November 2011
1 post
October 2011
2 posts
“Play With Matches scores with solid preparation, elegant presentation, awesome...”
– NHTJ Review of Play With Matches, by A Broken Umbrella Theatre.
“‘Left alone, it’s difficult to see the point of doing things you used to...”
– Conductor Colin Davis, on the loss of his wife and whether his upcoming trip to the U.S. will be his last.
(New York Times)
September 2011
2 posts
ambedo
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. a kind of melacholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela.
honk.
July 2011
1 post
5 tags
“Do you know what a summer rain is?
To start with, pure beauty striking the...”
– Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
June 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
Matthew, meet Meryl
via dorothy-snarker:
Meryl Streep can channel anyone. Seriously, ANY-fucking-ONE.
I was so freakin’ happy when I saw this in my mailbox.
January 2010
1 post
Moving
I moved. Eating Words is now over at Wordpress. Come visit.
August 2009
1 post
July 2009
8 posts
Mutton
I’m going to amend my previous post to include an important Central Asian menu option. The three main dishes offered at lunch or dinner are:
1) Noodles with mutton
2) Rice with mutton
3) Mutton on a stick
#3 is shashlyk, a skewer threaded through chunks of meat, usually served on a bed of onions. Shashlyk can be any meat on a skewer - beef, chicken, even pork (which seems odd in Muslim...
More about food, because I love it so
I realized yesterday that many meal choices on my trip came down to:
1) Noodles with mutton
2) Rice with mutton
Small chaikhanas (tea houses) sometimes have menus, but more often the person waiting on you will just tell you what they have. In addition to these two options, they love to offer shashlyk (meat grilled on a skewer, usually lamb or chicken). And there’s always bread and tea to...
4 tags
Local food, Kyrgyz style
I just spent two nights camping in Jety-Oguz National Park, a gorgeous expanse of meadow and mountain and canyon centering on a rapidly running river. The road to the canyon crosses the river several times on very basic wooden bridges that, especially when seen from our big orange truck, didn’t inspire confidence. Whether or not because of people’s prayers and crossed fingers, the...
Yurts. And felt.
So I stayed in a yurt. Or, as our Kyrgyz guide calls them, yurta. Sheep make yurts what they are. (They also make the Kyrgyz diet what it is. One guidebook joked that if there were a Kyrgyz cookbook, every recipe would start with, “First, kill your sheep….”)
The floors are covered in thick felt (often, nowadays, placed over a heavy plastic tarp). The rounded walls are covered in...
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan is unbelievably beautiful. Almost every place I’ve been here has a backdrop of dark, craggy mountains still covered with snow. We’ve been through dry, scrubby desert; alpine meadows; red canyons; high mountain passes where snow by the road still hasn’t melted. I spent two nights sleeping in a yurt in a high (10,000 feet above sea level) meadow, green and smooth and...
Tashkent
It sounds so romantic: visions of the Silk Road, of khans and mosques and heady trade and history. But really, the city no longer has much to offer.
Today I went to the Chorsu Bazaar, the one thing that any guidebook seems to recommend without hesitation. Okay, I thought, another bazaar. They’re always interesting: colorful fruits, spices, miscellany.
I have never seen a bazaar like...
The road to Khiva
“I do not remember the last time it rained,” said the man driving me from Bukhara to Khiva. I’d just asked about the rice fields we’d begun to pass, after the pale Kyzylkum Desert had given way to the richer land of the Khorezm region. The river has been low, which makes rice cultivation difficult. Apparently the cotton fields are a huge drain on the region’s water...
Jewish life in Bukhara
When I mentioned that I would be going to Bukhara, someone - I think it was my mother - said, “Oh, that’s where the Bukhara Jews are from.” Which, of course, makes perfect sense.
So this morning I set out to find the main synagogue. There are two remaining, but one doubles as the community center and seems to be known as the synagogue. I had some trouble finding it since, as it...
June 2009
5 posts
Tidbits of travel
It’s impossible to do justice to the buildings I’ve seen here, especially until I can upload some photos. So for now, I’ll offer a few snapshots of my trip.
1. I chatted with a guy this morning who spent almost a year in Columbus, OH as an exchange student. I tried to picture this nice young high school student in Ohio and introducing himself as coming from Uzbekistan. Even...
Here I am.
I’m in Samarkand, where I’ve seen mosques and madrassas and mausoleums, all covered in gorgeous tilework. I’ve taken endless photos of archways and doorways. I’ve drunk two pots of green tea. I’ve seen donkeys pulling carts on the main road while cars - mostly Daewoos and Ladas and little cars I’ve never seen before - whiz by. I’ve climbed up a minaret to...
Intelligent thought on the same subject
This post from a travel blogger seemed reposting, so here you are. I’m not sure why she was so unoffended by the NYT piece, but possibly she’s a more generous soul than I am.
I also appreciated her post about small group travel, which is how I’ve done some portions of trip to parts of the world I’m particularly unfamiliar with. I agree with much of her assessment of the...
A timely but inane New York Times piece about... →
This is timely for my trip: a piece in the New York Times about a woman’s experience with solo travel. I’ve traveled solo many times, within the US as well as in Europe, Israel, China, and New Zealand. And as of this weekend, I’ll be on my own in Uzbekistan for a week before I meet up with some people.
I love traveling solo. The independence allows me to go where I want to, eat...
Maps
For all of you who wonder (openly or privately) where on earth I’m going once I get on that jet plane this Saturday:
Here’s a map.
I’ll be roughly halfway between Berlin and Beijing, among the mountains and valleys to the south of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan. I’ve mapped the cities, lakes, and national parks that I’ll be going through, and I’ll update if...
February 2009
1 post
Freedom to Marry Week
January 2009
1 post
Eating food.
I was late to work this morning because of food.
While I ate breakfast (a Cortland apple and Dubliner cheese, if you want to know) I read food blogs and recipes. This morning, I was reading Smitten Kitchen’s post about a warm butternut-chickpea salad with tahini dressing. Now, I’d read this post a few days ago and had already mentally bookmarked it. Last night, when I finally had a...
November 2008
1 post
October 2008
1 post
September 2008
2 posts
Hiking in China
Hiking in China isn’t always hiking. My little group and I followed our guide one day to hike in the mountains above Dali.
The trip started with a cable car ride, which they call a “ropeway.” We were buying our tickets for the ropeway when I noticed the big wooden sign. Point No. 2 read:
Tickets will not be returned once sold out unless the ropeway breaks during the trip.
...
August 2008
3 posts
Freedom, and traveling
I stepped off the plane in Kunming, waiting to feel the familiar blast of searing heat that fills China’s air in the summer.
The air was cool. Crisp.
What?
I’d had no idea that Kunming was called the Land of Eternal Spring, that its setting in the mountains gives it an even climate, that even in the thick of July, the temperature hung in the cool 70s. But it made me very, very...
I'm back
I only just realized how long it’s been since I posted to my blog. Oops.
When I left Seoul to return to Beijing, I had no idea that everything would go crazy wrong. I mean, the trip went fine in the end, but I have never been so busy and sleep-deprived in my life. Blogging was entirely a non-happening thing. And then, when I (finally!) (and triumphantly!) finished the work part of my...
July 2008
14 posts
Korean Folk Village
I spent yesterday afternoon at the Korean Folk Village, an outdoor museum dedicated to Korean culture from before the country’s modernization. First our group was herded to a show of horsemanship, including displays of acrobatics and archery performed on horseback. The next event was a re-enactment of a traditional Korean wedding, held in the courtyard of a replica of a nobleman’s...
Taxi!
Welcome to take Beijing taxi.
That’s what the automated voice says when the taxi meter is switched on. It gets a smile out of me every time.
I’d heard that Beijing worked very hard to teach its cab drivers some English phrases ahead of the Olympic Games. My cab driver this afternoon - an older man, and by far the sweetest and friendliest cabbie I’ve met here - was a perfect...
4 tags
Dongyue Temple
I’d heard about the strange Dongyue Temple, which was built 700 years ago and only recently restored and opened to the public. Like most temples here, it’s structured around courtyards, with columned porches leading to the rooms at the perimeter. Unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, the rooms are identically-sized niches filled with near-life-size wooden sculptures of people,...
2 tags
2 tags
Sunny day
This morning - my fifth day in Beijing - I immediately noticed something even through my bleary daze.
The sky was blue!
I’d seriously assumed that the pale grey haze I’d seen all week was Beijing’s permanent blanket of smog and humidity. But no - blue sky does exist here. The flip side is that the sun made it hotter. Dry and hot, so that when the wind picked up it was like...
2 tags
Bicycles
There are so many bicycles here. I mean, I knew that that lots and lots of people bike here in China, but seeing it is something else. It’s amazing to see all the ways bikes are used. There are tricycles with an open metal box in back; I’ve seen people pedaling with a propane tank rolling around, with shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water or Gatorade, even a stack of window panes. ...
I’m in Beijing because of music. I pretty much live for music. And in my two days in Beijing, I’ve had some surreal musical experiences. 1. Yesterday I took the time to go for a long walk and do some sightseeing. While I wandered around the Confucius Temple, I heard the sound of a traditional Chinese flute - and then realized it was playing a curious variation on the Ode to Joy...
Back in Beijing
Here I am! 26 hours, door to door. (Actual flight time was about 16 hours, but I had a 5-hour layover in Seoul.) I am very happy to see that this time around, I can log into Tumblr and blog to my heart’s content - although Facebook seems to be blocked, and Wordpress is still off limits.
It’s already been interesting, and I mean that in a good way (mostly). I took my first picture...
May 2008
3 posts
Cape Cod
I love driving to the Cape. I love that part of southern Massachusetts, not long after passing through Rhode Island, when I suddenly notice that the trees are a litte scrubbier, the pines more stout and rugged, the air with a hint of salt. I love driving into Truro, coming over that stretch of road when that row of cottages stretches off to the left, each wall and roof identical, each catching the...
Yeehaw.
My gf graduated today, and it rocked. She won a big award, received a fancy-schmancy introduction and lots of applause, gave a kick-ass speech, and got more applause. Her mom and I got all farklempt. It was great.
It made me regret, for the first time, missing my own graduation from grad school. I never got one of those nifty hoods that go over your gown. Hell, I never even got my diploma,...
April 2008
5 posts
Buildup of Socialist Material
I cannot resist posting this. It’s an excerpt from an institutional biography from a Chinese conservatory. I’d comment on it, but I think it speaks for itself. All the students and faculty members spare no efforts for greater success in every field, according to the goal of “Run the first-class music education and create international advanced level.” Aiming at new...