Wandering Eater

I spent two weeks in Southern China in the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan which rivaled Bangkok as a wandering eating paradise. I enjoyed orienting myself in a city for a few days, checking out a couple of temples or hiking in Yunnan’s Himalayan foothills. I spent time in four cities, Kunming, Dali, Lijiang and Chengdu. Kunming and Chengdu are standard southern Chinese metropoli, crowded, booming and oriented towards feeding their local population. Dali and particularly Lijiang market themselves towards Chinese tourists, but both still have plenty of local street food options if you know where to look.

Both Yunnan and Sichuan grow a variety of different produce, which makes the street food fresher and tastier. Fresh mint appears in all sorts of Yunnan dishes, including my favorite, Yunnan potatoes. In both Kunming and Dali, Chinese women stand on streets corners with giant woks of hot oil, mixing the ridged potatoes until they are apporpriately fried. For about five yuan, you can get a large cup of potatoes mixed with chili, mint, and other delectable herbs and spices. On a brisk late afternoon, this makes a great late afternoon snack or second dinner.

Mint was also integral to Yunnan noodle soup, which helped me ball on a budget throughout my China travels. One interesting cooking technique for making noodle soup was putting the mint, noodles and sprouts into a wicker basket, then plunging the basket into a giant vat of boiling broth. If you want to feel at one with the peasantry, this most Maoist of meals ready for a long march.

But noodle soup is boring and functional. Sometimes you want to splurge on a variety of flavors. One great option is Chinese barbecue. I found a great spot in Lijiang thanks to two friends I made at my guesthouse. One was a fellow great eater, a man from Shanxi province who had moved to Lijiang looking to start a business. With the crew cut style of an ex-Red Army, he was an avid hunter and eater of animals. The barbecue joint he pointed me towards was typical in style, a family of three setting up grill with a small one room open-air store for customers to sit. They offered all sorts of meat and vegetables on skewers, which you could then pick out for eating. And when I say all sorts I mean bacon, octopus, chicken hearts, chicken feet, lotus root, green onions, eggplant, beef, lamb, quail eggs…the list goes on. Everything was spiced with a delcious mix of cumin, chili powder and flower pepper. Squatting down on stools with a Tsingtao or Dali beer, this feast made for a perfect nightcap after a day of biking around to various villages. You can even get oysters!

Sichuan’s food has the reputation for being China’s best. To one-up Chinese BBQ, Sichuan offers a special kind of shao kao, where the BBQ is deep fried first and then grilled. The results are unsurprisingly delicious although afterwards you feel somewhat unclean (probably because the oil hasn’t been changed since the late Ming dynasty.) The ultimate shao kaoed item was this fish, appropriately Sichuaned out with chilies.

That’s how we roll.

So if you go to China, don’t spend all your time in fancy restaurants. Make sure to pick something up from street vendors. You won’t regret it. Unless you get really really sick.

An extremely interesting phenomenon I witnessed over the last few weeks was the coordinated push by rich white old men to force predominantly poor young black men to work for them for well below their market value, so that the rich white men can improve the value of their product and hopefully capture more profit for themselves. While this sounds a lot like cotton plantations in the 1880s, I am talking about the seemingly coordinated efforts by the NBA and NCAA officials, making a push to raise the age limit for NBA entrance.

Now it’s obvious why all three parties who have decision-making/advocating authority in setting the age limit for entering the draft want players to stay in school for two or three years. The NCAA will get better players, which means a better product. They will also get the advantage of being able to market players over multiple years- take for example this year’s Kentucky team, which already has several of the most famous players in the NCAA as freshmen. The NBA will get additional ability to scout players and, perhaps more importantly, will get to save money as players’ year 19-21 seasons won’t have to be paid for. Even the NBA players union has a short-term interest in this rule: if Anthony Davis is forced to stay in school one more year, someone will take his roster spot. That will most likely be a current NBA player.

So this all makes sense from an economic perspective, sure. But the argument of “we want more money for ourselves, and we wish to take this from 19-20 year old predominantly poor, black man-children,” does not sound very politically correct, nor would it likely prove popular. Therefore, the NBA and NCAA have to trot out demonstrably false arguments to confuse the masses and win opinion to their side.

Argument one is that players who come into the league straight from high school are lacking in ability or maturity to adjust to playing in the NBA. This is like arguing the world is flat- you have to be willfully ignorant of hard data in order to make your argument. (Yea I’m talking to you Mark Cuban, who recently argued players needed to stay in school for three years and somehow managed to ignore the fact that his championship NBA team contained THREE rotation players that never played in college, DeShawn Stevenson, Tyson Chandler and of course, Dirk Nowitski.) Just in case you need any more evidence, look at the 2008 All NBA Teams, where four out of the 5 first teamers came straight from high school and over half the players did not go to college. And its not just superstars (you know, Kobe, LeBron, KG)- straight to NBA players follow a normal curve of outcomes, from All-Stars (Josh Smith, Monta Ellis, Andrew Bynum) to starters (Al Jefferson, Kendrick Perkins, Lou Williams) to role players (Kwame Brown, Dorrell Wright) to fringe players and washouts (Gerald Green, Robert Swift.) Clearly, players who don’t play in college are able to play in the NBA.

Argument two is that the league is somehow “doing the players wrong” by forcing them to accept the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars they are compensated for playing in the NBA. The argument goes that many of these players “wash out,” of the league quickly and are then left with nothing but that darn high school diploma, totally unprepared for the rest of life that awaits them.

This is at the least, a paternalistic argument and I would argue a racist one. The implied notion is that young black people with money are incapable of looking after themselves. Even if this is the case, the solution of the NBA and NCAA is not to set up support networks, or mandate financial planning, or ease regulations on NCAA eligibility, but to deny the players money in the first place.

And that’s why you know they’re being disingenuous. Because for most 19 years olds, the ability to earn the NBA minimum (over 450 thousand dollars) even for one year, will be more than a decade’s worth of income with a college degree. With that income, they also have the opportunity to attend college in the future of course, should they decide it’s in their best interests.

So please, NBA and NCAA officials, stop talking to us like we’re stupid. If you want to make more money by fucking over poor black teenagers, go for it. Just don’t pretend you’re being the good guys.

Continued from Part One…

OK if You Have an Expense Account

London

I tried to construct an argument that London isn’t a world-class city in my mind, but that’s plainly foolish. While I have already hemmed and hawed at the food, everything else is top class, including the Tube, historical sites, bars, parks, museums, arts scene etc. You can even walk into Westminster Abbey and hope to be invited to brunch with Will & Kate, if that’s what you desire.  It won’t happen and you might pay 35 pounds, but try anyways.

Speaking of pounds, the ridiculous prices of everything from beer to train rides to scones makes London a tough travel destination for someone on a budget. Even with free accommodation with friends or randoms, you’re still going to struggle to not blow through your bank account. Which is OK, after all many of the world’s other great cities including Sydney and Paris are also ridiculously pricey.

The problem is that for such a premium, London didn’t reach the standards of these other great metropoli. It’s not an urban beach paradise like Sydney, with it’s perfect weather and athletic, laid-back Aussie culture. It lacks the food, wine and romantic ambiance of Paris. Indeed the ambiance, at least in the parts we stayed in, is defined by a tribute to British aristocracy and manners, as well as the civilizing effects of British colonialism exemplified by the remorseless pillaging celebration that is the British Museum.

Maybe it’s my New England upbringing, but kowtowing to the values of British royalty never was my cup of tea. Parts of London I loved, and maybe I was just hanging in the wrong hoods, but in order to make the top tier, you’re going to need to give me something more. Or at least something at a better price.

Surprisingly Liveable Cuisine Stars

Kuala Lumpur

Malaysian food, deserves its own comment, but let’s briefly state for the record that having both Indian and Chinese populations competing for local food kings fulfills my greatest culinary fetishes. While the KL certainly shares Singapore’s climate, for some reason the humidity did not feel quite as oppressive, perhaps because of KL’s inland location. Supposedly the traffic rivals other Asian capitals like Beijing, Bangkok and Manila, but I didn’t find that to be the case.

The cultural diversity of Malaysia is on full display in KL and drives the city up the rankings. Muslim prayer calls, cheap Chinese foot rubs and Sari shops ensure that there’s always something new and interesting going on in KL, even if you’re just watching people walk by. And with idlis for breakfast, laksa for lunch and congee for dinner, what more do you need?

Guangzhou

Not so much diverse as filled to the brim with Cantonese people. Evidently Guangzhou does have pollution issues, which shouldn’t shock since Guangdong was the original China factory center, but the air smelled fine when I was there. What the city has going for it is a world class public transportation system, excellent parks and several town squares in downtown that are pedestrian focused. Oh yea and the food is spectacular- an array of various seafood dishes, the best dim sum in the world and of course, all sorts of weird stuff like dog hotpot and monkey brains, if you’re into that sort of thing.

As you can tell from the category, Guangzhou seemed more of a city you’d want to live in instead of visit from a tourist perspective. If you’re just traveling, I’d go to KL, Bangkok or even Chengdu instead. But ultimately I think being a good city to live in is more impressive than being a tourist destination. I’m looking for cities to settle down in, not cities to go out with, have a good time, puke on, then leave the next day without calling them back. Know what I mean?

The Cream of the Crop

Beijing

Yes the pollution is terrible. Ok beyond terrible, but life-affecting, creating God knows how many future cancer patients and lung ailments over the next five generations. And it’s not just the air quality- you never know when you might walk down the street to see a pile of innards dumped onto the sidewalk.

But these are mere externalities, which you ultimately start to ignore once you’ve acclimated yourself to this spectacular city. The monuments and history are second to none, from the Great Wall and Forbidden City, to excellent secondary sites like the Lama Temple and Drum & Bell Towers, you feel as if you are living history. And its not just the tourist site, enough of the ancient Beijing hutongs alley neighborhoods have been maintained to give Beijing some Lao magic. As a visitor you can lose yourself in a hutong, dodging electric motorcycles, looking at anything and everything for sale at bargain prices, and watching old Chinese people exercise like they have for centuries.

And obviously, the food’s incredible, with every Chinese cuisine represented as well as a mix of high-end and low-end dining options. In particular the Xinjiang cuisine is off the charts good. But you can find pretty much any amazing Asian cuisine, including Chinese regional, Japanese, Korean you name it.

With great parks, cheap taxis, excellent public transportation and a perfect blend of old and new, Beijing is truly one of the world’s great cities.

Paris

Ok so I went to Paris when I was 13 with my parents and hated it. I was there in March. The weather sucked. My Mom somehow thought that my 9 year old brother and myself would be interested in French cuisine and art mueseums. This was not the case.

Now a much more mature lad (in some ways), I can confirm that Paris is not overhyped in the least, giving writers great and crappy multiple sources of information for their forlorn musings. The winding paved alleyways and delightful architecture. The scrumptious sweets and aromatic wines. The river dividing the city, perfect for strolls with the Eifel Tower peaking out of various corners. And even the art.

So yes Paris, I discovered I was wrong about you. Just like I discovered I was wrong about Game of Thrones, Tom Brady vs. Drew Bledsoe and dating vegetarians. And I’m glad I did.

Hong Kong

There’s no reason to crown a champion amongst the top tier of cities. I’ll definitely be going back to all three. But HK just might be my favorite. It’s got a little bit of everything. Excellent nightlife and shopping for those who need action. International flavor provided by the huge ex-pat community. A weird combination of colonial and Cantonese cultures that leads to unique events like the scene at the Wednesday night horse races or the fervor over the Rugby Sevens tournament.

In addition to the mix of cultures, Hong Kong has rock solid fundamentals for a great city. The climate isn’t bad, although you need a high tolerance for humid weather. And for a city known for being densely populated, there’s  a stunning amount of green space, hiking trails, beaches and woods and much more. Most of the residential area is crammed into to Kowloon and Hong Kong Island (which is in itself a fantastic bit of urban planning.) Walking around these provides great photo opportunities and incredible views as you marvel at how so many people are stacked on top of each other. But you can easily get away on to a hike, or take the ferry to one of the surrounding islands for a quiet stroll.

The public transportation is a dream, whisking the population around from one island to the next. The food is cheap and delcious, with tons of Cantonese classics like dumpling soup to go with top notch international cuisine. No wonder the Chinese wanted it back.

I’m a city boy. I’ve never had a backyard or a driveway. I have probably spent more time in trains and buses than cars in my lifetime. I had never seen a Wal-Mart until I was 25.

Thus I feel compelled and qualify to judge the multitude of cities I visited on my journey. I tried to keep the cutoff around a million people, but in India and China, they have one million people in your average rest area. So no real criteria exists for what and what does not make the list. Sorry Melaka, Cochin, Lijiang and Luang Prabang.

Outright Shitholes

Manila

From the moment you fly in over a polluted bay and shanty towns, the capital of the Philippines makes Detroit look like Valhalla. Horrific traffic doesn’t help, with 11 million people and mostly two lane roads, you’ll mostly view Manila through a taxi cab window. This is partially because nobody wants to go outside since the city isn’t safe. A lack of any sort of reasonable policing authority means every 7-11 or chicken shack you enter has its own security guard equipped with a 12 gauge shotgun.

A walk around Manila’s streets at night find a bunch of seedy folks looking for underage Filipina prostitutes as well as families of four sleeping on the street. My common reaction was to immediately turn back to the comfort of my middling hotel room. Hey maybe I was pussying out a bit, but I blame the city: it’s an urban disaster, with an exploding population and you wonder how in the hell it will ever get better.

Phnom Penh

Not as unsafe or nearly as populated as Manila, but still a polluted nightmare. Unlike Manila, the people  are extremely friendly. Even if most of your interactions are with moto dopes or tuk-tuk drivers hounding you for business, they do so with just the right combination of laid-back pushiness so that you don’t take offense. Still there’s something weird about a people pimping their own horrid history for a few bucks, as the consistent calls of “tuk-tuk to Killing Fields?” grate on you after a while. Do Poles drive around hawking Auschwitz tours? Probably not.

But really it’s the garbage  condems Phnom Penh to shitholedom: when you have a noticably worse trash problem than India, something is horribly, horribly wrong. Now I know this is because Cambodia’s government are corrupt crooks and I don’t want to blame the aforementioned and quite lovely population, but garbage is garbage.

Hyderabad

Just to show I’m not being biased, the home city of my girlfriend’s family can compete with any non war-zone on the shithole meter. While there is plenty of garbage and cow shit on the side of the street (no sidewalks here!) the lack of functional traffic lights is Hyderbad’s claim to shithole fame. While there’s something enthralling about taking your life into your own hands every time you cross the street for the first 12 hours or so, it’s a fleeting feeling. Fear soon takes over.

More then anywhere, Hyderabad is a testament to the failure of India to manage its own development. An increase in wealth has led  to a massive increase in vehicles, while population and particularly urban population continues to rise. But there’s absolutely no concurrent investment in public infrastructure to support the increase in population, or at least nowhere near the necessary levels. No highways, or public transportation. No public education movement to teach people that cows probably need to be in fields in a modern metropolis. So India remains stuck, with part of its populace trying to maintain  the quaint urban life of their youth while millions more try to zoom around town in the 21st century. The results aren’t pretty.

 

Don’t Make A Wrong Turn

Jaipur

Shares most of the traffic and logistical problems of Hyderabad. Actually, it might be a little worse, since it’s firmly on the Indian tourist circuit meaning you have a whole host of people trying to rip you off, whereas no one goes to Hyderabad. Admiteddly, some of the tourist areas, particularly the Amber Fort high up in the hills are spectacular. This means little when you are stuck in a taxi, looking for your hotel, and you keep driving around the same rotary because your driver is lost and there’s too much traffic to get out of said rotary. Side note: The weather in Jaipur hits 55 degrees Centigrade in the hot season, so it may vacillate into shithole status.

Delhi

In Delhi we went baller status for the one time on my trip, staying at the Taj Mahal hotel, located in the same residential where many powerful goverment officials lived. Wide streets and boulevards gave the appearence of what clean beautiful city should look like. Your average government official lived in a nice mansion with a gate, walls and security guard. The sidewalks outside were lined with birdshit, and clearly hadn’t been cleaned since the last monsoon. The message was simple: I’m not going to waste my time worrying about  public spaces, even though that’s kind of my job, when I’m already getting mine.

Zoom over to Old Delhi and you see where the cities’16 million people actually live. On the street. Slammed into crowded boulevards where sidewalk is indistiguishable from lanes. A pickpocket’s wet dream. There’s something a little more invigorating about it than other Indian cities-maybe the fact that it’s the centre of India adds a little pride and pizzaz to the local population. But without a substantial bankroll or being part of the Nehru/Gandhi axis, it seems like it’d be difficult to survive long-term.

Cebu

The second city of the Philippines is much more manageable and friendly than Manila. Still there’s a few too many prostitutues and shady streetside characters to consider calling it home.

Souless Mall Cities

Singapore
I love hot weather, and I spent plenty of time in South India, Malaysia, Cambodia, all hot lowlands with oppressive humidity. Singapore takes it to another level though. I don’t know if its the urban setting or some sort of effect caused by being at the tip of the Malay pennisula (so that Singapore is affected by both the East Coast and West Coast monsoons. Basically its always rainy season.) But it was fucking humid. And the entire city appears to be built around avoiding that humidity. People walk outside for 15-30 minutes, then drenched in sweat escape into air conditioned malls or shopping centres. You’ll find many more people inside than outside, either at the aforementioned malls, or at one of the weirdo attractions that Singapore has built like Sentosa theme park or the Cable Car to Nowhere.

Plenty of people seem to like living here. But the combination of humidity and uniform thought pushed by a dictatorial government leaves something to be desired. Definitely a disappointment, although I’m willing to give it a longer look.

Its a Nice Place, but I Wouldn’t Want to Live Here

Chengdu

First the food. I’ll get more into this later, but let’s just agree that Sichuan has the best food in the world, and that’s that. If you live in Chengdu, you’ll eat like a king.

The place is also delightfully Chinese in a way Beijing and Hong Kong aren’t. I mean Beijing is China in many ways, but Chengdu is the Dirty Dirty South China. Just like Midwesterners and Southerners like to call their homes “real America,” you could imagine people from Chengdu calling their city “Real China.”

Of course part of what this implies is that the aforementioned “real” areas are shittier than their more famous counterparts like California or Beijing/Shanghai, so the populace has to create some sort of reason why the obviously shittier area is actually better. And of course in reality, they aren’t. Chengdu has all the pollution, traffic and weird smells of Beijing without the amazing public transportation system, history, quaint hutongs or world-class tourist sites. Plus there’s no central heating, even though winter temps easily drop to freezing.

This means you can’t do much other than eat and watch Sichuan people do crazy stuff. Which luckily, they do all the time. For example, my brother, his friend and I got a few snacks and watched a pickup soccer game one afternoon. To our great delighit, the soccer game devolved into an all-out brawl as several Sichuan alpha males tried to show who had the most face. A particularly fat guy tried to decapitate an opposing player with a dustpan, followed by both teams chasing said player around the field and kicking him on the ground. Then just like that, it was over. Phenomenal.

Bangkok

I’ve already declared Bangkok a wandering eater’s paradise, but it’s not without downsides. The traffic is horrific, and getting around the city would definitely grate on you after an extended period of living there. Additionally the city is prone to things like floods and riots which could put a bit of a damper on your Tuesday commute.

Still for visitation, Bangkok is a must. Along with the food, there’s plenty of Buddhist temples, shopping and partying at affordable prices to satisfy any traveller. You probably don’t need more than four or five days to get your fix, but it’s definitely a place you could come back to time and again.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Sandwiched by the twin food powers of Vietnam and Thailand, you’d think it would be difficult for Cambodia to carve out its own food identity. And there are certainly influences of both cuisines in Khmer food…or is it the other way around? According to Cambodians, many of the noodle dishes Thailand is known for are actually-Khmer influenced. So maybe we should be call it Pad Cambodia?

Let’s not inflame additional South East Asian tensions because there’s plenty of Cambodian-specific dishes that hold their own, including amok, lok lak and more. The standard ingredients are the same as other South East Asian locations—noodles, rice, minced meats, coconut, tamarind, chilis etc. However I found that the Cambodian food made enough local variations to create it’s own cuisine. Sure you can get fish in a banana leaf with coconut milk, probably in lots of different countries, and not just Asia, but rather than laska’s more sour taste, amok retains a refreshing sweetness. Lok Lak, which is basically pepper beef with rice, is made great by the native Cambodian black pepper. When freshly ground it adds a pungent aroma and flavor to the beef and gravy combination.

Food was cheap in Cambodia so I was able to eat in large portions, usually ordering a fried noodle dish and meat dish for dinner. With a couple of Angkor or Anchor beers, a meal was around 10$, which is an obscene amount for one of the poorest countries on Earth. But what can I say, I’m a fatass.

I already noted the cockroaches and beef with ants I ate during my time in Cambodia, but I only scratched the surface of weird eating available, particular in Phnom Penh. Snake vendors, cricket vendors, cockroach hawkers and more ply their trade on the shores of the Mekong. From the looks of it, they didn’t seem to be making toooo many sales, so note that if you pick up a fried snake, it may have been last week’s kill.

The Good: Very solid consistency in the Khmer food, there were few truly bad dishes. Every meal I felt satisfied, although, again, this could be related to the splurging. The French colonial influence reared its head for the first time, so I was able to get some good Western cuisine in the beach tourist outpost of Sihaounikville, including a pretty incredible breakfast made by a Parisian ex-pat with baguettes and jam. Even in the tourist traps, the food was incredibly cheap.

The Meh: The street food was underwhelming…a bunch of ducks and meats hanging from posts of questionable age and origin. Unlike Thailand, there were not a ton of street vendors, although there were some makeshift curbside restaurants where an auntie would whip up something in the wok for you like a ramen. I didn’t find any Cambodian desserts that inspired my pallet although I wasn’t adventurous.

The Ugly: Tourist focused restaurants generally took the spice and flavor out of the dishes—I had some seriously terrible lok lak my last night in Phnom Penh. I also took a bunch of buses in Cambodia and avoided eating at pretty much every stop since the food seemed old and not of the greatest hygiene. On the plus side, I’ve lost 8 pounds on this trip.

Best Dishes: Other than the aforementioned beef with ants, lok lak and amok, some fried chicken with lemongrass I ate on one of my many sojourns to the Angkor temples. The fresh lemongrass flavors and sauces made a party in my mouth.

Weirdest Dish: Clearly the cockroaches. But I also ate a dried fish and mango salad that was pretty unpleasant. I understand the flavor that’s aimed for, the saltiness of the dried fish against the sweetness of the mango, but it really didn’t do anything for me.

Overall score: A pleasant surprise, I recommend Khmer food. Only the lack of truly great dishes holds it back.

3.5 stomachs.