Tag: Food glorious food
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Notes on Yangon (which is also Rangoon)
1. Burmese script initially reminded me of the patterns woodbugs make when tunnelling into a two-by-four, then I decided it looked like binary code without the 1s, as seen through a wonky dot matrix printer, and now I’ve finally reconciled myself to the idea that it’s really just a series of counterfeiters’ adaptations of the…
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From Yangon, with sanity
Obviously no one briefed the censors that I was coming. This site is one of the only things out there that isn’t blocked. Thank you for your trust, Junta. Appreciated. We arrived yesterday morning after a long (and yet not long at all) journey from Shanghai: our flight out to Guangzhou sat on…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Fast Food for Sino Taste Buds
One of the things I’ve noticed in my years of living elsewhere, is that multinational fast food places seem to try really hard to court their local markets by attempting to mould their products into something vaguely resembling the local tastes. I remember seeing a Mc Turco in Turkey, which was some sort of…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Plum Rains
Last night around 10, my immune system decided it felt like inviting a cold around for a visit. Just as I was readying myself for what ought to have been a full night’s sleep, my nose went awry and my eyeballs hummed. This alone would have been fine, except that when I finally dozed off…
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Boxha Cafe in the rain
In the interest of creating mental escape routes for the rainy season, I’m starting a new category exclusively for cafes in Shanghai to duck into out of the rain. Since I’m off til mid-September (mostly- I do have exams and papers to mark this week) and don’t want to become completely house-bound, bed-ridden and 500…
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Redemption and Delivery
One of the things I really liked about Istanbul but never took advantage of due to sheer terror of using my (self-perceived) inferior Turkish skills was the culture of delivery. You could get everything delivered to your door. Mc Donalds delivered; the kebab guys delivered; your corner shop delivered. If you lived on the fifth…
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Fast, But Not Exactly McDonalds
Sometimes when I come home from work, I’m absurdly hungry- maybe I worked through my lunch break, maybe I covered ten kilometres just pacing and monitoring in class. It has been known to happen. I carry a pedometer as a clock in the class so I know this is a possibility. Dinner takes a while…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Perspectives on Groceries
I’m pretty wussy when it comes to meat- I lean heavily towards vegetarian and would label myself a lacto-ovo-bacon vegetarian if it were an option. In Istanbul I was able to veer into shallow omnivore waters because butchers would happily do all the cutting and de-boning and trimming for you. We had a lot of…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Grocery Photo Series
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On food and kitchens with three stoves
We had gone to Qiandao Lake, about three hours by car from Shanghai, for a weekend of diving: at the bottom of the the lake was a thousand year old village that had been flooded back in the 1950s for a dam project. When we arrived and suited up and threw ourselves overboard, we discovered…