Moss Rules

It started some years ago with a sarcastic comment on a friend‘s photo of some moss. “Moss Rules!”, I said. She laughed. It became a running joke, used whenever anyone we knew posted a photo of the same subject matter.

It got to the stage (as it often does with flickr) that I went out specifically looking for moss to take photos of. Soon a flickr group of the same name had been set up, and at the time of writing it has 178 members and 820 photos. My own contributions come from places as varied as Belgium, Exeter, Vienna, Piedmont,  Japan and California.

But last month I hit the motherlode. We visited the Hall of Mosses in the Hoh rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, where every tree is literally dripping with moss. It coats the floor like a soft green carpet, it hangs in curtains from the branches, it bubbles up tree trunks. It’s a magical place, and although I’m happy with some of my photos they don’t really capture the full verdant softness of it all.

Eating Portland

I didn’t have any particular culinary expectations regarding Portland, Oregon, but then a friend reminded me via facebook that there’s a big food cart scene there. A few minutes later I’d downloaded a free smartphone app and was on my way downtown to search for lunch. According to the site which produced the app, there are around 500 carts in the city, usually grouped into “pods”.

I headed for a spot on the corner of  SW5th and Stark, where there was a pod of around twenty carts offering a wide range of fare:

Love the photo on this one:

I chose a Czech cart, which is one of the most well known and popular.

If I’d known I could get a free postcard I’d have stopped shaving before I left Brussels.

Here’s my “Schnitzelwich”, which is, as the name suggests, a Schnitzel in a bun, although a tangy red sauce underneath added flavour.

If we’d had more time there I’d love to have tried some more. In fact given the number of carts you could stay in Portland for over a year and never need to step inside a restaurant or eat at the same cart twice.

The other food ‘must do’ in Portland, about which I was also ignorant before arriving, is Voodoo Doughnuts. Friends who live nearby insisted that we go there.

We passed it several times during our stay and there was always an enormous queue.

All the bricks are glittery, for some reason.

Here’s the full menu.

And there’s a range of suggestive merchandising. I bought a t-shirt.

Here’s our haul. Chocolate covered figures for the kids, a Portland special for me (filled with cream and covered in chocolate), and the two at bottom left are for our friends who are American and who therefore insist on having bacon with everything.

Beautifully soft, sweet doughnuts, and very reasonably priced too.

OMG, TBISC

We stayed for one night in a hotel on the Oregon coast which seemed inordinately proud of the fact that they give guests clean bed linen. Yes, that’s right, unlike all those other hotels which let you sleep in the same filthy, sodden sheets which have been used by all the previous guests, the Hampton Astoria clean theirs! Regularly!

This poster in the lift (elevator) was accompanied by a photo of a teenage girl excitedly texting this message to a friend, a manic grin on her face, seemingly unable to contain her delight at the prospect of a hotel room which meets basic minimum hygiene standards. Unfortunately I had to crop her out in order to get in close enough to see the small text.

Coffee Capital

One afternoon, back in our hotel after a hard day’s sightseeing in Seattle, I popped in to the tiny coffee shop next door. It was smaller than our hotel room, and could seat about five or six people.

On one wall was a fireplace, although, upon closer inspection, it turned out not to contain a real fire but a widescreen TV showing video of a roaring fire. Above it and to one side was a picture frame. This contained an iPad mini, showing a live video feed from a small camera positioned next to the coffee machine, so you could watch your drink as it brewed and poured out from the machine. And when I paid for my purchase the till consisted of an iPad with an app which let you pay by signing your name with your finger on the screen.

The speciality coffee that week was Bacon Latte: a normal latte containing bacon-flavoured syrup, served with a strip of caramelised bacon on the side. Not for me.

Pacific North West

As from next Saturday I’ll be spending two weeks in Washington and Oregon. The itinerary and planned activities look something like this:

Seattle

• The Seattle Center: Space Needle and Chihuly Garden and Glass
• Pike Place Market
• Trying to find a good coffee house that isn’t a Starbucks

Portland

• Hipster-spotting
• Artisanal beer tasting
• Powell’s City of Books

Astoria

• The Astoria Column
• Lewis and Clark park

Olympic National Park

• Get wet
• Take photos of moss

Any other ideas gratefully received.

Eating Budapest

So what did we eat in Budapest? Many yummy things, I can tell you (and, more importantly, show you). My knowledge of Hungarian cuisine before going was limited to goulash and tokaj, so this was a voyage of discovery for me.

Breakfast

We tended to get up pretty late during this trip, to take full advantage of the fact that someone else was at home looking after the kids. The one time we had what could be considered a Hungarian breakfast was at the famous Gerbeaud café, just around the corner from our hotel. A selection of cheese, salami and bread, plus some surprisingly sweet bacon, a pleasantly peppery dish of scrambled eggs, and a glass of very sweet muesli-type stuff.

Street food and markets

Tecnhically the first thing we ate in Hungary was a Kürtőskalács, known in English as chimney or funnel cake. Baked on a cylindrical spit over an open fire and then dusted with chocolate, sugar, or some other flavoured sprinkling (see list on the left of the photo), then eaten while still hot and steaming.

We walked down to the Great Market Hall to browse and drool among the food stalls. Upstairs was a very busy selection of lunch and snack establishments. If we hadn’t already eaten I could happily have worked my way through them all.

Sweet pizza!

The “spit meat” looks appetising. Presumably it’s a description, not an instruction.

Most of the sausages, and a lot of the other pork products you find in Hungary come from the Mangalica breed of pig. Certainly Mangalica makes for a nicer name than the alternative “curly-hair hog”.

Dio

For our first evening meal we’d planned to go to a local restaurant recommended by a colleague, but they were fully booked, so the hotel concierge pointed us just around the corner in the direction of a “modern Hungarian” called Dio. We started with a selection of “Cold goose liver in it’s [sic] own juice, Beef tartar, ’mangalica’ pork sausage, Crayfish tartar, smoked breast of goose, fresh vegetables”.

My main course was an amazingly succulent duck breast, drizzled with tokaj, on a date & barley risotto. Beautiful. And my wife’s Mangalica chop with sausage sauce and goat cheese polenta was just as good. By this stage it was becoming obvious that Hungarians like to add a lot of sweetness to their meat dishes, which is fine by me.

The friendly waiter warmly congratulated us on clearing our plates, and offered us a complimetary shot of pálinka (fruit brandy). During the meal we also had a few glasses of Bull’s blood wine. Check out that link: the story behind the name is interesting.

Onyx

The following night we went (again, just around the corner. Our hotel was very conveniently located) to Onyx, one of Budapest’s two Michelin-starred restaurants. The other, Costes, looks great too, but it’s a little more international, whereas Onyx seems to offer more in the way of local produce and traditional recipes, albeit done all fancy and posh-like.

I mean, just look at the bread trolley.

We chose the Hungarian Evolution tasting menu, which came with a selection of wines, all of which were local with the exception of the first Riesling.

Amuse-bouche: marinated salmon, herb salad, fennel mousse.

First starter: Hungarian sturgeon caviar, vegetables, quail egg, and a “soil” made of burnt breadcrumbs, lentil, mushroom and cashew nuts.

Second starter: goose liver slice dusted with almond on a brioche, plum jam, goose liver torte with apricot jelly. Gorgeous. Also, we’d noticed a lot of goose and duck on various menus around town. No, I’m not going to make any jokes about Hungarian food being mostly “fowl”.

Fish course: Danube salmon topped with crispy veal, potato purée and a potato rosti soaked in pumpkin seed oil.

Meat course: Charbbroiled Mangalica loin on a lentil bed. Pork’s not the tastiest of meats, and I found this very slightly dry, but not so much that I didn’t enjoy it.

It also came with a side of goose liver mousse, which was more pleasant than it looks.

Pre-dessert: pineapple ice cream and granita, white chocolate. Perfect.

And the final dessert, a modern reinvention of the traditional chocolate and vanilla Somló cake. Beautiful, if quite rich and filling.

What I didn’t know was that there was another, special birthday chocolate cake on its way. This was lovely too, but by this stage I was too full to finish it.

All in all very impressive, and deserving of at least one more star than they currently have.

On our final night in Budapest we managed to get a table at Paprika, the place recommended by my Hungarian colleague. I plumped for the goulash, which was large and flavourful and satisfying.

Overall I really enjoyed what I saw of Hungarian cuisine, although I was glad I’m not a vegetarian or I may have gone hungry. But even I couldn’t bring myself to taste this particular local delicacy:

Visiting Budapest

Last week I had a birthday. No, I’m not going to tell you which one (although if you’re reading this you probably already know) but it was a significant one. Significant enough to warrant a four day trip to Budapest while the in-laws stayed home to look after the kids. Here are a few of the things we saw and did there.

Our hotel offered rooms with “Danube View (TM)”, and sure enough there it is, with the Chain Bridge (the first bridge to link the towns Buda and Pest).

On our first afternoon we saw the main shopping street (full of tourist tat shops and Thai massage parlours) and the Central Market (more on that in the next post, about the food).

The next day it was time for the serious culture and history stuff. We started with the synagogue, which is the second largest in the world after one in New York.

In the courtyard at the back was a metal weeping willow.

Names and dates were inscribed on individual leaves.

There was another beautifully designed and evocative Holocaust memorial off to one side.

Wandering the streets nearby we found Szimpla Kert, the most famous of Budapest’s “ruin pubs“. We weren’t really in the mood for boozing, and it wasn’t the best time of day to get a feel for the atmosphere of the place, but we popped inside anyway for a look.

It’s huge and full of a bewildering variety of bric-a-brac. It reminded me of a friend’s house in London which I crashed in for a few months in the mid-nineties.

In the afternoon we walked up Andrassy Street until we reached number 60, also known as Terror House. The building where the Communist authorities used to detain, torture and execute dissidents has been converted into a museum detailing their practices.

It’s not pretty stuff, but it is interesting, and well laid out. There are a lot of photos and videos (some, but not all, subtitled in English), and an information sheet in both languages for each room.

This room didn’t require any clarification.

There was some (relatively) light relief in the Communist Propaganda room. I especially like the farmer explaining the Five Year Plan to his pigs.

Once you’ve finished with the upper floors a lift takes you down to the basement. When you step inside the lights go out and as the lift descends painfully slowly a video screen shows an interview with the house executioner, explaining his working methods.

This part of the exhibition has extra impact as you know that this is no mere reconstruction, but these are actually the rooms where these things happened.

A ledge on the outside of the building hosts photos and candles to commemorate the victims.

Outside we took the metro. Budapest has the third oldest underground railway in the world after London and Liverpool, and it has remained small and quaint, all wrought iron, wood and tile.

One of the main attractions of Budapest for many is the baths. I’m not really into spas, although I’m happy to relax in a pool of hot water given the chance, so we headed to the Gellert hotel, home to the most famous baths. It’s a beautiful building, but a poorly signposted labyrinth inside, and the main pool is freezing cold. Still, we managed to find some hot pools to soak in, and as it was a weekday afternoon it was relatively quiet; just me and a Karl Marx lookalike.

Later we tried another one: Szechenyi, which was larger, with a larger variety of hotter pools. It was also crowded (this was a Saturday afternoon) with young snoggy couples and American tourists regaling each other with tales of drunken excess across the capitals of Europe.

On the third day we visited St. Stephen’s Basilica. The star exhibit is the mummified right hand of St. Stephen (first king of Hungary) himself.

We passed by the iconic Parliament buidling, but had missed one of the English guided tours and didn’t fancy waiting around an hour for the next one.

On our last day we crossed the river and took the funicular up to Fisherman’s Bastion for the views across the city.

There’s certainly plenty we didn’t have time for (I was particularly keen to see Memento Park, but it wasn’t to be), so I can envisage going back at some point.

There are more photos here.

No-go area

This morning a tweet from Drew McWeeny caught my eye. He’s subsequently deleted that tweet, so I can’t quote it exactly, but he was commenting on the recent election results in France and Greece, and he said something about both France and Greece having elected Neo-nazis. I (and several others, I think) replied that France had in fact just elected a socialist president. He replied apologising for the confusion. It seems he had read a comment from someone else which confused socialism with National Socialism, put two and two together and came up with Nazi. He tweeted a retraction, so no harm done.

What stayed with me for a while afterwards was the hashtag he’d put on the original tweet. Again, as he’s deleted it I’m relying on my own, not exactly fautless memory, but it was something like #notagoodtimetovisiteurope.

Now I’m sure he put this on with tongue in cheek. I don’t think he or anyone else would seriously turn down the chance to visit France solely because a right-wing government had been elected. Or would he? Would you? As a tourist, does it make a difference to your enjoyment of exploring a country if you have major ideological differences with the current administration?

I’ve heard people say in the past that they didn’t want to visit a particular country because they didn’t want to support or appear to condone an oppressive regime, as if visiting, say, China means that you’re turning a blind eye to their human rights violations. I have two problems with this. One, people travel to foreign lands on holiday for many reasons, like a desire to see a different culture, see their monuments and landscape, meet the people, eat the food. No one I know thinks to themselves “I approve of Sweden’s progressive government, which is why I’m going to fund them with my tourist pounds/dollars/euros”. Two, even if you say that you don’t want any of your money to go, however indirectly, to a government with which you disagree, then you’re going to have to be very careful with your shopping. Object to China? Try buying a consumer product which isn’t made there. Issues with Israel? Pay attention to where your fruit and veg comes from. Not easy, is it? And, I’d argue, not very effective either. If you look hard enough you can find something to object to in pretty much any country you can name, but I don’t see that as a reason to stay home.

In fact I’d say that it makes it all the more important for people to go there and interact with the locals, exchange ideas, and spend your money there. After all, some of your money may end up in government coffers, but some of it will also benefit the people who may desperately need it and who aren’t necessarily to blame for the state of their country.

I despise Silvio Berlusconi and everything he stands for, but that didn’t stop me living in Italy for a year and visiting regularly afterwards. I went to the US last year, but if I’d decided to go a few years earlier I don’t think the presence of George W. Bush in the White House would have put me off. Now there are some places I’d think would be fascinating to visit but feel that I can’t simply for safety reasons. I’m thinking of various places in the Middle East and Africa. And there are places like North Korea which would also be interesting but where the restrictions imposed on tourists are so heavy and the freedom to move around, take photos and ask questions is so limited as to almost defeat the object of travelling there.

But politics is usually a fairly transient thing and often increasingly removed from the inhabitants’ day-to-day lives, and I don’t think it should constitue a serious barrier to those wishing to broaden their minds and expand their horizons through travel.

Les Roches Rouges

During a recent holiday in Corsica we decided to drive along the coast to an area called Les Calanche which is famous for its rock formations. My wife remembered visiting a while back and stopping for a drink on the terrace of a hotel with a view across the bay, so we figured we’d head there for lunch. The day started overcast and thickly foggy, meaning that we could see little or nothing of the supposedly spectacular coastline. To make matters worse driving along the tortuously winding road was making us all feel a little queasy.

After a couple of stops for fresh air we pulled into the driveway of Les Roches Rouges, a charmingly faded hotel where, with the exception of a couple of bored teenage guests in the lobby, we were the only customers around.

We had the dining room to ourselves, and the quietness combined with the all-enveloping mist created a rather eerie atmosphere. We ordered and I followed our two year old son as he wandered around the dining room, inspecting everything. I liked these padded doorstops. My son picked up one and let it fall back to the floor, whereupon it released a thick cloud of dust.

I also liked this oversized réfrigerateur electrique, although I hope this wasn’t where they stored the ingredients for our meal.

The wall was decorated with a painting of the town of Calvi, which is where we were staying.

Amuse-bouches arrived. I ate this meal almost a month ago, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t recall all the details.

First course. I don’t remember anything about this one, but it looks nice, doesn’t it?

The cheese course. There’s lots of great goat’s cheese in Corsica, and this little arrangement with fig preserve and ham went down very nicely.

My wife’s fish. Fairly self-explanatory.

My meat. The presentation of the vegetables was a nice touch.

And after all those perfectly executed yet relatively conventional dishes, along came what was without doubt one of the weirdest desserts I’ve ever eaten. A disconcertingly large bowl filled with cold, brown, vaguely coffee-flavoured watery ice cream/mousse with raspberries, space dust and various unidentifiable crunchy lumps floating around inside. Not unpleasant, just puzzling.

By the end of the meal the vapours had finally dispersed and we spent the rest of the day admiring the phantasmagorical sculptures of the coastline.

Thai markets

I’m currently reading a book (The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi) set in Thailand. The Thailand of the late 22nd century, admittedly, and one where genetic modification of foodstuffs is the norm. What this means is that there are numerous scenes (so far; I’m only 100 pages in) set in the markets of Bangkok, where characters examine what fruit and vegetables are on offer. Naturally my mind was cast back to when we visited Thailand almost a decade ago, and what we saw in the markets there.

This one was about an hour’s drive north of Bangkok, as I recall. The usual selection of goods, including typical, and typically delicious, fruits like jackfruit and durian.

The floor looks strange though, doesn’t it? Almost like…railway tracks?

And what’s that in the distance? And why is that man holding up a flag?

No…it can’t be…

At this point I stopped taking photos and got the hell out of the way.

This happens eight times a day. You can watch the whole process here:

And railways aren’t the only thoroughfares used by the Thais to buy and sell goods. Rivers are often home to “floating markets”, with many vendors not even bothering to unload their goods onto dry land, but selling directly from their canoes.

Must go back some day…