Boots in the Oven

Hong Kong, Day 1 – arrival, jet lag, and tasty

Hong Kong, May 17, 2007 (written in Chiang Mai, Thailand, May 28, 2007)

HONG KONG!

Might as well use the hot part of the day (and they don’t kid around with the heat and humidity during the hot season in Thailand, lemme tell ya) to catch up some on the blogging? Roight.

It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure Husbear left you guys hanging after a day of fish and chips and cans of poo (that last was not on offer at the Rock and Sole Plaice, thank god). Well, after all that fun, we hied our merry little way to Stansted Airport to catch our budget flight to Hong Kong.

I was a little concerned (read: terrified and yelly) that we arrived at the airport less than two hours before our flight was scheduled to take off, but the line through security was handled with that lovely British efficiency. We were prepared with our regulation-size containers of liquid securely and legally stored in our regulation-size bag, which meant that this, luckily, didn’t happen to us.

We were the first people to arrive at the gate for our Oasis Hong Kong flight (and really, I can’t recommend these guys enough – they were a bucket of awesome and cost like three dollars for a twelve hour flight). This was when I noticed Husbear’s unorthodox spelling of our destination. Hee.

The flight was lovely – noodles for breakfast, our own TV screens including my very favorite map channel, and a whole row to ourselves. This meant we got more sleep than usual and were feeling comparatively refreshed when we touched down in Hong (Honk?) Kong the next day at 3 in the afternoon.

I saw a bakery while Husbear was getting money from the ATM and became rather insistent. This delicious specimen, a pork filament and spicy mustard bun, was my reward, and it was so good. Sweet, eggy bread, horseradishy mustard, and smoky, dried pork? YES. First Southeast Asian style food in ten months! Rejoice, rejoice.

Now is probably as good a time as any to mention that when it comes to the food we'll be eating over the next few weeks, we're pretty ignorant.  If you see anything that I've gotten wrong or anything you can help clarify for us, please, HELP!  We like eating and learning and not being stupid!

Friendly tourist information people descended on us as we wandered around the terminal and got us straightened out with the best/cheapest way to get into town and our very own shiny free map. We bought lovely Octopus cards, hard plastic cards with an embedded chip that can be used on eight forms of public transit in Hong Kong (these guys are very forward-thinking in terms of technology) and hopped on a regular bus into town.

It was a double-decker bus (all forms of public street transportation seem to be double-decker in Hong Kong) and we got the front top seat! This gave us a great view of the enormous buildings all over Hong Kong, though we still managed to get off the bus one stop late. Ah well.

Finding our guest house, the Alisan, wasn’t too difficult, though it was a good thing we had the address – there’s no indication at street level that there’s a guest house in the 17-story apartment block, much less what floor it might be on. We did mange to check in and were given a very nice room, with attached bathroom – a room with toilet, sink, and shower head - and a/c. And my rather lumpy butt. (sorry, best picture of the room.)

We did some unpacking and, around 7, went in search of some food on the street by our guest house. This place looked promising, with lots of happy noodle eaters. (just not in this particular picture, because we took it later.)

The woman who ran the place was a master in communicating with hand gestures – she held up a handful of noodles and pointed at it and we nodded our heads enthusiastically. She then gestured to an array of tin tubs in front of her which held various unidentifiable (by us) meats and meat byproducts, and I pointed at what I was pretty sure were fish balls. We ended up with a bowl of this:

It was fish balls, but also chicken wings, bean sprouts, and thin egg noodles floating in a chicken broth thick with perfumy star anise and coriander. Just the thing after a long day of travel, and a delicious welcome to Hong Kong. There were no napkins, a difficulty for which we weren’t prepared, but the proprietress generously offered us a roll of toilet paper. (As it turns out, most places don’t have napkins – they may put a box of Kleenex on the table, if you’re lucky.)

I was rather full, but Husbear was insistent that this was in fact just a snack; that the real eating would have to come later. So we wandered off up Jaffe and Lockhart roads until we came to an overpass. That’s where we discovered a strange concentration of restaurants serving spicy crab. Half of them seem to be named “Under Bridge Spicy Crab,” and they all have buckets of live trussed crabs sitting outside so you know their specialty.

We settled on one of the under bridge spicy crabs and went in. Décor was barebones, but it’s never really about the décor in Chinese restaurants, is it? We really wanted to be able to read the pink banners fluttering in the breeze from the a/c.

The waitress came and took our order – I wimped out on the spicy crab, as we had no idea who much it would end up costing and honestly, I wasn’t crazy hungry after that bowl of noodles. So we ordered clams in black bean sauce and a bowl of congee, a particularly unphotogenic rice porridge (think watery bowl of grits, as you will get no picture here).

The waitress came and put our beers down on the table, as well as a buttload of plates and cups and bowls. (See the toilet-paper napkins?) We never did figure out what you’re supposed to do with all of them. I think one’s a slop bowl and you use the pot of hot water to clean your chopsticks and utensils, but that’s as far as we were able to get in three days.

The clams came and were very good, perfectly cooked and savory. We saw several other tables ordering them as well, so we felt vindicated.

After we finished our drinks and eats, a steaming cup of hit ginger drink was put in front of us, filled with chunks of some sort of Asian sweet potato and ginger.

It settled our stomach and just about put us to sleep right there on the table, so we returned to the hotel and went to bed. Big day of exploring Hong Kong, coming up tomorrow.

And a real-time update – we leave tomorrow morning to fly from Chiang Mai to Saigon… for a week. We have a lead on a guide there given to us by a friend, and we’re hoping to make the most of the little bit of time we have there. Ta!

Jumping out of the chronology for a moment

I know that we're seriously behind in blog posting right now (well, really only three or four days, so please don't get too shirty about it) but I did want to put up a quick "Hey, we're in Bangkok, and we're alive!" kind of post.

We have many many pictures to go through from Hong Kong, many of them of food and a few of Macau (and their famous egg custard tarts, because we really do have one-track minds).  Our guesthouse here in Hong Kong has internet, but I don't know if I'll be able to use it to do picture uploading. 

Bangkok is frenetic and HOT and friendly and HOT and smiling and HOT.  But we're here, and we made it, and we're very relieved and happy. Hope all is well in whatever neck of the woods you're in.

girlie

London's Last Leg

I’m so excited for you! The little lady is sacked out with a case of the omgwhatcountryareweinandcanijusttakeanap so I am boldly stepping in to recount our final hours in London. Personally, I am not quite dead from massive self inflicted noodle wounds (who knew it was so hard to stop eating in Hong Kong?) but for that my friends you will have to wait because in blog-o-world we have not yet left the land of limply waving queen mums and extremely orderly queues.

Now remember, the night before was the pilgrimage to the Fat Duck, so in a bit of uncharacteristic slack-cutting we decided to sleep in a bit and skip the “full English breakfast” provided by the hotel.

After we finally rousted ourselves and finished grooming and packing all of our knick knacks we headed outside to our first non-rainy day in England. Yea sun! Basically, all we had to do was hit the Tate Modern (one of my all time favorite museums) and make it to the airport. First though, we were a bit peckish.

This may surprise a lot of you, but I have never actually had the full on, authentic, fish and chips experience. I know, I know, and you thought you knew me. Well, Mme. Pants and I figured it was high time to rectify this problem, so for lunch we set out for what is supposed to be the oldest, still operating, fish-n-chips joint around, the Rock and Sole Plaice. No it’s not a typo, it’s just a pun. Rock, sole and plaice (pronounced place) are all types of fish that the Brits love to fry up.

We arrived at a cute flower covered corner in high spirits. There were nice tables outside and a little old man behind the counter working batter and oil at a steady clip. I figured we just ordered fish and chips much like you just order pie and mash at a pie shop. In my ignorance, I had no idea that there are actually 700 types of fish to choose from and practically everyone you ask will swear by a different type. Silly me.

Being noobs, we picked the two most popular, cod and haddock respectively, and then rounded out the order with some of their homemade pickles and slaw. Yum. These guys can really fry some seafood. The cod was good, crispy and moist with a nice big flake to the flesh, but the haddock was by far my favorite. It was sweeter and more flavorful with a slightly denser and more appealing texture. Of course the malt vinegar or “non-brewed condiment” as the label says, made the meal. Man is that stuff delicious.

Full and greasy, we waddled our way toward the nearest Tube station. In an unplanned detour for an ATM (bancomat for you Italians) we rounded a corner and stumbled onto this little jewel.

That’s right, the original Neil’s Yard Dairy. I didn’t even know it was around here. Mme. Pants said she did but just forgot so I tripped her and gave her a wedgie. Ok not really, but we’ve been eating and loving these peoples’ cheese for years so it was totally cool to see the actual shop behind it all.

We wandered in to their dairy shrine in somewhat of a daze. Mountains of cheese towered and teetered all around us. Hundreds of types I had never even heard of all with little tags with the names of the people who made it and where they are from. One of the guys behind the counter started talking to us, going on and on about the cheeses and the handling and their shipping and then he started cutting off chunks.

They had butter too!

I tried to explain that we were still swimming in fish and chips and that we couldn’t buy anything because we were leaving but he didn’t seem to care. It was all so good, how could we turn him down? My favorite was the Doddington (made by Maggie Maxwell at Doddington Dairy in Wooler, Northumberland donchaknow?)

After finally extricating ourselves, we got back on track and hauled our little patuchuses over to the Tate Modern. If you’re not familiar with it, the Tate Modern is a huge modern art museum with a truly amazing collection. Opened in 2001, it has been credited for single handedly reversing the slump in London museum attendance.

They’ve got a huge range of stuff. The large building is divided up into many smaller galleries. Before you enter many of them, the curators have selected pieces representative of whatever theme the works share and paired them as a kind of introductory explanation. My favorite duo was this sculpture by Umberto Boccioni and painting by Roy Lichtenstein. They’re just a totally cool pair. You can tell I’m an art history major by my biting insights can’t you?

I’m not the biggest Picasso fan, but this particular piece really struck my eye. I think I’m partial to his black and white stuff.

They also feature some hilarious crowd favorites like Piero Manzoni’s Merda d'artista no. 004. Yes. It is, in fact, a can of "Artist's Shit." The guy canned 90 of them back in the ‘60’s and sold them for the then-current price of gold.

They also had a large room of works by new artists out of Ghana and other parts of war torn Africa. Some of them are pretty amazing and it was really interesting to see how such highly charged and politically active works are being produced by the terrible circumstances over there.

.

This piece struck a particular note with girlie. While I found it funny, I could see her nodding along in complete sympathy.

Some of the works are of that quintessential modern art that people love to make fun of. This installation by Dan Flavin jumps out. Yes I’m sure there’s a long and involved back story and key elements tying it into some evolution of this movement or that, but I mean really, it is just four fluorescent tubes. This was also his most complex piece. Several others had just the one tube.

Other pieces were amazing not just because they looked great (and you totally have to see this in person to get a feel for just how truly cool it is) but because of how the they were executed. This self portrait by Chuck Close was done after he had become a quadriplegic due to a spinal collapse. He used his teeth to hold the brush. Yeah.

Well, that about wraps up our London wanderings, so I’ll leave you with this picture of the Millennium Bridge as some sort of lame and overwrought symbology of the next leg of our journey. Take that.

Toodles.

-L.Pants

Harrods and Meat Pies (the bland version, not the Natchitoches version)

London, May 15th, 2007 (Written in Hong Kong on May 18)

With 8 PM reservations at the Fat Duck, how the heck were we going to fill the hours until the time came to eat?

By looking at food and eating.  Duh.

When we were in London in 2001, we did go to that grande dame of department stores, Harrods.  However, we somehow managed to miss the pilgrimage to the food halls!  Probably because we were on a backpacker's budget at the time and had to get out of there lest we feel the need to spend thirty pounds on something stupid.

The food halls, though, are like no food court I've ever seen.  First of all, you can't eat your purchases there, unless you're at one of their hilariously overpriced bars.  (15 pounds for a half-dozen oysters?  Roight.)  Secondly, they carry things like:

A salmon roulade with crab claws!  Clutching its very own flavorant!

Or how about an assortment of twenty or thirty terrines?  These were really impressive.  Husbear took copious notes, since terrines weren't so much in the course of study at Apicius.

They have things to fit budgets from rich to super rich (especially with the pound holding at right about two dollars at the moment).  If you have cash just burning a hole in your pocket, why not drop it on some caviar?  Harrods brand, that is!

And if you're a pickle or olive freak like me, Harrods has you covered as well.

They even had some pretty interesting sausages - these were supposed to be from Italy, though we'd never seen anything like them in that country.

I was sorely tempted by these meat pies, but we had after all just eaten like twelve soft-boiled eggs and sausage at our hotel and we had dinner plans.  They still look good, though.  And so cute!  And, well, only like 4 dollars each... not entirely awful...

There's a whole room dedicated to chocolate and desserts, too, including a whole case of fudge and another of Turkish Delight.  I remember reading "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" when I was a kid and having no earthly idea what that snot Edmund was going on and on about with his Turkish Delight.  At least now I know, (I foud out several years ago, thank you) but I'm still not a fan.

Though all of this food is certainly impressive, it's the rooms it's all contained in where the real decorative insanity has taken hold.  Just like the rest of Harrods, actually.

Here's the cheese counter, for instance, with its stained-glass ceiling:

And the vegetable and gift box room, with... vegetable chandeliers!  OK, yes, I do want those and may very well hang one in my own home someday.

All in all, though, the food halls left us cold.  The prepared foods were insane and wonderful, yes, but after the vegetable and meat markets of Italy, those sections of this department store just didn't do it for us.  Yup, we're ruined.  And kind of asses. 

We did a little more poking around in Harrods, just to check out the luxury bathrooms (well stocked with expensive perfumes) and the Egyptian escalator.  Which was awesome.  Just like Egypt.  Ahem. (Harrods' owner is Egyptian, which explains the pharaoh symbology and Egyptian stuff everywhere.)

At the bottom of the escalator, there's a memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi al-Fayed.  He was the son of Mohamed al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods, who was killed in the car crash that also killed Diana. 

This display includes a wine glass used by the couple on their last night in the hotel suite they were staying in in Paris as well as a diamond ring (possibly engagement ring?) Dodi bought for Diana before they died.

I guess... no comment.

We left Harrods right around lunchtime - we had plans.  Meat pie and mash related plans.

There's a place we found online just south of Tower Bridge that we wanted to check out.  Getting to the pie shop meant we got nice views of the Tower of London, as well as Tower Bridge.

(Don't worry.  We didn't skip the Tower of London just to go to a pie shop - we'd been there in 2001 and didn't feel the overwhelming need to return.)

Then, we crossed Tower Bridge - this is the one most Americans think of when they think "London Bridge."  At least I know I used to.  What can I say?  My grasp of geography has gotten a lot stronger over the past ten years or so.

Don't go to London Bridge by mistake.  It's very boring.  And the original's in Arizona anyway, paid for by people who according to urban legend made the same mistake I did six years ago.

Manzes pie shop ended up being quite a bit further past the bridge than we were anticipating, but whatever - we needed to preemptively walk off all that pie.  When we got there, we were heartened by the look of the place and the prices.  A totally straightforward menu.

We plumped for 2 pie 1 mash, with liquor, and jellied eels on the side.  Hubear's been a little obsessed with British-style meat pies (and their eels!) ever since before he made that hare pie.

The mash was homemade, from actual potatoes.  And very good.  The meat pies had a delicious crust, nice and crisp on the top and soft and tender on the bottom, but they had NO FLAVOR.  Same with the "liquor" - basically a white gravy "flavored", if you can call it that, with parsely.  Lucky there was some vinegar on the table, including a  bottle of spicy with two little peppers floating in it.  I imagine if this was your comfort food from when you were a child, this would be exactly how you'd like it.  Bland.

The eels were... well, take a look, why don't you?

Let's just say they tasted about how they looked.  With stronger jelly.  Not a new favorite, that's for sure, but to each his own.  The vinegar helped.  Vinegar always helps.

The place seemed to be popular with locals.  In fact, I think we were the only non-local people in there.  It's a lot like a London Mario, the restaurant by the Mercato Centrale in Florence where you sit with people you don't know and you eat really fast and then you get up to leave.  But with fewer tourists.

Husbear weaseled his way over to the counter for just a second to take pictures.  "Sure, love - whatever you want, if it's some kind of personal thing," said the lady behind the counter.

And honestly, that was all of interest for the day, until we went to the Fat Duck.  Which I won't write about right now - I think we're going to hold off until we aren't blogging in a hotel room in Asia at 1 in the morning.  On that note, toodles!

There's nobody driving that car!

London, May 13th and 14th, 2007

Well, we’ve been in London for two days now, and I don’t know why I’m still having so much trouble with the whole “drive on the right” thing.  I keep looking at cars, thinking “Who’s driving that thing?!”.  Luckily, there are handy “Look Left” and “Look Right” markers painted onto the road in every crosswalk, just for late adjusters like me.

I swear we’ve been hearing more Italian here than English.  I had no idea London was such a popular vacation destination for Italians!  And folks from Eastern Europe, many of whom we’ve seen using cameras to film 360 degree views of pubs and parks.  That’s going to make for enticing vacation footage later.

It’s been raining a lot, but then again – we are in London.  At least it’s authentically cold and wet. 

How about I make with the pictures already?

We flew Ryanair from Pisa to London Stansted on Sunday morning, an experience I was totally convinced would go horrifically awry.  Google ryanair complaints to see why.  Of course, all that worry was for nothing since our flight went perfectly, as did passport control.  (No more thinking about the lack of a permesso di soggiorno!  Woot!)

The bus into town, into Victoria Station, was fine.  It was pouring and cold when we disembarked, and I was starting to think that linen-pants and short-sleeve wearing Husbear was going to be more than a little miserable – but a store appeared selling jackets for 10 pounds!  Now Husbear is jacketed.

We were hungry, and decided what better way to introduce ourselves to British cuisine than through an authentic Cornish pasty?  Unfortunately, our only easy nearby option was a fast-food stand called “The Pasty Shop”, which was advertising Cajun Chicken Pasties (“From the South… of Cornwall!”).  We went with a veggie pasty (which was oh-so-heavy on the corn) and a traditional steak/potato/onion 1-pound dealie (Actually, it was called ‘The Big One’ and it weighed 510 grams –L. Pants).  Both were good, but needed salt.  Again, London.

We went and checked in to our hotel, the Caring, which is about the tallest and narrowest building I’ve ever seen.  79 steps to our hotel room!  But whatever, the price was right (in London, with the dollar being where it is, read “right” as “not entirely exorbitant.”)

Then, what the heck, on to Speaker’s Corner!  This is a place we wanted to see when we were last in London in 2001, but we never had the chance.  There’s quite a cast of characters holding court in the Corner, from mostly sane – this man, saying that trying to exercise freedom of speech in the States gets you thrown in Guantanamo,

to this guy.  The word “if” is covered by his arm, just so you know.

Next stop – a detour to and around Buckingham Palace.  It looks as though there’s been a push to acknowledge contributions to the war effort made by members of the British Empire.  This one’s for Australia.

Just a couple of blocks from the Palace, we saw a wonderful street sign.  I guess horses have to cross at different times than humans?

And Buckingham Palace still looks sort of like a grand office building.  Sorry, Queen and Royals.  Though I do appreciate a good obsession with gold leaf and gilt.  The shinier the better, that’s my motto!  (Seriously.  Please help me come up with a better motto.)

We ate dinner at a pub near the hotel called the Leinster Arms.  I’d seen a cheddar and pickle sandwich on the menu earlier that I felt we really needed to try.  Plus a Yorkshire pudding.  And bangers and mash (which is just sausages and gravy and mashed potatoes, but bangers has such a nice ring to it.

They ran out of mash, but still had baked potatoes.  And were entirely Britishly helpful about it.  I can’t get used to this thing here, where it seems like people actually want to help us to do things in their city.  How un-Italian.

The cheddar and sweet pickle – YES.  It’s on every pub menu we’ve seen, pretty much, and it’s a good and simple combination we’ll have to explore more deeply later.

And Yorkshire pudding – is this basically a savory bread pudding in gravy, or am I missing something?  It reminded me of Husbear’s past panades.

The next morning, we presented ourselves in the Breakfast Room (I think the English are even more enamored with random capitalization than we Americans are) for the promised included English breakfast, only to find a distinct lack of baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, or any puddings.  Though two eggs, sausage, and bacon is still more breakfast than we’ve been given anywhere in Italy.

Slightly disappointed, we made our way over to the Houses of Parliament to say hello to Big Ben.  Hi, clock and bell!

Then, back in the tube (and can I just mention how out-of date our guidebooks are briefly?  They say that one-way Tube tickets are 2 pounds in Zone 1, the central part of town.  Try FOUR.  But there’s a thing called an Oyster Card where you pay a 3 pound deposit and pre-pay on tickets, and then you pay only 1.50 pounds per ride.  Still expensive, but at least it isn’t eight dollars per ride!).

Our target was Smithfield Market, where we had lunch reservations at St. John Smithfield Market, a place we’ve been wanting to go for several years.  The lunch itself will have to have its own post, because it was just that good.  The market was interesting, though we couldn’t really see much of anything.

Plus it was raining pretty hard.  Husbear remarked that this wasn’t the kind of quaint little market where you buy an eggplant and perhaps a steak – this was a pallet of eggplant kind of industrial place, as far as we could tell.

The colors were great, though.  And we learned that the UK didn’t come off of meat rationing after World War Two until 1954!  I had no idea.

After an oh my gawd good lunch, we started to make our way over to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a museum of applied arts which looked to be completely awesome in our guidebooks.

Why is so much English graffiti so good-natured?  I mean, there’s some weird stuff, like the guy who wrote “Brooke Shields Alphabet” all over Tower Bridge for us to see today, but then there’s things like this.

(That should say… well, perhaps you figure it out.)

The Victoria and Albert Museum was great, as advertised.  We spent a lot of time in the fashion through the ages exhibit.  Since when does Juicy Cotoure belong in a museum?

This Charles Worth dress was more like it.

The underwear display was really interesting.  I especially liked the tie-on bustles, over in the near left.

And the displays of avant-garde New York style were downright hilarious, including this Swiss dot Capri-pant suit.  And the ruffly formal shorts.  I’m all for men getting to break out of the mold of the traditional suit, but I don’t know about puffy shorts being the answer.

The sculpture wing was equally awesome, mostly because we got to see some sculpture that wasn’t Italian!  Here’s an English Eve.

We had to go through the sculpture wing at a pretty fast clip, since we were running very low on time.

We saw Raphael’s cartoons for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, confirming again that neither of us are Raphael fans.  Tucked away in a corner, however, was a thing we may need to have commissioned, if we ever get to that point in our finances.  Hah.

A fish, rampant, with the family coat of arms!  I may not know too much about biology, but I know that fish don’t have hands.

Then, we went for a long walk back to the hotel, past a monument to Prince Albert – again, with the gilt!

There were friezes running all the way round the bottom of this monument, covered with great thinkers, architects, sculptors, and painters throughout the ages.  There were lots of Italian names on there, of people we certainly wouldn’t have recognized this time last year...

Dinner!  Indian food!  I really think we came to this same Indian restaurant in August of 2001.  Swear to Gd, it looks familiar.  There was much gorging on Indian food.  We have a pretty good Indian place in Florence, but nothing like London Indian food (which is very likely nothing like Indian Indian food).

Gotta wrap this up – we’re on our way to… really… the Fat Duck.  We have a train to catch in 20 minutes, so I gotta go get a moveon!

(in a confusion eliminator, hopefully, this post was written in London on May 15th and posted from Hong Kong on May 17th.  Seriously.  Yeah, we're in Hong Kong.  But for the purposes of the blog, let's pretend we're still in London, shall we?  This is CRAZY.)

Hello from London!

So, we're in sunny London right now... and by sunny, I mean raining and 55 degrees.  We're freezing our little used-to-being-in-Italy butts off.

I'm at an Internet cafe with just a few minutes of use left, so this will just be a quick "Hey, we're alive!" kind of post.

But we've been having an amazing time!  Lots of walking, lots of eating, and the discovery of what may very well be my new favorite museum in the world - the Victoria and Albert museum, where we spent a good chunk of time today looking at clothes through the ages as well as an amazing sculpture gallery.

We had lunch today at St. John's Smithfield Market, which... oh my god, we have lots of pictures and someday I will get our laptop hooked up to the internet so I can upload them.  Suffice it to say for now that marrow salad is a great idea, and that we ate an honest-to-goodness gull egg!

Tomorrow, we're going to go check out Harrod's famous food hall, and we have reservations at the Fat Duck!  Not that this is a things we've been looking forward to for a year or anything, but we're very excited.  And cold.

We're flying out of London on Wednesday night for Hong Kong.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to post again before then, but I will be working on detailed posts with pictures so you can see some of what we've been up to.

Another Day, Another Region: The Valle d'Aosta

On a non-anachronistic note - if all has gone well, we are in London.  Today we have lunch reservations at St. John's Restaurant in Smithfield Market, where we will toast the king of offal himself... though likely with water, because if you haven't heard, London is seriously expensive these days.

But... back to Italy, for the time being!

We left Torino early to catch the two-hour regional train to Aosta.  Our hotel (Hotel Turin) had a great view of the old Roman city walls.  And a huge breakfast buffet. 

Of course, since it was lunchtime, we took the brief walk into town to search out somewhere to eat.  Husbear happened upon  a totally cute little Valle d'Aostan place, Le Pelerin Gourmand, and we settled ourselves in to see just what was up with the food of this little region, tucked into a corner of Italy just up against France.

Since we're predictable, we ordered the antipasto misto della casa.  What came was anything but predictable.

This has to be the first time I've been served a selection of terrines and pates in an Italian restaurant.  Again, proof positive that there is no such thing as "Italian Cuisine".

Since it's sort of difficult to tell what's going on here, I'll start at the salmon (raw) and work clockwise.  We've got a pressed carpaccio of shrimp, a terrine of scallops, a country-style pork pate, a soft and crazydelicious cow cheese, and a terrine described as being "like foie gras".  And a pepper stuffed with tuna. 

Now, what the heck kind of Italian food is that?  Delicious, that's what kind.

We were trying to keep things sort of lightish, so we ordered three pastas to split between the three of us. 

The long dumplings are strozzapreti (priest stranglers!) in a slightly sour sausage sauce (yum), a not-so-awesome dish of tagliolini with crab sauce which tasted more fishy than anything else, and gnocchi in fonduta.  These gnocchi weren't like other gnocchi we've had - more starchy and bouncy against the teeth, if that makes sense.  They were all made in house, and the strozzapreti and gnocchi at least were totally delicious.

We stuck with coffee for dessert.  Over coffee, we debated how a place charging prices this low for food this good and high-quality could stay in business.

When we got the bill, we understood - 3 euro bottles of water and 3 euro coffees!  Other than that, though, their prices are crazy low for the quality.  Highly recommended.

Time for a bit of sightseeing of the non-food-related variety!

We grabbed a bus to Courmayeur, from where we'd heard you can take a scenic cable-car ride up Mont Blanc (Monte Bianco, if you're Italian).  That's the highest mountain in Europe, don'cha know.

Unfortunately, we got there too late and missed the last round-trip cable car ride.  So we resigned ourselves to checking out the ski town.  There were lots of great little food shops, selling lardo and fontina cheese (though usually not together).  We saw an oddly-shaped wooden vessel in a store and Mama Bear asked what it was -  a grolla, the proprietress said, for drinking caffe' valdostano.

Oh really?  One of these had to be ordered at the first place we stopped.

Turns out, it's a hot coffee drink spiked with grappa and a local liqueur called genepy, floated with a slice of orange.  That's sugar you see around the top - the bartender poured flaming liquor onto it, I guess to get the sugar to melt to help keep the top on?

It was perfect, warming in every way.  But... when we went to pay...

20 euro!  I've never had a $27 coffee before.  Yay. (Further exploration showed that this was a bit crazy.  The average going rate was closer to 7 euro so don't be put off.)

We really should have checked the price on that.  Lesson learned for next weekend in Venice.

Courmayeur was otherwise a very nice little Alpine ski village, though it was most certainly out of our price range.  Great window-shopping.

We rode back to Aosta considerably wiser.

After cleaning up a bit at the hotel, we walked to Taverna da Nando for dinner.

When we saw not only fonduta, but also bagna cauda, on their menu - we had to jump.

Fonduta is Valdostano fondue, while bagna cauda is actually from the Piedmont - a warm butter, cream, and anchovy dip into which you dunk raw veggies.

With homemade, actual, honest-to-goodness polenta!  This is a harder commodity than you'd think to come by here in Italy.

We thought both of these were delicious, since we're both people who love strong flavors and dipping; Mama Bear was a fan of the fonduta, but not so much of the very anchovyish bagna cauda.

I think she liked our second course, more, camoscio e polenta.  Chamois is a local game, that looks a lot like a small antelope, with a sweet flavor.  The gravy was really good with the polenta, this time cooked a little softer.

You know, sometimes I hate looking at pictures of everything we ate on a particularly crazy day, because it tends to look more than a little excessive... I promise we don't always eat like this!

The dessert was bad.  We ordered a creme caramel, over the waiter's strenuous recommendation of the tiramisu.  Dumb move, us!

On the way home we saw a viper in grappa.  I don't know if they actually drink snake grappa in these parts - it certainly felt like an early taste of Vietnam!

Big day.  Good lord.  Bigger day in the morning, so on to bed!

Le Pelerin Gourmand, Aosta, Via de Tillier.  0165.231850

Taverna da Nando, Aosta, pass follier de tillier 41, 0165.44455. 

Continuation!  Hey, I'm trying to cram an awful lot of blogging into just a few hours...

Next morning, up and at'em to the bus station to catch a bus to Breuil-Cervinia.  (Don't ask me how to pronouce that.  I studied Italian, not French.)

Anyone able to parse this sign for me, snapped out the window on the way?  No littering, no flower picking, no fires, no...trees?

When we got to Breuil-Cervinia, we discovered that you can actually take cable cars to Switzerland.  Then, if you're skiing-inclined, you can ski down into Zermatt!  Not us, today, but it is possible.  We decided on just the cable cars. 

(Check out the Matterhorn!  That's it all foggy on the left.  Monte Cervino if for all you I-talions out there. -L.Pants)

It takes three to make it to the top.  As you go up, it unsurprisingly gets progressively colder.  And it started snowing!

Here's some proof that yes, Mama Bear did make it into Switzerland.  In case any of you are doubters.

It was seriously snowing by this point.  Mama Bear gave thanks that she had decided to buy a fleece at the bottom of the mountain, and I was equally thankful that she lent me her sweater.  Everyone else was in full-on ski gear, and there we were in short sleeves and/or linen pants...

The highest up you can go with the cable cars is 3840 meters, or about 12,500 feet.  That's a lot of units, any way you slice it.  (Now Auntie, don't get jealous, but that is actually higher than the station at the top of the Jungfraujoch!)

And just so we could say we hopped over the border into Switzerland for lunch, we ate at the cafeteria at the top.  Polenta and beef stew and soup - just right for an unexpectedly cold time.

Husbear got this great picture of the last cable car descending into the abyss.

Right about exactly then was when I got altitude sickness.  The wine and coffee at lunch, combined with a brief struggle to the top of a small snowy hill, made my vision go almost completely white.  I sat on the first leg of the cable car with my head between my knees, and when we made it to the first stop a nice family told me to go lay down on a bench with my feet up until I felt better.  Fun.

Since it was snowing heavily on top of the mountain, it follows that it was raining pretty steadily in Breuil-Cervinia by the time we got back.  We scooted into a bar for a significantly cheaper caffe' valdostano and waited for the bus back to Aosta.

Awesomely, in Aosta it wasn't raining!  We ate dinner crepes and went for a walk around town.

Gelato, of course, followed.

Then lots of sleeping!  Another long day of wonderfulness.

And Husbear, once again, packed a great picnic for us to take on the long train back to Florence the next day.  This time, we had a couple of really strange sausages (a blood sausage and a beet and rice sausage) as well as goat cheese and fruit.  We got some stares, but it was totally worth it.

Nettles and Snails!

So, we’re officially leaving Florence (small tear leaks gently out of corner of eye). And among other things this means that everything in the Pants Kitchen must go. Many of the choicest items have been safely deposited with food loving friends that will be here for a while longer. However, some just didn’t meet “gift” specifications. So what exactly does that mean for us?

Nettles and Snails for dinner! Yes, that’s right. Like many of you I’m sure, when we get to the back of our pantry it’s all slime and thistles. This may not be the greatest plating (we’re really freaking busy people) but I can assure you that it was quite tasty.

We picked up both of these little goodies on our travels through southern Italy along with brief descriptions of how one might want to prepare them. I took the nice man’s advice about the snails and cooked them low and slow with onions, red wine, and tomatoes and I have to say it’s not a bad idea.

The nettle pesto just gets tossed with pasta, penne in this case, and then sprinkled with a little cheese and olive oil. And though it certainly wasn’t recommended, the combination of the two flavors paired surprisingly (thankfully?) well.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. We didn’t have these with dinner (they were totally lunch), but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention them. These little beauties are pickled wild onions preserved under oil that we picked up in a town called Lecce in Puglia. The little old man of a shop keeper practically dragged me by my ear to look at them when Mme. Pants let slip that I was studying food. I’m sure glad he did though because Mmmm, mmmm! These little guys are lip smackingly scrumptious.

Now that you’ve seen the darkest recesses of our larder, wish us luck in Southeast Asia. Italy may have its strange foods, but have you seen what they eat in the jungles of ‘Nam? If all goes according to plan you will soon!

-L. Pants

And also, in an item totally unrelated to snails or onions, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to all the mamas out there, but most especially ours!  We're thinking of you and love you very much.  And yes, we promise to keep in touch while we're in Southeast Asia.

Torino, the return

Day 2, early morning - did you know that Turin has the largest market in Europe?

We showed up on Saturday morning, not even entirely sure the thing would be open, only to be confronted with what must have been hundreds of carts set up along makeshift alleyways in the middle of an enormous lot.

The outside food area, just in front of the huge covered market, is full of fruits and vegetables and the occasional snail.

The front area is taken up by stalls selling a wide variety, while in the back you'll find the farmers selling just a few things, their crop from that morning.  We saw the smallest, tenderest celery ever, along with the brightest carrots.

Sadly, not all the produce is sold in time...

Then, there's an entire outdoor area dedicated to clothing.  Mostly cheap stuff, but there were good deals on socks and underwear and accessories.  We saw a lot of women there wearing the head scarf.

Then, of course, there are actually two covered market buildings.  The first is dedicated to fish, and has a setup I've never seen before - vendors stand in front of and behind their wares, which are displayed at a steep angle on tables.  They actually throw fish back and forth - and we saw several vendors folding money to throw it from the top level down to the bottom.

A very strange way to do business - but it certainly looked like they'd been doing it that way for a while. 

We haven't seen variety like this at a fish market since Catania.

Then, there's an entirely different covered building, much larger than the fish building, that's full of meats and bread and dry goods.  We were surprised at the amount of sausage surrounding us - smoked sausage, German style.  Turin definitely looks north more than south, culturally.

And they had Romanian wine displayed on chains.  Interesting idea...

We spent several happy hours at the market, but eventually it was time for us to leave.  Poodle.

Torino reminded us of its stateliness.  The streets seemed even emptier, coming from the bustle of the market.

We found a really great place for lunch, under the arcades, that had a display of prepared plates.  The food was delicious and fresh - we gorged on vegetables.  Of course, most of them were au gratin or baked into quiches, but there were some just steamed... and stuffed with meat. 

We even bought some of Torino's famous candies, the little lozenges known as pastiglie.  These are raspberry flavored from Leone, and they are even now all over the bottom of Husbear's camera bag.  Oops.

Satisfied, and on to the film museum!  It's housed in a building originally built as a synagogue, until Torino's Jewish community decided costs were getting to high and sold the building to the city.

Torino was the center of Italian filmmaking for a long time, and I was sort of thinking we'd be seeing a lot of memorabilia for Italian films that I knew nothing about, or a dusty warehouse full of posters.

Turns out, I was much mistaken.  Instead of a bunch of cheesy souvenirs loosely tied together through their connection to film, what we found was a meticulously researched, very slick new-style museum full of information about the development of pictures that moved.

As well as awesome souvenirs.  I may regret not buying this.  (For those of you who are scratching your heads, "parlando" in Italian means "talking.")  Capisci?

The museum started with the parlor games dabbled in during the 17th - 19th centuries, including this fun flip-your-image trick.  Hi, upside-down me!

Then, there were eight or ten of those binoculars that let you see in 3-D - the ones that come with cards with pictures on each side?  We looked at a wedding in 1900, a glacier in 1880, and then...

PORN!

In a separate red room with a curtain saying children shouldn't go.  I was mostly surprised that the women in the pictures looked like real people.  Mama Bear was scandalized, I tell you.

Old-school parlor tricks are still fun, I have to say.

There was an area of he museum dedicated to memorabilia, as it turned out, with a script for Psycho, masks from Star Wars, and Charlie Chaplin's bowler hat.

As well as a little homage to Marylin Monroe.

The entire center of the museum is taken up by a huge viewing area, where lounge chairs point at two screens showing a loop of old films.  A cable elevator rises through the center of the room, and around the outside are arrayed what the museum calls "chapels" - small spaces dedicated to different genres of film.  An interesting idea, well executed.

The museum even has an extremely slick bar, with color-shifting tables!

After reupping on the caffeine, we took the elevator up to the roof to catch the view of Torino.  It's a really large city.

By now, of course, it was time for gelato.  We had passed a place with violet gelato and so went back to try it.

It sort of tasted like perfume.

We couldn't let the perfumed one be our only violet gelato experience, so we actually stopped by another place to try theirs out.  Much better, more like candied violets than perfume. 

After going back to the hotel to change and splash some water on our faces, we left for aperitivi.  The further north in Italy you go, the better these spreads of bar snacks tend to be.  Basically, you pay for a drink and you get unlimited access to their spread - so check the spread first!

Husbear got to have his first martini in quite a while.  Happy guy.

This place had what they called international aperitivi, which meant that, for the first time since leaving Austin in August, I actually saw a plate of sushi.  Though "sushi" might be more accurate. Whatever - it was raw salmon and rice wrapped in seaweed, and even if the rice was more risotto than sushi-style, I was still thrilled beyond belief.

Unfortunately, that's it for Torino... and even more unfortunately, for the whole of the Piemonte.  That's definitely a region we'll have to make a special visit to see.

Next time - on to Aosta!

On a more specifically timely note, we returned our phones today.  We are phoneless!  Our landlord arrives in two hours to go over the apartment list of contents from way back in August.  And the number of arguing American couples I heard on the street today walking to the train station was staggering.  (I won't poke too much fun, as that may very well be us in two weeks.)

Love from Firenze, on our last day here!

Torino, Day One. We saw a little of the Piedmont!

So, oh my god, we leave Sunday.  Today's Friday.  I've once again put myself in the position of having seventyquadrillion blog posts left to do before leaving the country. 

Oops.

My plan is to get all of these written and them have them post automatically, so there isn't a glut of like 8 posts in one day (as if I'll get 8 posts finished in one day), so don't get confused if Sunday comes and goes and there are still Italy posts arriving, 'k?

Mama Bear hadn't even been in town twentyfour hours before we were packing her onto a train for northern Italy.  Time was short!

She wanted to see her some Alps, but on the way we convinced her to make a stop in Torino (Turin).  Though we had some wonderful advice about lovely places to go in the Piemonte, (thanks, Rick!) we didn't have a car or much time this trip, so in the Piemonte we just stuck to Turin.

At least we had a ridiculous picnic?

Tomatoes and homemade hummus and babaganoush and sausage (from Matera!) and 'nduja (from Cosenza!) and caperberries and tap wine and oranges and pears and gorgonzola and parmigiano and three different types of bread and I think that must have been it.  Mama Bear was quite impressed with our collapsing wine glasses.  Yummy picnic - thumbs up, Husbear.

After like seven hours of travel, we arrived in Torino late afternoon and checked into our hotel, the Hotel San Carlo.  Turned out to be in a perfect location, and they even gave us two rooms for the price of one since they didn't have a triple available.

Though the guidebook's characterization of the place as "scrupulously clean" may have been a bit outdated...

First stop upon leaving was to get poor confused jetlagged Mama Bear some coffee.  We stopped at one of the very old-school grand caffes on the piazza in front of our hotel and ordered her a Bicerin - coffee with chocolate and cream.  And likker, though we ordered it senza.

She liked it muchly.

We walked up towards the area of town that looked most likely to house good restaurants.  Torino looks very much northern European - definitely different than Florence.  We wondered what the city looked like before the Olympics, since it looks newly spruced up.  Our Rough Guide was hilariously out of date, describing traffic-free piazzas as "choked with cars" and one immaculate space as a giant hole in the ground awaiting a new car park.

We think the loggias are a great idea that should be adopted in the southern US.

I found myself really liking Torino already.  It was open and full of air.  The buildings here are of a completely different style than we've grown used to - back to the Baroque!

And neoclassical!  (Check out the wide-angle on our new little Canon SD800 IS... we love love love.  Wave hi to your new fans, little guy!)

At 7:45, the town had barely started thinking about the evening meal.  Bars were bustling with a crowd of attractively-dressed Torinese, drinking dainty cocktails and munching on buffet-style hors d'ouevres.

We, however, were hungry.  Yummy picnic lunches don't stick with you forever!  There were lots of really nice-looking restaurants around - definitely the type of city that caters to a lot of discerning locals, not just tourists coming in from out of town wanting bistecca fiorentina and crostini toscani (I'm looking at YOU, Florence!). We actually saw Argentinian and Mexican restaurants!

We decided on Tre Galli, based on their yummy-looking menu and 73-page wine list.  73 PAGES, people!

Nice bread basket - with olive bread and the Piemontese breadstick, or grissini.

We ordered a delicious Dolcetto, Diano d'Alba La Lepre (2004, if you're counting), and split a delicious but tiny sformato di asparagi con fonduta.  That's asparagus pudding with melted cheese sauce.  We wanted more.

Moving on - a maltagiata con ragu' di mare.  This was a bit of a disappointment - the pasta was cooked well, but the seafood sauce was pretty bland.  Matter of fact, for me the overwhelming taste was of the flat-leaf parsley garnish.  Meh.

The orecchiete were better - but they better have been, since they were topped with speck and gorgonzola.  I mean, smoked cured ham and blue cheese?  That's like the best combination there is!  The fava beans, though deliciously fresh and in season right now, were totally overpowered.

Too bad the pasta was way undercooked.

After all this food, we were totally full, and decided once again to drink our desserts.  When our waitress told us they had an amaro (bitters) made in house, an involintary "oooh!" escaped my lips... and the waitress totally imitated me.  I really deserved that.

The amaro was clear!  Wierd!  And it tasted like flowers.  I dunno... I still like my amaro del capo.

By the time we left the restaurant, near 11 PM, the streets were totally full of people strolling and enjoying the cool evening.  A beer tent was set up outside of a bar, and Husbear stood in line to get us a couple.

While Husbear was waiting for his beer at the front of the line, two gypsy kids (age of 12? 14?) sidled up next to him.  When their requests for free tequila were met with "vai!" or "Go away!" they waited until the bartender's back was turned and poured themselves shots!  Ballsy.

The walk home was really pretty.  We flexed our cameras trying to capture Turin by night.

Good night, Torino!  We'll see you in the mo'nin.