A very small number of people will be as disappointed as I was that the Blue Mango has closed its doors in Kampala. Once, it was a thriving, budget-ish lodge and bar, highly recommended by all manner of pundits, a place which attracted once-fashionable adjectives like lush and succulent and sprawling. Now that I gather the vocabulary and see it before me, it strikes me that these were all euphemisms and that it was probably a brothel. At any rate, it's shut and the website, bizarrely, has been taken over by a bunch of health scientists.
Poems, anyone?
Sorry, this whole post was an in-joke.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
The heart of the matter
I’m in Arusha, the heart of Africa, equidistant from Cairo and Capetown, if not from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The Rwanda Genocide Commission is located here and if it miraculously takes me less than eight hours to book a plane ticket and a bus ticket and change some money, I understand that I am welcome to witness the proceedings unfold. It’s about ten degrees cooler than it was in Dar Es Salaam, Mount Meru looms in an unimposing fashion and most of the ATMs in town are out of cash.
I wasn’t 100% certain that I was onto a winner when I emailed the Everest Chinese Restaurant and Inn in Arusha to see if they had a room. Happily, the Everest is a gem, half-polished, tis true, but a gem nonetheless. I don’t believe I’ve stayed in an inn on this trip but I am obviously in favour of the concept of food and lodging, particularly of the cheap and charming variety. The spry proprietor dashes around in loud waistcoats and his daughters chat on the sly. And the restaurant, the restaurant is an honest-to-goodness Chinese restaurant! The closest I’ve come to Chinese food since leaving Australia is the raviolis grillés in Paris.
(Sidenote. Raviolis grillés are fried dumplings available at the millions of traiteurs chinois in Paris. They all taste the same, full of pork and ginger and shallots, they’re all served with the same iridescent red chilli sauce, they’re generally heavy, reheated and a bit gluggy but they are WONDERFUL, an unsung guilty junkfood pleasure of the City of Lights and an antidote to any amount of pastis, vin rouge or Cointreau.)
So yes, Chinese food. It has been too long. You might be reading this with easy access to sizzling chicken with ginger and chilli and so not be able to share the excitement that a just replenished scarcity induces.
This is not the best Chinese food I’ve eaten – no BBQ King (Sigh. Same décor though.), no Billy Kwong, no Marigold, no Fu Manchu, no Shanghai Dreams – but, even with the in my view highly unorthodox addition of cucumber to the hotplate, still pretty damn sizzling good. I dreamed of yum cha and handmade noodles and Peking duck and steamed oysters with ginger and shallots and black vinegar. I’m still debating the rights and wrongs of an all-dumpling dinner tonight. There’s great, cheap seafood on the coast and lots of lifesaving Indian restaurants around but otherwise, Tanzanian food hasn’t really knocked my socks off. As a result, I have begun to develop some quite specific cravings, including:
Obviously, this is an abridged list. I am not confident that any of these desires will be fulfilled in the short term. What’s a fulfilled desire but a force expended anyway? Tomorrow I’ll board a big air-conditioned coffin of a bus and quit Arusha for Kampala. I’m still not entirely sure how long the bus trip will last. Recent advice is hedged between seventeen and twenty five hours. Hello, swollen ankles and woozy brain. As I’m leaving Tanzania so soon, now is the time to append the following...
Lesser known facts about Tanzania!
I wasn’t 100% certain that I was onto a winner when I emailed the Everest Chinese Restaurant and Inn in Arusha to see if they had a room. Happily, the Everest is a gem, half-polished, tis true, but a gem nonetheless. I don’t believe I’ve stayed in an inn on this trip but I am obviously in favour of the concept of food and lodging, particularly of the cheap and charming variety. The spry proprietor dashes around in loud waistcoats and his daughters chat on the sly. And the restaurant, the restaurant is an honest-to-goodness Chinese restaurant! The closest I’ve come to Chinese food since leaving Australia is the raviolis grillés in Paris.
(Sidenote. Raviolis grillés are fried dumplings available at the millions of traiteurs chinois in Paris. They all taste the same, full of pork and ginger and shallots, they’re all served with the same iridescent red chilli sauce, they’re generally heavy, reheated and a bit gluggy but they are WONDERFUL, an unsung guilty junkfood pleasure of the City of Lights and an antidote to any amount of pastis, vin rouge or Cointreau.)
So yes, Chinese food. It has been too long. You might be reading this with easy access to sizzling chicken with ginger and chilli and so not be able to share the excitement that a just replenished scarcity induces.
This is not the best Chinese food I’ve eaten – no BBQ King (Sigh. Same décor though.), no Billy Kwong, no Marigold, no Fu Manchu, no Shanghai Dreams – but, even with the in my view highly unorthodox addition of cucumber to the hotplate, still pretty damn sizzling good. I dreamed of yum cha and handmade noodles and Peking duck and steamed oysters with ginger and shallots and black vinegar. I’m still debating the rights and wrongs of an all-dumpling dinner tonight. There’s great, cheap seafood on the coast and lots of lifesaving Indian restaurants around but otherwise, Tanzanian food hasn’t really knocked my socks off. As a result, I have begun to develop some quite specific cravings, including:
- Very, very cold champagne, sauvignon blanc and/or cocktails and the right people to drink them with.
- Bread and cheese. Same old, same old. Soft white baguette with Camembert, a ripe Tome or a randy, rindy goat (St Maur?) or a dark rye with Roquefort would be a nice start.
- Non-threatening salad with non-radioactive dressing.
- Olives that haven’t been chemically treated.
- Sashimi. Lots of sashimi. Again, sashimi of the non-gastroenterologically threatening variety.
Obviously, this is an abridged list. I am not confident that any of these desires will be fulfilled in the short term. What’s a fulfilled desire but a force expended anyway? Tomorrow I’ll board a big air-conditioned coffin of a bus and quit Arusha for Kampala. I’m still not entirely sure how long the bus trip will last. Recent advice is hedged between seventeen and twenty five hours. Hello, swollen ankles and woozy brain. As I’m leaving Tanzania so soon, now is the time to append the following...
Lesser known facts about Tanzania!
- Food is universally under-salted.
- Table salt shakers are invariably blocked and require a fork-driven intervention in order to remedy #1.
- Tanzania’s roads are better than Kenya’s.
- Mexican soaps dubbed into English are really popular telly fare.
- The African Queen was shot in Tanzania.
- The trees are full of nests and the skies full of birds.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The Land of the Waratah and Dahlia
I’ve been going all Waltzing Matilda since Kevin 07 went official. I’m still thrilled about the election outcome and the delay in the results – due to a blackout in Bagamoyo – has only served to prolong the glee. I knew the full moon would come to good. It’s an odd jubilation, the excitement being more that the Libs lost than that Labor won. Except for Maxine. ‘Oh, Maxine,’ I keep finding myself murmuring.
I got such pleasure out of watching Howard’s concession speech. Schadenfreude is cheap, but gee, it can be fun.
There’s much that’s cheering here. Howard’s whole ‘My Fellow Australians’ spiel is one that I’ll be happy not to hear for a while. Shades of reality TV too, with the statement, delivered fists clenched, that prime ministership is an unbelievable experience. Like, totally. The joyously shickered hecklers interrupting in this clip are great, pure Aussie faux pas-dom. I ‘m not sure about Howard’s claim that he has bequeathed the ALP a stronger and prouder nation, Tampa and WorkChoices and the GST and Iraq and Reconciliation Rollback and regional political fiascos all being conveniently edited out of the picture. Still, Howard used the adjective ‘special’ like a genuine evasive battler when he referred to his ‘very special debt of gratitude to Costello.’
The fact that it seems to have been a landslide victory makes me feel slightly less despondent about apparently getting bumped off the electoral roll and so not being able to vote. When I checked the AEC rolls in that bastion of democracy, the Ukraine, I discovered that my name wasn’t on the list and that I didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to re-enrol. Irate emails to the AEC lead me to deduce that the people living at my old address, where I was registered, had sweetly sent my mail back. Probably bloody Liberals who got wind of my pinko tendencies when a mail-out from the Radical Separatist Treehugging Femo-Front (ah, the RadSTFFront, those were the days) arrived and decided to sabotage my vote. Elizabeth Bay is full of them.
I got such pleasure out of watching Howard’s concession speech. Schadenfreude is cheap, but gee, it can be fun.
There’s much that’s cheering here. Howard’s whole ‘My Fellow Australians’ spiel is one that I’ll be happy not to hear for a while. Shades of reality TV too, with the statement, delivered fists clenched, that prime ministership is an unbelievable experience. Like, totally. The joyously shickered hecklers interrupting in this clip are great, pure Aussie faux pas-dom. I ‘m not sure about Howard’s claim that he has bequeathed the ALP a stronger and prouder nation, Tampa and WorkChoices and the GST and Iraq and Reconciliation Rollback and regional political fiascos all being conveniently edited out of the picture. Still, Howard used the adjective ‘special’ like a genuine evasive battler when he referred to his ‘very special debt of gratitude to Costello.’
The fact that it seems to have been a landslide victory makes me feel slightly less despondent about apparently getting bumped off the electoral roll and so not being able to vote. When I checked the AEC rolls in that bastion of democracy, the Ukraine, I discovered that my name wasn’t on the list and that I didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to re-enrol. Irate emails to the AEC lead me to deduce that the people living at my old address, where I was registered, had sweetly sent my mail back. Probably bloody Liberals who got wind of my pinko tendencies when a mail-out from the Radical Separatist Treehugging Femo-Front (ah, the RadSTFFront, those were the days) arrived and decided to sabotage my vote. Elizabeth Bay is full of them.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Enfin!
Ah, the miracle of the Internet. It took a long time for the trucks bearing the good news to make it down the information superhighway to the coast of Tanzania.... and now? Hurraaaaah! No more Howard! Bravo to the Australian electorate for finally seeing sense! I shall drink a patriotic cocktail to celebrate!
Lunar retreat
I caught a boat from Zanzibar to Dar Es Salaam, planning to fiddle with some flights there before starting the slow haul to Kampala. The boat arrived four hours later than expected and the travel agent had closed for the weekend. There was no way that I was going to stay indoors in dodgy Dar as the full moon rose so I decided to hot-foot it up the coast to Bagamoyo, the nineteenth century capital of Tanzania, a dhow building centre, an old Swahili town and certified sleepy beach precinct.
I had tried to find out about transport to Bagamoyo online but alas, my searches were fruitless. So, for the benefit of the next poor fool who keys the words ‘getting from Dar Es Salaam to Bagamoyo’ into the Google search box, here’s what you need to know. Dala dalas (which are little private vans, think family mover…) and mini-buses to Bagamoyo leave from Mwenge terminal. Dala dalas for Mwenge leave all the time from the Old Posta stand near the port; the trip costs 250 shillings (25 cents! Bargain!) and takes about half an hour. Mwenge is a dustbowl interchange point heaving with dala dalas and minibuses. Anyone can point you to the Bagamoyo departure point. Here, things get a little crazy. You can, like me, allow yourself to be rushed into the nearest dala dala by a charming gent who smilingly shouts ‘Bagamoyo? Bagamoyo!’ at you and whisks away your pack before you have time to demur, grateful only that you’ve got to approximately the right point in the hot throng of whirring vehicles without losing your foot under a wheel. Then you’d be stuck in the heat with nineteen other passengers in a van that seats ten for a bit over an hour. You’d start to think about the tens of thousands of shillings you’d pay to get out of a van that it only cost you 1500 shillings to board. Were I to make the trip again, I’d smile graciously at Mr Charisma-tout and sail over to the larger mini-buses with Bagamoyo emblazoned over the windscreen, possibly cop a 3000 shilling fare and a twenty minute wait, and enjoy a whole cracked vinyl seat to myself.
Bagamoyo and Dar are only seventy kilometres apart but the journey felt a whole lot longer. It transpired that there was no room for my pack in the back of the van so I was squashed in bearing the entire weight of my pack on my knees. When the back door of the dala dala swung open mid-trip and someone else’s bags tumbled out onto the highway, it seemed like half a blessing. For a while, maybe for ten minutes, I entertained myself trying to find the right sitting position such that I could sit up straight, lean into an embrace with my pack and somehow find a point of gravity to balance me. Then the van braked suddenly and I wound up on my knees on the floor. Somehow, I heaved myself back into the seat and the whole balancing game rapidly ran out of steam, mainly because my knees and ankles were beginning to ache. I remembered my mother telling me that a snapped Achilles tendon is one of the most painful injuries one can endure and became certain that the combination of strange angles and pack pressure was going to snap the back of my legs in two. This passed the time for a while.
Knowing that Bagamoyo was a Swahili town, I had taken the precaution of wearing long sleeves for the trip. This turned out to be a wise move. The van was full of robed Swahili men, none of whom looked particularly thrilled at my infidel presence. As I was squashed in, I became extremely conscious of the brazen, conspicuous bareness of my legs from knee to toe. As soon as I was plonked next to him, the man on my left started to pray, whether for himself or for me, I could not tell.
Happily, I made it, knees ahoy, ankles unsnapped, bag intact. I needed a cup of coffee to recuperate, and this is what I got.
A thermos, a jug of hot milk, a tin of instant coffee (containing half a teaspoon of coffee), some sugar, a cup, and a pile of spoons.
All said, Bagamoyo is delivering solidly on the sleepy, undercaffeinated promise. There’s almost no one here so I have made friends with two very charming, hopefully non-rabid dogs. I’ll watch the full moon rise over the Indian Ocean tonight and I won’t know about the outcome of the election until tomorrow. Has the Rodent scurried through again? Should I tear up my passport? Will November’s full moon signal a new celestial era for the Antipodean Federation? Will Australia ever again be lead by a man with the temerity to refer to his country as ‘the arse end of the universe’? Yikes!
I had tried to find out about transport to Bagamoyo online but alas, my searches were fruitless. So, for the benefit of the next poor fool who keys the words ‘getting from Dar Es Salaam to Bagamoyo’ into the Google search box, here’s what you need to know. Dala dalas (which are little private vans, think family mover…) and mini-buses to Bagamoyo leave from Mwenge terminal. Dala dalas for Mwenge leave all the time from the Old Posta stand near the port; the trip costs 250 shillings (25 cents! Bargain!) and takes about half an hour. Mwenge is a dustbowl interchange point heaving with dala dalas and minibuses. Anyone can point you to the Bagamoyo departure point. Here, things get a little crazy. You can, like me, allow yourself to be rushed into the nearest dala dala by a charming gent who smilingly shouts ‘Bagamoyo? Bagamoyo!’ at you and whisks away your pack before you have time to demur, grateful only that you’ve got to approximately the right point in the hot throng of whirring vehicles without losing your foot under a wheel. Then you’d be stuck in the heat with nineteen other passengers in a van that seats ten for a bit over an hour. You’d start to think about the tens of thousands of shillings you’d pay to get out of a van that it only cost you 1500 shillings to board. Were I to make the trip again, I’d smile graciously at Mr Charisma-tout and sail over to the larger mini-buses with Bagamoyo emblazoned over the windscreen, possibly cop a 3000 shilling fare and a twenty minute wait, and enjoy a whole cracked vinyl seat to myself.
Bagamoyo and Dar are only seventy kilometres apart but the journey felt a whole lot longer. It transpired that there was no room for my pack in the back of the van so I was squashed in bearing the entire weight of my pack on my knees. When the back door of the dala dala swung open mid-trip and someone else’s bags tumbled out onto the highway, it seemed like half a blessing. For a while, maybe for ten minutes, I entertained myself trying to find the right sitting position such that I could sit up straight, lean into an embrace with my pack and somehow find a point of gravity to balance me. Then the van braked suddenly and I wound up on my knees on the floor. Somehow, I heaved myself back into the seat and the whole balancing game rapidly ran out of steam, mainly because my knees and ankles were beginning to ache. I remembered my mother telling me that a snapped Achilles tendon is one of the most painful injuries one can endure and became certain that the combination of strange angles and pack pressure was going to snap the back of my legs in two. This passed the time for a while.
Knowing that Bagamoyo was a Swahili town, I had taken the precaution of wearing long sleeves for the trip. This turned out to be a wise move. The van was full of robed Swahili men, none of whom looked particularly thrilled at my infidel presence. As I was squashed in, I became extremely conscious of the brazen, conspicuous bareness of my legs from knee to toe. As soon as I was plonked next to him, the man on my left started to pray, whether for himself or for me, I could not tell.
Happily, I made it, knees ahoy, ankles unsnapped, bag intact. I needed a cup of coffee to recuperate, and this is what I got.
A thermos, a jug of hot milk, a tin of instant coffee (containing half a teaspoon of coffee), some sugar, a cup, and a pile of spoons.All said, Bagamoyo is delivering solidly on the sleepy, undercaffeinated promise. There’s almost no one here so I have made friends with two very charming, hopefully non-rabid dogs. I’ll watch the full moon rise over the Indian Ocean tonight and I won’t know about the outcome of the election until tomorrow. Has the Rodent scurried through again? Should I tear up my passport? Will November’s full moon signal a new celestial era for the Antipodean Federation? Will Australia ever again be lead by a man with the temerity to refer to his country as ‘the arse end of the universe’? Yikes!
The Honeymoon Crasher
November 2007 will stand as the month I crashed not one, but two honeymoons. As a follow-up to Sharath and Sorcha’s safari bonanza, I met two lovely fellows from London who had just tied the knot. We hung out at Kendwa Rocks and, until their departure the day before mine, my new friends shielded me from an influx of proposals involving cattle, life planning, and large families. As a result of this meeting, my life has moved one step closer to some kind of completion (or, alternatively, aesthetic entropy). Life experience #492: Part immersion of self in turquoise waters at sunset whilst wearing a loud bikini and large sunglasses and drinking the daggiest drink in the cocktail manual, a pina colada, complete with paper umbrella and redundant fruit slices.
Yeah yeah, I know, enough already with the sunsets. I was directed to Kendwa, a beach village on the north of Zanzibar, by a Zanzibar old-hand, an American lass whose judgment I uncharacteristically decided to trust on the briefest of encounters. I caught a dala dala along bumpy back roads from Stonetown through concrete block villages and wondered whether I’d been lead up the garden path. No, it was stupidly beautiful there, an impossible convergence of turquoise, aquamarine and out further, darker, deeper blues captured in the sea.
Yeah yeah, I know, enough already with the sunsets. I was directed to Kendwa, a beach village on the north of Zanzibar, by a Zanzibar old-hand, an American lass whose judgment I uncharacteristically decided to trust on the briefest of encounters. I caught a dala dala along bumpy back roads from Stonetown through concrete block villages and wondered whether I’d been lead up the garden path. No, it was stupidly beautiful there, an impossible convergence of turquoise, aquamarine and out further, darker, deeper blues captured in the sea.
I lay on the beach, all white sands and palm-fronded umbrellas and my entire genetic being was confused. I am not configured for idyllic beaches but for fens and moors and crags: I have the pink and beige complexion to prove it. What with the sun and the photosensitivity enhancing medication, I’ve gained a whole set of interesting new freckles which may in the future form some meaningful constellations on my shoulders and hips. No doubt a few cells have started to wonder whether they should start to wriggle and twist in a non-conformist, melanoma type fashion. It was stupidly beautiful back there on Kendwa and I’m beginning to suspect that this kind of environment does in fact make you stupid. I certainly feel a whole lot stupider, like my brain has been poached. Sunsmart and pasty as I should be, I’m veering towards tan-dom, for starters.
Forgive all this blathering. I blame Richard Ford – I read The Lay of the Land on the beach. I should, all things being proper, loathe Ford’s WASPy male menopausal meanderings, in the same way that I should have loved Radclyffe Hall’s femo-sappho-Modernist extravanganza, The Well of Loneliness, which I suffered through last week. Oh gosh, modern life is so hard to understand and all of these changes in the social fabric, they’re tough too, and how, oh how, does one go about being a good citizen, a middle-aged man, a father and a husband, under these conditions? Oh me, oh my, blah blah blah. Three days are stretched into seven hundred pages, every incident a trigger to memory and digression, a more sophisticated version of the Sex and the City school of exposition: ‘and that got me to wondering/thinking/remembering…’ The Lay of the Land got under my skin in the same way that Independence Day did, with its expansive, waffly contemplations anchored by a litany of precise and incessant detail. I think it is the wry and bafflingly unironic narrative voice of the rambling, wondering Frank Bascombe, good man/everyman/sad man/just a man, that prevents the unabashed symbolism and allegorical contortions of the narrative from being as annoying as they really should be. It’s a smart, measured and weirdly affecting novel, one that I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to throw into the ocean. That’s praise, surely. Even though I can’t honestly hate Richard Ford, I do, however, hold him almost entirely responsible for the discursive nature of these last few posts. On the other hand, I have also recently read a couple of space opera sci-fi novels (ah, genre fiction, sweet narcotic) and you will note that there haven’t yet been any alien megaships setting down on the beaches.
Forgive all this blathering. I blame Richard Ford – I read The Lay of the Land on the beach. I should, all things being proper, loathe Ford’s WASPy male menopausal meanderings, in the same way that I should have loved Radclyffe Hall’s femo-sappho-Modernist extravanganza, The Well of Loneliness, which I suffered through last week. Oh gosh, modern life is so hard to understand and all of these changes in the social fabric, they’re tough too, and how, oh how, does one go about being a good citizen, a middle-aged man, a father and a husband, under these conditions? Oh me, oh my, blah blah blah. Three days are stretched into seven hundred pages, every incident a trigger to memory and digression, a more sophisticated version of the Sex and the City school of exposition: ‘and that got me to wondering/thinking/remembering…’ The Lay of the Land got under my skin in the same way that Independence Day did, with its expansive, waffly contemplations anchored by a litany of precise and incessant detail. I think it is the wry and bafflingly unironic narrative voice of the rambling, wondering Frank Bascombe, good man/everyman/sad man/just a man, that prevents the unabashed symbolism and allegorical contortions of the narrative from being as annoying as they really should be. It’s a smart, measured and weirdly affecting novel, one that I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to throw into the ocean. That’s praise, surely. Even though I can’t honestly hate Richard Ford, I do, however, hold him almost entirely responsible for the discursive nature of these last few posts. On the other hand, I have also recently read a couple of space opera sci-fi novels (ah, genre fiction, sweet narcotic) and you will note that there haven’t yet been any alien megaships setting down on the beaches.
Mea culpa, felix culpa
Not so long ago, I received an email from a correspondent unknown to me in which I was sternly taken to task for the cavalier title of this blog.
The gist?:
Unemployed at last? What kind of spoilt ninny would so blithely, so irresponsibly trumpet such a statement? Who seeks to be unemployed? And what gross insensitivity to the plight of those seeking employment and yet unable to find it! You should be ashamed of yourself, young lady, etc, etc.
Who and what indeed!
(Heaves a heaving sigh)
The words ‘Unemployed at last!’ open the novel Such is Life by Tom Collins (or Joseph Furphy, as you will). Over coffee in Darlinghurst in early 2007, the line ‘Unemployed at last!’ was, within my hearing, designated the greatest first line in Australian literature by a storied sage who travels as the Don. This not being the first time I had plundered the Don’s ample stores of wit and classificatory nous, I borrowed the line so stamped with the imprimatur of great authority with little compunction. The slightly obnoxious bent of the title is thus, I hope, utterly redeemed by its exemplary lineage: Ozlit, the Don, Daaaahlinghurst.
It must be added that my departure from the bonds of a career which was whittling my robust and merry spirit into something bitter and dusty is not so distant; the spry tone of the exclamation does capture, almost perfectly, my ongoing glee at finding myself unleashed from a lifetime of despair up there in the tower.
The gist?:
Unemployed at last? What kind of spoilt ninny would so blithely, so irresponsibly trumpet such a statement? Who seeks to be unemployed? And what gross insensitivity to the plight of those seeking employment and yet unable to find it! You should be ashamed of yourself, young lady, etc, etc.
Who and what indeed!
(Heaves a heaving sigh)
The words ‘Unemployed at last!’ open the novel Such is Life by Tom Collins (or Joseph Furphy, as you will). Over coffee in Darlinghurst in early 2007, the line ‘Unemployed at last!’ was, within my hearing, designated the greatest first line in Australian literature by a storied sage who travels as the Don. This not being the first time I had plundered the Don’s ample stores of wit and classificatory nous, I borrowed the line so stamped with the imprimatur of great authority with little compunction. The slightly obnoxious bent of the title is thus, I hope, utterly redeemed by its exemplary lineage: Ozlit, the Don, Daaaahlinghurst.
It must be added that my departure from the bonds of a career which was whittling my robust and merry spirit into something bitter and dusty is not so distant; the spry tone of the exclamation does capture, almost perfectly, my ongoing glee at finding myself unleashed from a lifetime of despair up there in the tower.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Juice wars
I was flabbergasted by pomegranate juice in Istanbul. The squeeze didn’t stop there.
a) Seedy
There are many things I am missing about Sydney, well, Australia, at the moment. One of the less obvious is Spring Valley Orange and Passionfruit Juice. It’s worthy of capitalisation, this daily juice, this emergency repair fluid, and has wrenched me out of many a physiological and psychological pit. And then there are the liddle facts.
Anyway, fresh strained passionfruit juice surpasses the SV Orange and Pash by several degrees. It’s usually a combination of yellow and black passionfruit (one of which is sweeter), slightly sweetened and chilled. It’s embarrassingly cheap and divinely wonderful. I attempted to drink my body weight in passion juice (yes, sorry) on Lamu, being concerned that I might never sup the nectar again. Happily I find passion juice to be widely available all the way down the East African coast.
I drank this one at Buni Café in Zanzibar. My Peace Corps contact told me that in many parts of Tanzania, passion juice is the only available fresh juice. It is an excellent substitute for Spring Valley. Now I need to find a stand in for Darrell Lea liquorice.
b) Slimy
I like avocados almost as much as I like passionfruit. My fierce love for fresh avocado with any combination of lemon/lime/Tabasco/garlic/tomato/onion/toast/chilli/wasabi mayonnaise/soy is only undermined by my furious loathing for any kind of cooked or over-processed avocado. The avocado which regularly appears in the vegetable tempura bowl at Don Don on Oxford St is a blight on the good name of that fine institution. I have no hestitation about shifting to the imperative here: Avocados should be cut in half, chopped, or mashed. Avocados shouldn’t be put anywhere near heat and they shouldn’t be put in a juicer.
Avocado juice is advertised on most juice menus I’ve seen since arriving in Africa. I’ve not experienced an iota of curiosity about avocado juice. Avocados shouldn’t be put in a juicer and that’s that.
I’m staying at a guesthouse in Zanzibar which provides breakfast. Breakfast starts with a plate of fruit and a glass of fresh juice. Yesterday a glass of pale green juice was placed before me. Um, what is it, I asked somewhat timorously. Avocado juice with lime, madame. Everything OK? Yes, yes, yes.
On the grounds that any principle worth rattling on about warrants testing, I decided to swallow my doubts and taste the juice. My prudence was possibly addled by the earliness of the hour. Icy crystals of very sweet lime juice baffled my expectations as to the texture of avocado juice. This glassful was very sweet, a little bit slimy, quite creamy, and not particularly flavoursome. If I’d been told that it was soursop or custard apple juice, I might have been able to drink the whole glassful. Somehow though, the knowledge that it was avocado juice acted upon my swallowing reflexes and I barely got through half a glass. I see no reason to vary the dictum: Avocados (wonderful fruit that they are) should never be put in a juicer.
By way of conclusion, to vindicate the triumph of one juice over another, here’s a sunset more passionfruit than avocado.
The rubbish on the beach is clearly a reminder that we live in a fallen world, a world in which avocados are put in juicers, a world in which neither fresh passion juice nor Spring Valley juices are universally available.
a) Seedy
There are many things I am missing about Sydney, well, Australia, at the moment. One of the less obvious is Spring Valley Orange and Passionfruit Juice. It’s worthy of capitalisation, this daily juice, this emergency repair fluid, and has wrenched me out of many a physiological and psychological pit. And then there are the liddle facts.
Anyway, fresh strained passionfruit juice surpasses the SV Orange and Pash by several degrees. It’s usually a combination of yellow and black passionfruit (one of which is sweeter), slightly sweetened and chilled. It’s embarrassingly cheap and divinely wonderful. I attempted to drink my body weight in passion juice (yes, sorry) on Lamu, being concerned that I might never sup the nectar again. Happily I find passion juice to be widely available all the way down the East African coast.
I drank this one at Buni Café in Zanzibar. My Peace Corps contact told me that in many parts of Tanzania, passion juice is the only available fresh juice. It is an excellent substitute for Spring Valley. Now I need to find a stand in for Darrell Lea liquorice.b) Slimy
I like avocados almost as much as I like passionfruit. My fierce love for fresh avocado with any combination of lemon/lime/Tabasco/garlic/tomato/onion/toast/chilli/wasabi mayonnaise/soy is only undermined by my furious loathing for any kind of cooked or over-processed avocado. The avocado which regularly appears in the vegetable tempura bowl at Don Don on Oxford St is a blight on the good name of that fine institution. I have no hestitation about shifting to the imperative here: Avocados should be cut in half, chopped, or mashed. Avocados shouldn’t be put anywhere near heat and they shouldn’t be put in a juicer.
Avocado juice is advertised on most juice menus I’ve seen since arriving in Africa. I’ve not experienced an iota of curiosity about avocado juice. Avocados shouldn’t be put in a juicer and that’s that.
I’m staying at a guesthouse in Zanzibar which provides breakfast. Breakfast starts with a plate of fruit and a glass of fresh juice. Yesterday a glass of pale green juice was placed before me. Um, what is it, I asked somewhat timorously. Avocado juice with lime, madame. Everything OK? Yes, yes, yes.
On the grounds that any principle worth rattling on about warrants testing, I decided to swallow my doubts and taste the juice. My prudence was possibly addled by the earliness of the hour. Icy crystals of very sweet lime juice baffled my expectations as to the texture of avocado juice. This glassful was very sweet, a little bit slimy, quite creamy, and not particularly flavoursome. If I’d been told that it was soursop or custard apple juice, I might have been able to drink the whole glassful. Somehow though, the knowledge that it was avocado juice acted upon my swallowing reflexes and I barely got through half a glass. I see no reason to vary the dictum: Avocados (wonderful fruit that they are) should never be put in a juicer.By way of conclusion, to vindicate the triumph of one juice over another, here’s a sunset more passionfruit than avocado.
The rubbish on the beach is clearly a reminder that we live in a fallen world, a world in which avocados are put in juicers, a world in which neither fresh passion juice nor Spring Valley juices are universally available.
I am the Great Pretender
Q. Who is Zanzibar’s most famous glam-rockin’ son?
A. Freddie Mercury.
Yep, it was news to me too. Throughout this very conservative town are scattered proud monuments to Freddie and to Queen, including a restaurant called Mercury’s. The house where Freddie grew up is now home to a souvenir shop which trumpets its Mercury lineage triumphantly.
A. Freddie Mercury.
Yep, it was news to me too. Throughout this very conservative town are scattered proud monuments to Freddie and to Queen, including a restaurant called Mercury’s. The house where Freddie grew up is now home to a souvenir shop which trumpets its Mercury lineage triumphantly.Proof of a Protean Planet
1. White pants
There are certain things that certain types of people don’t do. One of the things that people like me – messy, grumpy, domestically deficient, clumsy, slouchy, would-be urbane and bohemian people – don’t do is wear white pants, let alone white linen pants, not even in the tropics. My injunction on pale clothing was only very recently and reluctantly released and, proof of the slippery slope theory if nothing else, I’m the Owner of a pair of WHITE PANTS.
Those are my legs, my feet, my balcony. Those are my white pants. Soon I take a walk along the beach. I might even dare to eat a peach.
To add that they’re actually cream shouldn’t destigmatise them or me. Yes, they’re airy and comfortable, no, they don’t offend the Muslim population on Zanzibar or the conservative Christians on the mainland, and hurrah, no one in their right mind will mistake me for a prostitute or loose woman wearing them. Whilst I’m still dubious, I’m also unconvinced that they will stay cream or white or whatever for too long.
2. John Malkovich no longer reigns
I’ve been captivated by John Malkovich for years and years. The sadistic, debonair, savvy charm that he brings to his roles, those long dismissive stares, that too-clipped enunciation and painfully slow physicality: long live the über-rational bald dandy! Valmont, Ripley, I’ve been utterly unable to resist John Malkovich’s screen personae. I watched Jane Campion’s Portrait of A Lady and the nasty schtick was exactly the same. His interpretation of Osborne adheres perfectly to the formula he established, being John Malkovich, if you will, and yet I found myself utterly horrified by the cruelty which inhabits this, and every one of his performances. That my shudders were shudders of repulsion might be a higher homage to the big M’s thesp prowess or, alternatively might testify to some worrying resistance to morally questionable characters. Funny though, I bought the white pants just before watching Portrait. Causal nexus?
‘Time passes.’ (V. Woolf.) Vide Thoreau (H.D.), things change. We do, semioticians, greenhorns and others alike, people a strange and fluxient universe, do we not? Am I going soft in the head? Is travel broadening my horizons? Is the heat poaching my good judgment? Are the anti-malarials that I’ve started to take again sending me bonkers? Do I have malaria?
Not all is awry. The beach, fortunately, is still quite appealing.
There are certain things that certain types of people don’t do. One of the things that people like me – messy, grumpy, domestically deficient, clumsy, slouchy, would-be urbane and bohemian people – don’t do is wear white pants, let alone white linen pants, not even in the tropics. My injunction on pale clothing was only very recently and reluctantly released and, proof of the slippery slope theory if nothing else, I’m the Owner of a pair of WHITE PANTS.
Those are my legs, my feet, my balcony. Those are my white pants. Soon I take a walk along the beach. I might even dare to eat a peach.To add that they’re actually cream shouldn’t destigmatise them or me. Yes, they’re airy and comfortable, no, they don’t offend the Muslim population on Zanzibar or the conservative Christians on the mainland, and hurrah, no one in their right mind will mistake me for a prostitute or loose woman wearing them. Whilst I’m still dubious, I’m also unconvinced that they will stay cream or white or whatever for too long.
2. John Malkovich no longer reigns
I’ve been captivated by John Malkovich for years and years. The sadistic, debonair, savvy charm that he brings to his roles, those long dismissive stares, that too-clipped enunciation and painfully slow physicality: long live the über-rational bald dandy! Valmont, Ripley, I’ve been utterly unable to resist John Malkovich’s screen personae. I watched Jane Campion’s Portrait of A Lady and the nasty schtick was exactly the same. His interpretation of Osborne adheres perfectly to the formula he established, being John Malkovich, if you will, and yet I found myself utterly horrified by the cruelty which inhabits this, and every one of his performances. That my shudders were shudders of repulsion might be a higher homage to the big M’s thesp prowess or, alternatively might testify to some worrying resistance to morally questionable characters. Funny though, I bought the white pants just before watching Portrait. Causal nexus?
‘Time passes.’ (V. Woolf.) Vide Thoreau (H.D.), things change. We do, semioticians, greenhorns and others alike, people a strange and fluxient universe, do we not? Am I going soft in the head? Is travel broadening my horizons? Is the heat poaching my good judgment? Are the anti-malarials that I’ve started to take again sending me bonkers? Do I have malaria?
Not all is awry. The beach, fortunately, is still quite appealing.
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