salts - and, of course, crunchy Cambodian crickets (baked, not fried) and Scorpion vodka.

Although funny, if you search the Fortnum & Mason site this morning, you don't return any results for crickets or scorpions - or those chocolate covered tarantulas that shared the same display case. All of which looked more appetizing than these chickens from Nepal or these dogs in Hanoi.

Browse through nearly 300 more photos in the Food and Drink Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

McDonald's Leaves Iceland, No One's Day Ruined.

To know a people, know their food. In a foreign land, we always try to make it to a local grocery or market, just to see what's different there. When you're on holiday, one of the great pleasures is to sample the local cuisine.

The little deep-fried scorpions on our first trip to Beijing were cute and crunchy. Finnish moose is hearty, warming and delicious. The crocodile tail in Cape Town was leathery and tough and caused intestinal revolt later on, but hey, when in South Africa....

We went for the betel nut high on the banks of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea:

They offered a chew of betel nut. An amused audience watched us split ‘em open and pop the nuts into our mouths. You chew; that generates saliva, and you spit the juice through your teeth while keeping the meat. It was a technique I didn’t master.

The juice is white. You dip a couple-inch piece of mustard stalk into “lime,” pounded from mussel shell, and chomp it. It turns the juice bright red. Chew, spit, chew. It’s a little bitter and it gets your heart moving a bit, a little blood rushes to your head, everything’s a notch more intense, and then it fades.

The larvae-in-a-branch in Kyuak Tan village, Burma, was a bug too far, though:

You could buy branches too, inside of which some God-forsaken larvae nestled. Yep, you bought the branch, plucked the thing out and popped it in your mouth. Tasted like butter, Kyaw said, except crunchy. This was more of a Chinese practice than a Burmese one, he assured us, and he'd only tried it once. My God, these people were eating worms out of trees!!!

With this for comparison, let us not lament the closing of the three McDonald's in Iceland. You can manage until you get back home. For those who must, I was going to suggest the Hard Rock Cafe Reykjavik, but whoops, looks like that's gone, too. In the spirit of the region, enjoy some fine imported smoked Scandinavian reindeer instead.

(Photo: Making sago paste in Papua New Guinea. Visit the Food Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Fine Food

Have we mentioned lately what a pleasure the blog Sticky Rice is? Here's a typical entry. Always colorful, nicely done. Best viewed hungry.

Eat 'em up, Drink 'em In

The site Eating Asia is just so well done it makes you want to be - or at least eat - wherever they are at the moment. This post, from Delhi earlier this week, is particularly nice. Enjoy also the Food and Drink Gallery and the Markets Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Buy You a Beer? Lao?

Just reading the Sharing Experiences blog entry titled Beer. It's timely because earlier this week The New York Times published a long article on one particular beer on a mission, Beer Lao.

There's even one place where recently we've been able to find it here in rural northeast Georgia, of all places. It's great to see it popping up (albeit only occasionally, so far) hereabouts.

The article reports that, "In Hong Kong’s central district, it (Beer Lao) sells for 44 Hong Kong dollars, or about $6, a bottle — about the same price as Carlsberg, Stella Artois or Heineken.

Not so on our first encounter with Beer Lao. On an impossibly hot, dripping-humid afternoon, we sat in full sun at an insubstantial little formica table that comprised half the terrace at a no-name restaurant directly above the Mekong River in Luang Prabang.

We'd just arrived by boat from the northern tip of Thailand, it was so, so bloody hot and well, gee, we were mighty thirsty.

One U.S. dollar first produced two tall, icy bottles (one of which is pictured). A few moments later the barefoot, maybe pre-teen girl returned with a brilliant smile - and a handful of change.

Herewith I submit photographic evidence of our painstaking research into Beer Lao: It's my beautiful wife Mirja hard by the banks of the River Mekong in Luang Prabang, Laos in June, 2000.