Reflections on Things at Hand: Shop Around the Corner

Don't know why India is consuming my thoughts so thoroughly lately - mainly because I was so happy there. Anyway, I was reflecting on my daily life in my little apartment and immediately thought of the little shop where I did most of my shopping. It was about half a block of the street, and they could not have been nicer. That said, they did try and sell me everything in the store every time I walked in, and considering that I'm a large westerner I don't know if I can blame them. I would ask them for certain items, and then the guy behind the counter would just start grabbing things off the counter and asking me if I wanted them - some times there was a certain logic to the request, and sometimes he would just randomly grab things and ask if I were interested. One time he reached behind him and grabbed an items that normally only pertains to women and asked if I wanted to buy one (the box) - and then he realized what he had picked up - and he just smiled so big and sheepishly put it back - and then grabbed something else. It was a daily Monty Python routine with a small, Indian Michael Palin behind the counter.

Reflections on Things at Hand: Eating in India

Every so often, even at crazy times like this, I'm hoping to delve back into earlier trips - ones that preceded the travel blog or even my travel journal. So, I want to include little glimpses here and there of earlier travel adventures, especially those relating to India. All of my four trips to India happened before the blog or the journal. It especially pains me how much of the memories of that amazing time I spent teaching at our Mumbai campus (the summer of 2004 - can't believe it's been almost six years) have begun to fade away. It would be impossible to discuss all the amazing meals I ate in India so I won't even try - I ate like a prince, and usually for next to nothing, and still lost weight. Part of the weight loss related to the fact that the food, for the most part, had very little fat in it. Most everything is vegetarian - so much so that when you go to a restaurant there is a little section at the bottom called "Non Veg." And even if it's not "Non Veg" it usually just means that they waved a piece of meat over the skillet while cooking. Anyway, I'm not going to try and recount all my meals, at least not here, so let me talk about a couple cool places right around my apartment. There was an ice cream shop about five minutes away and they served fresh coconut ice cream, which I ate every night. They would just see me coming, smile and wave, and start piling ice cream. The other interesting place was a guy right down the street (and I mean down the street, because he just sat in the street) from my apartment who served corn - remarkably simple, but delicious. He cooked the corn over an open flame, and then took a half-lime, dipped in a mixture of salt and chili powder, and rubbed it over the corn. Amazing. I miss India so much, even today.

Wings for Charity

OK, let me take a short respite from travel blogging - and break one of my cardinal rules - by posting some non-travel related pictures. On Super Bowl Sunday night my good friend Andy Burkhardt, a librarian at Champlain and one of the founding members of the Gentlemen of Excellence social club, and I participated in one of the odder ventures I've ever schemed up (which is really saying something) - eating chicken wings for charity. It began very innocently, as most things do. Andy, another poor Viking fan, and I would meet at Ruben James in downtown Burlington to eat chicken wings and suffer our weekly football related humiliation. Anyway, for some reason at one point we decided that we should work up our stamina until we could eat 100 wings in the course of one football game, and we went into training. Luckily, at about this time, our good friend Faith Yacubian suggested that we do this for charity - which sort of ruined it for us, because we were mainly concerned about the purity of the wing-eating, but we went along with her idea. We were soon joined by our friend Cyndi Brandenburg, who teaches in the Core division with me at Champlain, and her husband Bill Vespa joined us - mainly because Cyndi, as we soon discovered is uber-competitive. Our charity was COTS, the homeless shelter folks here in Burlington, while Cyndi's charity was Women Helping Battered Women. We had the same goal, eating 100 wings - and we recruited a small army of amazingly supportive folks who pledged so much for wing consumed. At the end of the chicken wing carnage the Minnesota Wrecking Crew (Andy and my team) edged out the Brandenburg Gates 105 to 100 wings (I think we could have done even more damage to our internal organs, but we locked it up early - having eatern our 100 by half-time - and, much like the Colts, although with better results, phoned it in down the stretch). There was a lot of conniving and scheming which I can't really discuss here for legal reasons - anyone who has ever participated in a fantasy baseball draft with me would nod their heads knowingly - but a great time was had by all. The Burlington Free Press even showed up to cover it, and, in classic Vermont fashion, actually gave about as much coverage to the wing competition as to the Super Bowl itself. In the end we raised over $1200 for COTS and Cyndi and Bill raised around $700 for Women Helping Battered Women. We're already looking forward to next year's competition, although Cyndi says she will never, ever eat another chicken wing, so we may be looking for fresh competition. Many of our friends from Champlain showed up to support us, including the amazing Steve Wehmeyer who acted as referee, including stopping on the way to the competition to purchase an officials's jersey. An amazing time.

Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood

OK, back, briefly, to the Russian trip. Here are a series of pictures of the beautiful Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, which can be clearly seen as you walk down Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg. The rather ominous name relates to the fact that it was on this spot that the reform-minded tsar Alexander II (he was the one who freed the serfs in 1861) was assassinated in 1881. The decision was made to build the church right on top of the spot, hence the name. Interestingly, while it took over two decades to construct the church, it was later closed (after the revolution) and it took three decades to restore it - which led to the joke that it is the only church that took longer to restore than to build. As with most Russian Orthodox churches it is very ornate - it's not the most beautiful church I saw in Russia, but it is definitely worth a visit.

Dunhuang Market

Once again, I have no time for devoting more effort to getting caught up with the blog, so I'm stealing a couple moments here and there to post one picture and briefly comment on it (before it all fades away completely). Here's another picture from the time I spent in Dunhuang in western China, which, with the exception of Kasgar, was my favorite part of my time in China. This is a shot taken in the traditional market in Dunhuang. I especially love the live fish, just inches away from where he is grilling dinner - guess we know it's fresh. What a wonderfully weird time - it was the same day as the donkey wine adventure - about a block away. There was also a murder across the street while we were drinking the donkey wine - some woman stabbed her boyfriend to death right out on the sidewalk (and you thought those things only happened in the U.S.). We passed through the market again a couple days later and I had cold soup, which is exactly like it sounds. I was hanging around with the tour guide and he asked if I wanted to eat with him - and seemed very pleased when I said yes. He asked if I wanted the cold soup, which was very popular in the summer. Being hard of hearing I thought he said cold soup, but figured it was just a Chinese word that I wasn't picking up. It turned out to be cold, noodle soup, with a bit of a hot sour (or in the case, tepid sour) soup taste to it - he told me that it was popular there in the summer as a break from the heat. My friend Yanfeng walked in and was very pleased that I was eating a bowl of the cold soup and plopped down and had a bowl himself. That said, we then jumped on the bus and took off for a couple hour drive on one of the bumpiest roads in the world - and I was sitting in the last row - and I just about lost my dinner, which would have thrown away any points I had scored for downing my entire huge bowl of cold soup. I swapped with another professor, using the excuse that I had enjoyed the extra leg room long enough and should really share, crept up to the front of the bus, and managed to survive. All the sloshing around just about did me in.

Dunhuang

I am way too busy to be spending any time catching up with the blog - so much of the summer is unaccounted for in the blog - and because of the camera theft in Barcelona some of it will never be documented. Still, I'm dedicating break time to at least posting individual pictures and very short stories. Here is a picture of the sand dunes in Dunhuang, the infamous location of the donkey wine adventure. As I said, you fly into the oasis that makes up Dunhuang by covering some of the most inhospitable desert you can imagine. We stayed at a very nice, and, sadly, essentially empty hotel on the edge of these massive sand dunes (the hotel folks were very happy to have us there). You could rent a bike and ride over to the edge of the dunes, but it cost something to actually get past the gate - once there you can ride camels and go sled riding down the dunes. It was an absolutely astonishing experience to sit out on the balcony, watch the sun go down, and the dunes slowly disappear - matched only by getting up early to see them reappear over breakfast in the morning. It was a short trip into town for donkey wine, cold noodle soup and a walk around a great traditional market.

Kasgar

I've been promising to talk about Kasgar, my favorite part of last summer's China trip, but have had no time - and certainly have no time right now - but I'm going to go ahead and post some pictures now anyway. Kasgar is about as far west as you can go in China, and it really felt much more like the Middle East than in China. A good friend of mine found that she could easily chatter away with the merchants in the marketplace in Turkish. What was amazing is that in the space of an hour we went from the bustling traditional marketplace to a cybercafe, where it was possible to get a moche for 28 yuan (which meant that it cost almost exactly what it would cost in the US) and also check your email. In the market itself you would stumble across these amazing stalls full of anything you could imagine. I love the picture at the top - I was standing on the wall above the stall, leaning forward, to get the shot as symetical as I could. If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see the dried snakes, which you grind up and put into hard liquor to make "snake wine" (which is, like donkey wine, an aphrodesiac). After walking past the dentist's office I was glad that my teeth were in good order.