Tag Archives: viking.British and Irish history

Hisashiburi.

6 Sep

wedding

Wow, what a month it’s been. My entire August was gobbled up by the wedding – which was a rousing success, by the way! And now I can (hopefully) get my visa. Yaaaaay!

But I’ve neglected the blog, and indeed, I’ve neglected the sort of activities for which the blog exists. A lack of both time and money has precluded extravagances in culinary tourism, not to mention any creative endeavors aside from making invitations and placecards. Even so, August has seen several newsworthy discoveries and exploits on the viking front. Before I recommence posting proper, here is a recap of the past four weeks’ more interesting items:

earlscourtbeermenu

  • August began with the Great British Beer Festival, where I sampled a dozen or so excellent and almost-excellent ales from around the UK and around the world. I also tried the East London specialty, jellied eels, which sound, look, and taste like something from a Roald Dahl story.eelsBut the real revelation was the selection of beers from Italy, of all places. Like the brewers of Japan and America, whose beer cultures aren’t mired in “traditions” like those of England, Belgium, and Germany, Italian brewers adopt a playful, experimental attitude and a love of the local. I am convinced that Italy is the next frontier in craft brewing. Consider the three bottles I picked up at the festival: Shangrila Fumé, a strong amber ale brewed with spices and peat-smoked whisky malts; Barley BB10, a barleywine made from the reduction of a prized local wine; and Verdi Imperial Stout, infused with the heat of chili peppers. I plan to crack these open soon and have them with Italian cheese – stay tuned for tasting notes.
    beermapitalianbeer
  • I am a professional food writer! I’ve now reviewed two restaurants and one pub for View London, and I will be writing more for them in the future.breelouise
  • Speaking of restaurants, I’ve been to a few recently that I must recommend. Head to Abeno or Abeno Too for perfect Osaka-style okonomiyaki and miscellaneous izakaya fare that’s only slightly overpriced. Sakura and Tokyo Diner are also wonderfully Japanese, both embracing the whole universe of Japanese cooking from katsukarē to mentaiko. Tokyo Diner in particular is fantastic – modest yet superlative, and dirt cheap. Cans of Kirin and Asahi are only £1.90!leongsA bit further into Chinatown is Leong’s Legends, a Taiwanese-Chinese joint where the service is brusque but the food is special. You must try the xiao long bao (soup dumplings), but let them cool a bit before tucking in or you’ll scald your mouth something awful. Finally, we were pleasantly surprised with Anatolian Flame, a place we hungrily stumbled into after viewing some flats in northwest London. The service was charming and the charcoal-grilled Turkish food was excellent, such as the relentlessly juicy and flavorful  lamb kebab with tomatoes served on a whole grilled eggplant with dill cream.
  • I’m still going to the awesome, free life study sessions at Beach Blanket Babylon Shoreditch, and I wrote about it for a contest (which I lost) on Trazzler. If you’re in London and even a little bit arty, check it out. And if you’re not sure about the whole drawing thing, you can still enjoy a cocktail or two.
  • I just finished reading Hops and Glory, a surprisingly non-geeky (alright, it’s a little geeky) book about the history of India Pale Ale. Author Pete Brown weaves meticulous historical research together with a spirited personal travelogue as he drags a keg of IPA on a journey from England to India that approximates the sea route along which the original ales were shipped. The book is peppered with sharp gastropolitical commentary and enlightening factoids, and in some places is actually suspenseful – not what I expected from a book about beer. Highly recommended to beer geeks, history buffs, or fans of good travel writing.

And now I’m off to the motherland for six weeks, where I will fork over nearly a grand to the British consulate in order to get my visa. Blogging shall continue while I’m there, and before long I’ll be able to post about trips around the UK and the rest of Europe!

Myanmar Stream of Consciousness: Week 1 ミャンマーの旅の意識の流れ・第一周

28 Dec

When they beat on a broken guitar
And on the streets, they reek of tropical charms
The embassies lie in hideous shards
Where tourists snore and decay
When they dance in a reptile blaze
You wear a mask, an equatorial haze
Into the past, a colonial maze
Where there’s no more confetti to throw

Beck, “Tropicalia”

buddhaglow

“Let’s send him to Burma!” Okay, where is that exactly? And isn’t it called Myanmar now? And isn’t there some reason I’m not supposed to go there? Sure, whatever – I need this job, so who am I to argue? But I really don’t want to be away for Christmas. I’m flying in from Taipei with six hours to kill at Suvarnabhumi. Burger King – a welcome break, then a disappointing break, from Chinese food. Meeting up with Nick, landing at Yangon. The airport is surprisingly modern – the city, not so much, but in the dark it looks a bit like LA. Our hotel is rubbish, the windows don’t shut and there are bugs in the room – but it’s only one night. Gmail is blocked; the military plutocracy makes its presence felt for the first time (but at least they don’t block Facebook, thank goodness).

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shrimpcashew

Driving to Kyaiktiyo with a stop at a WWII cemetery. Lunch – a tasty Chinese stir-fry with peanuts as a starter. These peanuts – they’re unusually crunchy and robust! Bottled water and a flatbed truck ride overflowing with people halfway up the hill to the Golden Rock pavilion (I heard one of them tipped over last week and killed eight people) – then a refreshing hike up the rest of the way. The Golden Rock – huge, and gold. I wonder when it will roll off the cliff and kill a dozen pilgrims, but it’s beautiful in the sunset. A crepe filled with palm sugar and coconut. A dance performed by tribal insurgents. A stunning sunrise. How high up are we, anyway?

goldenrocksunsetgoldenrock2
crepe

Walking, then driving down the mountain – the same guy who carried our suitcases up the mountain on his back carries them down. Wow. I bought some spicy fruit preserves then let myself get ripped off by a flirty banana vendor. What the hell am I doing to do with all these bananas?! The drive to Mawlamyine – impossibly uncomfortable and bumpy through miles and miles of rubber plantations. Half the road isn’t even paved. It’s hard for people to get around, and I suspect the government likes it that way.

Mawlamyine – an hour on the internet at a cafe costs less than 50 cents, and Gmail works here! What the hell, this government is so rubbish they can’t even censor the internet properly. Y’know what else costs less than 50 cents? A glass of draft Myanmar beer! But isn’t it brewed by the government? Who cares? It’s cheap and I’m bored. I’m also starting to get sick of temples (but not Burmese sunsets – yet).

mawlamyinestupamawlamyinesunset

The next day was rubbish. Another torturously bumpy drive, first to a pleasant war cemetery, then to a wholly unpleasant former Japanese onsen and POW camp. If I had known I’d be trudging through a muddy river and sulphuric muck I’d have worn sandals. I’m probably going to get worms. At least lunch was nice – stunningly fresh seafood from Setse Beach. Back to the hotel to get slightly less drunk than I did the night before.

foreverenglandsetsefish

Driving back to Yangon via Bago for six hours – not nearly as horrible as I expected (I was actually able to sleep in the van). More peanuts come with lunch – why are the peanuts in this country so good?! I am getting sick of mosquitoes, and of Buddhas, but these four in Bago are remarkably cool. But not as cool as our hotel tonight in Yangon – The Savoy. Damn, I wish we could stay here for more than twelve hours! This is colonial chic; I wonder how many temples were plundered to decorate this place. And the happy hour is a damn good deal, too, but you call this a Manhattan? I’ll stick to ABC Stout for the rest of the night – one good thing about the British Empire is that it brought extra stout porters to the most unlikely corners of the globe. The sun never sets on decent dark beer.

buddhabago

Waking at 5:00 to catch a 7:00 flight to Bagan. Bye bye Savoy! (Sometimes this job is awesome.) A glimpse of Bagan’s red brick temples from the plane, of what may be the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in my life.

Jorvik ヨーヴィック

26 Oct

It seems to me that the English in general have a very high tolerance strange affinity for camp and kitsch. The four-meter-tall statue of Freddie Mercury on Tottenham Court Road, the Charles Dickens theme park in Kent, and the endless pages of High School Musical 3 coverage in the free papers all seem to suggest that kitsch is as much a part of English culture as kawaii is of Japanese culture.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Jorvik Centre in the charming city of York. York is so far north it may as well be in Scotland, and it has a castle, and cool old city walls, and attractive buildings dating back to some ridiculously early period. Of course, practically every sizable city in England seems to have a castle and cool old walls and buildings, so what what really makes York special is the Jorvik Viking Centre. Around the same time The Specials gained national fame for “Ghost Town,” York was making headlines for the discovery of huge amounts of viking bones and artifacts below the city streets. The vikings apparently pillaged York in the early 900s, and the chilly, wet Yorkshire soil acted as a sort of refrigerator for all their stuff, preserving it neatly for a millennium or so. In 1979, a bunch of archaeologists decided to dig it all up, and the unlikely outcome of this massive excavation is the Jorvik Centre, a viking museum-theme park that feels like something that could have been an EPCOT Center reject.

Visitors are taken into a time machine that dumps them in the year 927, a few decades after the initial viking invasion of York, at that time called Jorvik (pronounced “you’re Vic”). Here they are loaded into a helmet-shaped gondola that tugs them through the viking settlement, complete with horrible animatronics, considerably better architectural recreations, and weird smells. Actually, make that weird smell – the literature on the Jorvik Centre says that visitors will be able to smell distinct things – viking food, viking poo, etc. – but really there is just one, overbearing odor through the whole thing, a sort of musty, yeasty, vaguely cheesy odor.

Following the viking settlement tour there are cabinet-style displays and employees acting like vikings who give little talks and demonstrations about viking material culture. This part was actually pretty interesting. I especially liked the information about the vikings’ diet – who knew they ate so many oysters? – and the interactive “Are you a viking?” quiz, which allows visitors to see how closely they resemble the vikings physically, culturally, and gastronomically. There was a queue for this and I was too impatient to find out whether or not I am a viking by the Jorvik Centre’s standards. But screw them, anyway – I don’t need their seal of approval!

I also liked the viking skeleton they had laid out which detailed all his wounds and grotesque ailments. The skeleton had about a dozen injuries from spears, arrows, and clubs, and the placard merely stated that he “probably” died in battle. Really, probably? The man had a spear wound that severed two of his cervical vertebrae. Ouch.

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