Speaking of radiation, I had superb lobster
one time somewhere north of Boston, looking
across the water towards a big nuclear power station - I thought of Three Mile Island and checked the lobster to see if it
had any extra claws or tails.
I have been travelling a lot in Asia over the last 30 years or so. So much has changed
and yet so much is still the same.
I first went to Shanghai when the Pudong was still all fields
with a few factories here and there. Everyone still wore green or blue Mao suits
then. Everyone rode push-bikes. Cars were not that common. Shanghai had only a
couple of tall buildings over a few stories high - that was around 1989 or so. I
met a Singapore Airlines pilot who told me that in the mid 1980s, he had flown into
Shanghai and
had to wait for a guy on a push bike to come out to the plane. The guy had a
sign on his back which said "Follow Me" in English and the plane then
followed this guy to where is was to park. How things change. The
pace of change in Shanghai
was just amazing and incredible after that. At one stage, Shanghai had over half of all the building
cranes in the world! Suddenly, a trip that took me 2 & 1/2 hours
across Shanghai
took me 35 minutes, as ring-roads, bridges, freeways and so on seemed to spring
up overnight. In the mid 1990s, flying into Shanghai was like flying into a fairyland because
of all the sparkling and twinkling of welding everywhere for concrete reinforcement
and structures on over 500 major building sites. In some ways, being
there felt like being in a real-life Blade Runner set - it was surreal.
I try to eat most foods wherever I go,
but sometimes the locals try it on a bit and I have my limits! In this
category are bile and livers and blood of snakes or other poor unfortunate
creatures mixed with local rocket fuel in shot glasses - green and red gunge -
yum, not. See if they drink it. Also, deep-fried spiders and cockroaches
and things like that - why bother?
Went to a little restaurant in Tokyo once where
basically the whole menu revolved around tongue - sashimi, everything.
But they did start off with an appetiser which turned out to be pickled cow's
uterus. Didn't find that out till after I'd eaten it and to be honest it
wasn't bad at all. Quaint!
Beer with durian in Penang
- fantastic. Fish head soup in the back streets of Singapore,
eaten by hand off a banana leaf - superb. Rendang and rice in a little
roadside place sitting on wooden boxes - yum. Desert beans in Rajisthan -
great. "Army" soup in Seoul - very nice. And so it goes. In all
the years, I've only got sick twice from eating locally - once in Tokyo, from eating in a
restaurant that specialised in chicken! And once in Shanghai from eating seafood in a really
expensive, swanky restaurant.
Cheers (single malt whisky, please, hold
the bile),
Grahame
reinthal.com.au)