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If A Wine-Colored Drink Turns Out Not to Be Wine, It Better Be Good

Kokum sherbet in Velas

It was a sweltering early summer day in Velas, Maharashtra, the kind that had us guzzling water by the gallon and yet feeling unquenched. The smell of the sea near our homestay, sulfurous and mossy, hung in the humid evening air. The kind hosts of our homestay welcomed us with warm smiles and a cool drink. The sight of rows of stainless steel glasses, some dented and wobbly, filled with an aromatic, reddish drink on a large wooden tray was puzzling. Was it wine? Was it Rooh Afza?

It was kokum sherbet, they informed us, and we took a hesitant first sip. The flavor was a cross between cranberry and plum, with mildly tangy and enticingly sweet undertones. It was so refreshing that we asked for many more servings. My daughter, whose idea of juice was limited to the odd Odwalla, the 365 range at Whole Foods, or homemade lemonade at best, wasn’t particularly ecstatic when she regarded the strange, wine-colored drink in a steel glass. It took more than gentle nudging to get her to take a sip, but once we’d crossed that bridge, she needed to be coaxed to stop after the third glass.

Kokum, of the mangosteen family, is a blackish-red super fruit, sour and delicious, similar to a few other fruits in India, such as jamun or star fruit. It is also known as the tamarind of the Malabar region. Having grown up in the south, and therefore more familiar with tamarind, I had only heard of kokum in passing and never encountered it. The many kokum recipes in Maharashtra were a novel treat. The tart and spicy sol kadi—kokum mixed with coconut—served as a curtain raiser to an elaborate meal and was soothing to the gullet. The side dishes and gravies infused with kokum extract had a distinct flavor, more complex compared to the sour, tamarind-infused ones on which I grew up.

During our stay at Velas, we had many more servings of the chilled, invigorating sherbet. We got up close with the kokum fruit, too, when a batch was sun-dried for in the backyard of our homestay. We bought a few packs from our hosts to bring home.

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Barcelona, Undaunted

I was 6,000 miles from home, in the back seat of a taxi with my Catalan wife, cutting through the misty mountains of southern Mexico, when the news hit. My brother, riding shotgun, turned around and passed back his phone. “Something’s happened in Spain.”

For the past few years, Laura and I have talked about the possibility of an attack frequently. It wasn’t as much a panicked hypothetical as it was a soberly assessed inevitability: When would it happen? Where and how would they strike? It doesn’t take an oracle to tell you one of Europe’s most popular cities, with the third largest concentration of international visitors on the continent, would be a target for ISIS and its wretched teenage minions. The CIA reportedly warned the Spanish authorities about an attack on the Rambla months ago, as if the Catalans needed the agency’s analysis to know they were a target.

But no amount of forecasting prepares you for barbarism of this scope. And so we sat there, speechless, watching the villages of Chiapas pass us by as the messages rolled in: Estamos bien pero en shock…Are you safe?…Where are you?…Todo bien con la familia? The same words circulated too many times in recent years, in Nice and London and Berlin, and in the corners of the world where daily acts of terror don’t register on the Richter scale of Western media. It stung, of course, but it wasn’t until we saw the photos of the van and its route of terror down the Ramblas that it took ahold of us: After traveling 600 meters down the famous thoroughfare, drilling holes through the lives of hundreds, it came to rest on top of Pla de l’Os, Miró’s magnificent mosaic, the very same red and blue and gold tiles we step on every morning on our way to the Boqueria, the great central market of Barcelona.

La Rambla. Photo by: Ralf Roletschek

More than just a market run, this is a sacred ritual, one that roots us in Barcelona—the city my wife was born in, the city I’ve made home for the past eight years. We begin nearly every morning the same way, wandering the back streets of the Gothic Quarter, café con leche in hand, from Plaça del Rei to Plaça Neri, from where Columbus announced the “discovery” of the New World to where Franco and the fascists bombed a church and an elementary school. By 8:30 a.m., we’ve crossed the Rambla and settled in line behind the Catalan grandmas, who believe it their unalienable right the first pick of the day’s produce. It was here, where we buy our cuts of fat-rippled Ibérico pork and bundles of calçots, that the driver Younes Abouyaaquob fled, melting into the market crowds before slipping out the back door of the city, leaving the world with more questions than answers.

2017 has been a summer of discontent in the Catalan capital. The steadily-simmering anger and frustration surrounding Barcelona’s booming tourism industry finally boiled over in the early days of July, as groups of young malcontents aimed random acts of violence and vandalism towards outsiders. Locals in Barceloneta staged beachside protests, unspooling floating signs in the Mediterranean as a reminder to visitors and officials alike that this is their neighborhood, too. Travelers at El Prat airport have staggered through three-hour security lines, the result of a protracted strike from weary employees rundown from ever-increasing numbers that require their vigilance. Turismofobia, long a minor ailment in Spain, grew into a full-blown disease.

Photos by: Matt Goulding

Of course, most people are more ambivalent about the city’s most contentious subject: they recognize that tourism pays the bills for much of Barcelona (20 percent of the city’s GDP) and are proud to live in a city loved by the rest of the world, but don’t want to see it irrevocably altered by the swells of Segway-riding, booze-swilling tourists that clog up its central arteries. And they certainly don’t want to be kicked out of their own neighborhoods by skyrocketing rents and 24-hour street parties. Consider me among the ambivalent. I live in the molten-hot center of the Gothic Quarter, a place so inundated with visitors that I need to plan my days around the ebb and flow of human bodies that course through the narrow stone corridors of Barcelona’s oldest neighborhood. I want space to live and breathe, but as a writer, I want to share the magic of this city with the rest of the world. I published a book on it. As R&K partner Anthony Bourdain told me earlier this year, as we strolled through those same corridors of the Gótico: “You’re part of the problem.”

Photo by: Matt Goulding

In fact, up until the last week, terrorism has been part of the problem. Spain has been one of the few beneficiaries of the rising tide of terror washing across Europe. Its counter-terrorism forces have done some incredible work over the last few years, arresting hundreds of suspected extremists and foiling several plots for the kind of deadly attacks carried out in other cities. So, while the rest of the continent has watched visitor numbers drop precipitously—by 21 percent in Belgium since the summer of 2015, 10 percent in France (Paris alone lost 1.5 million hotel reservations in 2016)—Barcelona has experienced a 10 percent uptick in visitors in the past 12 months. The handling of this surge has been the source of no small amount of hand-wringing and soul-searching. Ada Colau, Barcelona’s current mayor, rode into office on a platform composed largely of measures aimed at controlling tourism.

Suddenly, the calculus is more complicated. Those screaming ���tourists go home” have lowered their voices. The most aggressive anti-tourism forces have put down their arms. If the rest of Europe is any indication, they could soon be yelling “tourists come back”.

Spaniards know a thing or two about resilience

Not that Spain isn’t up to the challenge. In the past 80 years, this country has lived through a brutal civil war, 36 years of brutal military dictatorship, and one of the worst economic crises ever seen in a developed nation. Spaniards know a thing or two about resilience.

Barcelona still needs to answer its most pressing existential questions—about what kind of city it wants to be, a bastion for sustainable, light-footed tourism, or a theme park for wide-eyed visitors—but the terrorists have given the city and country a set of unexpected gifts: the images of political rivals Carles Puigdemont and Mariano Rajoy, the regional and national leaders, respectively, walking shoulder to shoulder down the Rambla; the entire squad of FC Barça replacing their individual jersey names with Barcelona, putting the city on their backs for one more night; the hundreds of Muslim residents of Barcelona, most who live along the Rambla in the Raval district, flooding the thoroughfare on Sunday afternoon to stand against terror: “Not in our name” their signs read.

Indeed, this wasn’t an attack of radical Islam on a Catholic nation; this was a group of young, confused cowards against the rest of the world. The 13 people killed or injured during 30 seconds of terror on the Rambla came from 34 different countries, ranging in age from three to 80. A mosaic every bit as lovely and complete as Miro’s, a reminder that we, all of us, are Barcelona.

Photo by: Matt Goulding

The attacks will not solve the political and cultural challenges between Catalunya and the rest of Spain. The tensions of tourism will not suddenly dissipate now that the city has seen tragedy. We won’t all walk arm in arm into the Spanish sunset. Nor should we. Any alliance built on the back of barbarism is likely to be shallow and short-lived.

Nor will this be the last screed dispatched about a European city under attack—not by a long shot. I’m afraid we have a lot more reckoning in front of us.

It’s been hard being so far from home after your city has been under attack. If I were closer, I might see what my friends and family have seen: that the city moves inexorably forward. “Not a few hours later, the city was back to being its lively self,” one friend wrote to me. “Crazy how quickly things got back to normal in the center,” said another in a message. Tourists swarm the old part of the city, soaking up sun and saffron and sangria in equal measure. At the base of the Rambla, packed as ever with people from every corner of the world, 200,000 souls on a given day, the Mediterranean shimmers as brilliantly as ever. We should consider ourselves lucky to live in a place whose main flaw is its own soaring popularity.

I certainly do. That’s what the morning ritual of ours has always been about, taking in the majesty of the Catalan capital in the most innocent hours of the day. Truth is, it would be easy enough to alter the habit, to walk along the beach rather than the stone corridors of the Gótico, to take my business to the relatively tranquility of Santa Caterina market instead of the chaos of the Boqueria. To avoid the acrobatics it takes to cross the Rambla. But I’m more anxious than ever to walk our morning route, to shuffle through the plazas and across Mirò’s tiles, and take my place behind the grandmas, the ones who refuse to cede ground to anyone, neither tourists nor terrorists, and wait for my daily bread.

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Life in Little Pyongyang

Haebangchon, SOUTH KOREA—

“They’re all dead,” says Daniel Park, shrugging and taking a drink. “They’re just dead.”

We’re sitting at a table in Hair of the Dog, the kind of pub that invites long philosophical talks over beer, in Seoul’s most diverse neighborhood, Haebangchon.

This was once the city’s own Little Pyongyang, filled with North Korean defectors who fled home at the end of the Korean War in July of 1955, and Park, whose parents were among them, is explaining why almost none are left.

“Mi padre, he died in his ’90s, and most who came didn’t live so long,” he says. “The next generation, they moved to other areas in the city. New defectors go all over.”

Park is a 53-year-old who looks like he’s 40, smiles like he just scammed you out of a 10-spot, and peppers his sentences with Spanish, a relic of his times spent studying psychology in El Salvador. He looks at the bar for a moment, lost, then leans over the table toward me.

“Mi padre was born in Pyongyang. He [studied] science at Kim Il Sung University. When he come here, he buy un edificio,” he says, using the Spanish word for building. “So, no need for work, just drink all day, like me.”

Park leans back and smiles. I ask if it’s an apartment building.

“No, shops. Basement and two floors. He [gave it] to me. Now I make $10,000 a month,” he says, shrugging. “No need for work.”

Given the hardships required to journey to South Korea at that time, it’s astounding that two people could make the trip and have their son wind up a slumlord millionaire in Seoul.

freedom brought troubles of another kind

In the summer of 1955, the bombed-out ruins of Pyongyang were still smoldering when groups of North Koreans began slipping south through the borderlands. They crept onto trains and rode through tunnels and mountain passes, clinging to the roofs of passenger cars to avoid inspection agents, leaping off before train station security could spot them, then making their way through burning forests and desolate villages gutted by U.S. air strikes to the banks of the icy Tumen or Anbok rivers, where they crossed at night to evade military patrols or sniper guards.

But freedom brought troubles of another kind. Those who made it, sometimes known as gwihwan dongpo or “returned brothers,” settled in the slums of Seoul, where they faced terrible prejudice—and still do. Even today, almost half of North Korean defectors say they face discrimination in South Korea.

Street art in Haebangchon. All photos by David Josef Volodzko

“They called me names, treating me like an idiot, and didn’t pay me as much as others doing the same work, just because I was from the North,” Kwon Chol-nam, who defected in 2014, said in a New York Times piece published this month. “In the North, I may not be rich, but I would better understand people around me and wouldn’t be treated like dirt as I have been in the South.”

Kwon isn’t the only one who wants to return, either. In 2012, a former South Korean MP claimed that already that year more than 100 defectors had gone back, which is about 7 percent the annual number of defectors at the time, and this is despite the fact that upon their return, they could be sent to labor camps where, as one former prisoner told the BBC, people fight over maggots that grow out of corpses and catch rats that they eat raw, “their mouths covered in blood.”

When the first wave of “returned brothers” came to Seoul, they settled in the heart of the capital on the southern slope of Namsan, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, because it was the cheapest place to live, but also because they had to stick together in order to survive.

Before the war, the neighborhood had been a shooting range for the Imperial Japanese Army, which had its headquarters at the foot of the hill, where the U.S. Yongsan Garrison now sits. According to an historical account of Haebangchon by the neighborhood group Haebangchon Shintaekriji, by the 1950s, it had become home to northern Vietnamese war refugees, a ghetto crammed full of crooked shacks and piles of trash, wooden planks and fragments of asphalt laid over the muddy alleyways, and scrap tires placed on roofs to hold them down in the heavy summer rains. Some people made their homes out of tarp or cardboard, and as one person recounted in the Shintaekriji account, “I could hear the farts next door.”

Le Chien Blanc, a French bakery in Haebangchon.

After the war, Haebangchon, or “Liberation Village,” named after of the community of Vietnamese and North Korean defectors who called it home, slowly began to improve. The roads and back streets were paved, concrete walls replaced cardboard, and metal roofing replaced tarp. But for decades still, its steep, winding alleys and quiet soup shops remained some of the poorest parts of the city.

The 1960 South Korean film Obaltan, or Stray Bullet, is a tragic study in class struggle. Shot in Haebangchon, it depicts the life of a young man, Cheolho, struggling to get by. Considered by many the best South Korean film ever made, its most famous line is repeatedly screamed by Cheolho’s traumatized mother, who survived the war and keeps thinking another attack is imminent: “Get out of here!”

It’s a line that precisely captures the ethos of the community at the time. Slowly, though, the local economy began to stir. Rolling cigarettes and making sweaters, both labor-intensive work, became the neighborhood’s main industries. The streets were soon suffused with the leathery smell of cheap tobacco and the gentle drone of sewing machines. Still, poverty was rampant. As the Haebangchon Shintaekriji account notes, one resident recalled, “It was like a chicken coop or a barn—my chest got sore every time I saw it.”

The account describes one resident, living in the local schoolhouse, who would walk to the top of Haebangchon, where the quiet Namsan forest began, carefully collect firewood, then cook a ball of unwashed rice—as residents were so poor they feared that by washing the grain, they would lose some small part of it and decided it was better to eat it dirty. Another recalls riding his horse through the woods of Namsan’s slopes and watching children play in the streams there.

A speakeasy bar in Haebangchon called Olde Knives and its owner, who goes by nickname “Master.”

But 62 years later, Haebangchon is now Seoul’s most multicultural and politically progressive pocket, home to a diverse collection of expats, many of whom choose to live there because of its thriving social atmosphere and selection of trendy restaurants. Once full of tobacco shops, laundromats, Korean restaurants, and knitting factories, Liberation Village is now home to retro-style speakeasies, cocktails lounges, artisanal cafés, hipster pubs, a video game parlor, French and Italian bistros, a sex shop, and bookstores with obscure selections curated by celebrity owners.

“In Morocco, I’ve been harassed for wearing jeans and a T-shirt,” says Fatim Zahra Boushit, a 26-year-old bartender. “But I can do anything I want here, date whoever I want, dress the way I want, show skin, and I don’t get catcalled. Back home, you get catcalled even if you’re in niqab.”

She shakes her head as she pulls the beer tap to pour another drink. “I feel comfortable here, because I don’t have to explain myself.”

“You can easily hang out and make friends with people from different backgrounds,” says Aimable NiyiKiza, a 26-year-old Rwandan cybersecurity engineer who moved to Haebangchon in March 2016. Tegegn Yimer Kassa, a 35-year-old Ethiopian who teaches taekwondo and hapkido, moved there in 2013 and says he enjoys the diversity and the fact that “it’s very close to Namsan for walking, and the view there is very natural.”

Fatim Zahra Boushit, who bartends at The Hidden Cellar in Haebangchon.

In the days before plumbing, Koreans ghettoes were usually situated on hilltops, where residents had to suffer the daily work of carrying water buckets up to their homes. These neighborhoods were known as daldongne, or “moontowns,” because they seemed however slightly closer to the moon, propped upon a hill. Haebangchon’s hill is Namsan, and over the years, Namsan forest has changed considerably as well. It’s now replete with hiking trails, water gardens, forest boardwalks, and a view of the neon skyline from Seoul Tower. But, Kassa adds, the neighborhood is not without its drawbacks. “On the weekend drunk people make noise, the traffic can be uncomfortable, and there are too many smokers disturbing the public.”

Haebangchon’s growing popularity means some restaurants have lines that snake around the block, bars crowds often spill out onto the pavement, and cars park illegally along the street, forcing pedestrians to share the road with mountain bikers descending Namsan and the occasional Lamborghini as it barrels through, driven by a celebrity who trusts he or she can relax here without being recognized. But there’s another, more harmful effect. Naqash Kham, a 25-year-old Pakistani who moved to Korea in April 2016 to get his masters in international business, says it’s good to see new people moving into the neighborhood “because they’re trying to survive,” but says he doesn’t like seeing older Koreans pushed out.

Shiheung Market at night.

However, the Seoul Metropolitan Government is encouraging Haebangchon’s quickly changing demographic. In 2014, the city announced plans to spend 10 billion won (U.S. $8.56 million) over the next five years to revive the area. One plan is to renovate Shinheung Market, once a thriving city center near one of the city’s busiest streets, Shinheung Road, now Haebangchon’s main drag. Knitting factories sold their goods at the market in the ’60s and ’70s, but business has dried up, and the now government wants to turn it into an open-air art bazaar. Many local artists welcome the change, while others see it as another form of gentrification.

Another plan is to update the iconic 108 Stairway. In the blog Korea Exposé, Haeryung Kang writes about the fascinating history behind this often ignored landmark, a staircase that once lead to Gyeongseong Hoguk Shrine, built in 1943, where Japanese colonialists forced Korean schoolchildren to attend daily prayers honoring Japan’s war dead. All that remains now is the stairway. The Yongsan District Office, Kang reports, is planning to build a “facility for convenient movement” right on top of the stairway, which could mean an escalator, elevator, or funicular. Kang notes how the Japanese Government General Building, an elegant neoclassical structure in central Seoul, was torn down in 1995, and asks, “Is there value to remembering a painful past? What are the consequences of repressing or forgetting it?”

The neighborhood’s North Koreans are already all but gone, save for a few noodle shops and the odd sewing store, and soon, Shinheung Market and the 108 Stairway may soon join them. While a few, like Daniel Park, keep some of its history alive, Haebangchon continues to change. Today, it’s a multiethnic mecca totally at odds with the city that surrounds it yet one that draws increasing numbers of young Koreans. And though the past is quickly being lost, the struggle that began so long ago, the struggle to make this a village of liberation, is slowly being won.

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Forget Peanuts and Cracker Jack, Try Chicken and Cheese

This week, we’re running a series on our favorite stadium eats from around the world.

Empanadas in the Dominican Republic

Merengue blasts from the loudspeakers dotted around the outskirts of the field while fans scream unabashedly at their favorite—and least favorite—players. Baseball in the Dominican Republic has a few unique elements. One is that all baseball fields feature natural grass—infield and outfield—never turf. Another is the food.

Some go for “La Bandera Dominicana”: a well-balanced meal of rice, red kidney beans, and stewed chicken, which literally translates to “the Dominican flag.” The beans, rice, and chicken are supposed to correspond to the red, white, and blue of the flag. (Some liberties are taken with the color of the chicken.) Others spectators forgo balancing this full plate and opt for a smaller, but no less tasty snack.

The ideal stadium snack shouldn’t just taste good—it should also be practical; easy to eat and also easy to hold. Like the empanada, a love letter to flaky, deep-fried pastry. In Santo Domingo, it’s foolish to show up to a baseball game without grabbing an empanada first. There’s nothing better than biting into a warm pastelito and savoring the small drop of grease that migrates from the paper bag onto your hand.

This one is pollo queso; chicken and cheese. Forget peanuts and cracker jack, this is a classic baseball pairing. And don’t forget to wash it down with El Presidente, the beloved local pilsner.

Photo by: Daniela Batya

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A Salty, Meaty Snack for Watching Others Exert Themselves in Pursuit of Soccer Glory

This week, we’re running a series on our favorite stadium eats from around the world.

Pork Gyros in the Bahamas

There’s a lot of running happening on this beach, but it definitely isn’t Baywatch. Hundreds are gathered on blisteringly hot metal benches to watch one of the most impressive athletic feats of all—running barefoot on scorching sand in pursuit of soccer glory.

Witnessing all of this calorie-burning can work up an appetite, so it’s important to have a protein-heavy snack on hand. Enter the gyro—a salty, meaty, hearty nosh. A gyro isn’t necessarily the first thing you think of for suitable beach food, and it probably won’t help anyone feel beach-body ready. But it’s satisfying, which is of course much more important.

Beach soccer is only in its ninth recognized national federation year, but gyros have been a stadium food staple here since the late 1880s. Greek food became a mainstay of the Archipelago when immigrants came to the Bahamas to kick-start the sponge harvesting industry. By the early 1900s, the Greek settlers began opening their own restaurants.

The thin slices of perfectly cooked pork slide from the rotisserie like butter, and are placed in a soft, warm, charred pita along with tzatziki. Every bite is a perfect blend of charred meat and cool, creamy sauce. With the gentle breeze, it’s wise to tote a snack that’s easy to eat, and will be safe from wind and sand—such as the gyro, which comes neatly wrapped.

Photo by: Otishka Ferguson

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R&K Insider: Greetings from Hanoi edition!

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Hello, dear readers, and welcome to a very special Hanoi edition of the newsletter! I’ve been in Vietnam for the last few days, eating and motor-biking and drinking cheap beer to my heart’s content while on assignment for R&K and Explore Parts Unknown. Despite the fact that it was about one billion percent humidity before it began storming later in the week, I’ve loved every second of exploring the city.   From the moment I climbed onto the back of a scooter weighed down by a 3-year-old, her father, his teen sister, and their dog, I knew I’d found the place for me. Who doesn’t want to weave in and out of traffic with a beloved family pet tucked behind the wheel?

  And my god, the food. The FOOD. There was fragrant pho for breakfast, sweet and savory with hints of star anise, garnished with generous squeezes of lime juice and slices of red chili and studded with thin slices of rare beef. For lunch, perhaps, a banh mi: the shatteringly crisp crust of the bread giving way to the tang of pickled vegetables accenting the rich umami of paté. For a pick-me-up after this embarrassment of carb riches, I’d turn to the city’s egg coffee, an ingenious concoction of robusta coffee and aggressively whipped raw egg that tastes like the richest cappuccino you can imagine. 

But let’s not get too distracted by the greatest hits. See that picture up there at the beginning of this thing? That’s a pan full of chả cá, a Hanoian dish of fish flavored with turmeric, galangal, and deeply fermented shrimp paste, then grilled until almost cooked through. Afterward, it’s cooked again table-side; this one was lightly fried in lard and generous handfuls of dill and spring onion. That’s right, it was marinated, grilled on a bed of fresh herbs, and then cooked in pig fat. Ahhhhhhhh! The creator of this meal-of-my-dreams was Chef Hải at Hang Son 1871, a restaurant named for the street and year on which and in which chả cá was created. He gave me some tips on making the dish (hint: LARD) and told me about its role in the nation’s fight for independence. More on that soon. 

For our final evening, we indulged in a blow-out evening of southern Vietnamese fare at the incomparable Hem Quan, feasting on chicken fried in fish sauce and Vietnamese hot pot that was sour, salty, herbal, and entirely addictive.      If you can’t be in Vietnam this week, at least follow the pho trail on Instagram, and perhaps this other gal eating her way around Hanoi. Let’s re-visit this James Beard award-winning piece on revenge and Vietnam’s dog meat industry, The Dog Thief Killings. Let’s read this extremely comprehensive guide to banh mi, the sandwich that ate the world. Let’s read an interview with Anthony Bourdain about eating bun cha with President Barack Obama! We had our own bowl of bun cha this week, and I can see how it would induce the famed and powerful to sit on tiny plastic stools for an evening.

That’s it for this week! See you next week for more of the best in food, politics, and travel from around the web. Tweet me stories you want to see here @caraparks.  

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Riding on Stalin’s Rope Roads | Chiatura, Georgia

by Emily Lush

Not many tourists make it to Chiatura, a mining town nestled in Western Georgia’s Imereti region 70km from Kutaisi, the country’s third-biggest city. Those who do come to see one thing: the fabled aerial car network that was built in 1954 on orders from Joseph Stalin.

In Soviet times, 60% of the world’s manganese ore was drawn from Chiatura’s soil. Some 4,000 workers tolled for up to 18 hours a day in mines set on top of the steep cliffs – but it wasn’t enough. The kanatnaya doroga (rope road) was erected to shorten the miners’ daily commute, thus boosting productivity.

In its heyday, 17 individual ropeways plied Chiatura’s skyline, ferrying workers up and down the valley. Only a handful remain operational today, with rumours that all of Chiatura’s cable cars will be retired by the end of 2017. We knew this might be our only chance to ride on Stalin’s rope road before it was relegated to the history books.

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On a misty Sunday morning in May, we squeeze into a Chiatura-bound marshrutka bus just as it’s pulling out of Kutaisi station. The fog thickens during the one-and-a-half-hour journey through densely forested Imereti. When we finally pull into Chiatura, the haze clears to reveal a little town alive with activity.

Along the main road, women sell neatly arranged bundles of herbs and bunches of roses. Bakers scramble to keep up with weekend trade, Ladas cruise up and down the streets, and people come and go from brightly coloured apartment buildings.

It’s not long before we catch our first glimpse of Chiatura’s cable car infrastructure: a hulking station building, remnants of rusted rope hanging limply from its cantilevered concrete arms. The smashed windows and boarded-up doors reveal this is one of the lines that has ceased to operate.

We search the grey skies for more cable car lines, eventually following a group of women inside a lemon-coloured building where some cables appear to be converging.

Just as we approach the station, a blue car arcs down the hill and docks in its station. A few people disembark and the women take their place. After observing a few rotations, the station attendant gestures nonchalantly for us to board the next empty car. Without a moment’s hesitation we climb inside.

Another attendant is there waiting. It’s her job to ride with passengers and ensure no one accidentally pops the loosely fitted door. A bell sounds; the first attendant pulls a lever and we’re off, sailing in our metal cage. This particular line hugs the contour of the hill, so we are never very far off the valley floor. Still, peering through the tiny wire-covered windows is thrilling. We can’t communicate with words, but the attendant chuckles knowingly as we look to her for reassurance. The most striking thing about the ride – which only lasts for a minute or so – is how silently and smoothly the carriage moves. Sixty-plus years later and these weather-worn ropes still do their job with efficiency and ease.

Back inside the main station, we admire the plasterwork that decorates this once-grand building. A freshly painted mural pays homage to Chiatura’s miners. Outside, we notice a mosaic cast above the entryway – forever immortalised in river stones, Stalin and Lenin gaze out towards the ropeways.

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The World Champion of Noodle Cups

This week, we’re running a series on our favorite stadium eats from around the world.

Jajang in Korea

Sporting matches come with a whole lot of nerves and stress. Perched at the edges of their seats, millions of viewers anxiously watch their teams vie for glory. That, on top of the stress drinking, probably leads to a lot of upset stomachs. But Daejeon Stadium in South Korea has the perfect food to combat those nerves.

Noodle cups aren’t anything novel. The Jajang noodle cup, upon first glance, looks like any other noodle product, wrapped in cellophane. The unassuming brown package advertises what looks to be a monochrome beef stew. But it delivers so much more.

Jajang is named after the savory black sauce used in a Chinese-Korean fusion dish called jajangmyeon. Jajangmyeon is made mostly of noodles and pork chunks. The Jajang noodle cup pulls from the jajangmyeon sauce, which is roast beans and caramel. It also has what the package promises to be “large” beef-flavored flakes.

As a connoisseur of cheap noodle packs, a.k.a. a grad student, I can confidently say this might just be the winner among stadium eats, clocking in at roughly USD$1.13 per pack. And it’s a far cry from the average chicken-flavored packets.

Setting itself apart from the rest by using a liquid base, instead of the usual packet of powder, the result is something that feels a little more homemade and a little less college dorm-made. The thick, wheat noodles cling to the sauce, creating the perfect bite every time. This hearty, saucy, slurpy treat is perfect for an evening game, when the sun has set and some of the heat has gone out of its residual glow.

These packets sell out like hotcakes in grocery stores, so the best place to snag one of these may actually be a soccer match.

Photo by: Issa Del Sol

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Everything That Powdered Chocolate Milk Toast Promises to Be

Milo toast in Singapore

When I was a school kid, Milo was my favorite drink. The Australian malt-and-chocolate powder mix had somehow permeated the local market at the laid-back coastal town in India in which I grew up, and it was quite the rage among my friends.

But in my home, we were set in our ways; anything new was viewed with skepticism. We were not allowed to have coffee all through school, so I had to be content with other health drinks like Complan, Bournvita, Maltova, and Boost, all of which promised to turn kids into super tall, supremely intelligent creatures who could crack complex arithmetic problems in nanoseconds. Occasionally, I’d have a glass of chilled milk with Milo at home and feel like such a rebel.

I was in Singapore recently and discovered that Milo toast is a breakfast option. This was a revelation to me, and as someone who hadn’t had a sip of the drink for more than 10 years, the idea of biting into crunchy toast dusted with Milo seemed like fun. So, one morning, at Toast Box in Bugis Junction, we ordered two plates of Milo toast and two cups of steaming hot kopi (coffee). The perfectly buttered toast was cut into bite-sized squares with generous sprinklings of Milo, topped with condensed milk. It was everything Milo toast promised to be.

I used to love eating Milo straight out of the tin, and this simple breakfast brought back truckloads of memories: of school, home, family, friends I’d lost touch with, and flavors that linger. And of course, nostalgia. Sitting in a café, thousands of miles away from home, it made me crave a simpler life, filled with the flavors of my childhood. Yet I also felt at home, munching on Milo toast in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.

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So Much More Than Corn-on-the-Cob

This week, we’re running a series on our favorite stadium eats from around the world.

Esquites in Mexico

The number one sport in Mexico is association soccer—no surprise. There’s a deep love for fútbal in Mexico. During important matches, the country grinds to a halt as people crowd into stadiums to watch the games. The country is one of only six to qualify for every FIFA World Cup consecutively since 1994.

But, the real star inside these arenas is elote, or Mexican street corn.

Esquites, the portable version of elote, may be one of the most satisfying things that can be purchased in a cup. Roughly translated as “little corn cup” there’s nothing little about the pleasure that comes with a spoonful of Mexican street corn.

Corn is a staple in traditional Mexican cooking, but esquites is what to eat when cheering on your favorite team. Some esquites are boiled, the buttery-yellow kernels submerged in hot water until tender, but the best kind are roasted in a seasoned pan over an open flame until the kernels blister and char, usually accompanied by onions. Traditional esquites must use mature corn—not fresh or dried.

The warm corn is then coated in mayo and cotija cheese. A little gooey, a little melty, the dish is then topped off with a burst of lime juice and chili powder. Occasionally, fresh pequin chilis are used, but it’s simpler to use the powder for churning out mass amounts in stadiums.

Each mouthful is a burst of sunshine with bright citrus and warm, creamy mayo, with a little bit of a kick. The perfect thing to keep your mouth occupied when you’re not screaming at the referees.

Photo by: Enid Ayala

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The Quest for the Perfect Mango Knows No Borders

If left to my own devices, I’d never have visited Apna Pakistan. The name means Our Pakistan, and I am a reasonably patriotic Indian. The supermarket lay in Dubai’s Al Karama area, one densely populated by Indian and Pakistani immigrants. Behind it was a restaurant called Mumbai se, literally From Mumbai, and diagonally opposite to it, across the street, was my favorite, Bikanerwala, named after a town in India, Bikaner. In other words, there were plenty of red-blooded Indian options for me to choose from. But one summer in Dubai, all the Indian supermarkets failed me.

I first ventured into Apna Pakistan in the search of a very specific gourd variety, the luffa. I was looking for an Indian version of it, long, slender, dark green in color, and not the spongy kind I had encountered in other markets in Dubai. It was specific to Indian summers, and when cooked the right way, it took me back to my mother’s simple but immensely gratifying cooking, the kind of stuff you’d never find in a restaurant. There was another item, though, that invariably accompanied all those summer meals at home with the gourd: mangoes. Their presence made the meals complete, either sliced or as juice—called ras in western India—an indicator that life was normal and that there was still hope in the summers, even when the thermometer edged past 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Some 500 years back, a certain Afonso de Albuquerque, considered one of the greatest European conquerors of his time, invaded the western coast of India around Mumbai and Goa. He brought with him more than just the Portuguese army. He brought a variety of mangoes that would rule the hearts of Indians for generations to come: the Alphonso, named after him.

I spent several years of my life working in the bustling metropolis of Mumbai and there, a large part of summer evenings was dedicated to finding the best quality mangoes in the city. I scoured the most obscure streets for the perfect Alphonso. Those that came from Ratnagiri were the most famous, but there were mangoes from towns all around Mumbai. Whichever variety one chose, the test remained the same. It should have non-uniform colors, a mixture of yellow, green, and probably a bit of crimson; shouldn’t be too stiff or too squishy when held in the hand; and must heavily invigorate the olfactory senses even from a distance. For almost three months every year, my home was perfumed by arguably the best mangoes of India.

Alphonso mangoes at a Mumbai market. Photo by: Anuradha Sengupta

When I moved to Dubai, I was apprehensive about the mangoes I’d find here. I started my efforts my first summer, ducking under awnings of stores to somehow escape the scorching Dubai sun, frantically searching supermarket after supermarket, sniffing my way through their fruit sections. Yes, I found the Alphonsos of Mumbai, “export quality” as their packings would proudly claim, but they were nowhere close to those in Mumbai. In perfectly arranged crates of mangoes from Spain and Portugal, I tried searching for the ancestors of the Alphonso. There was the R2E2 variety from Australia, but those only arrived in winter months. There were the Kenyan and Egyptian mangoes; they tasted good, slightly tangy, yet left something to be desired. There were eye-candy mangoes from South American countries that sold for a small fortune, but each time I was disappointed.

You see, in the Indian sub-continent, mangoes are a very sensitive subject. Even within families, nothing reveals fault-lines more clearly than our preferences about the fruit. My father loves a certain Chaunsa variety, my mother swoons for the extra-sweet Dussehri, and I owe my allegiances to the aforementioned Alphonso. My friends from Delhi and Mumbai would fight over how the Alphonso was either the worst or best mango in the world, depending on which city they came from. I’m sure that at some point in our medieval history this debate could easily have led to one of the several wars between the clans of the Mughals, who ruled Delhi, and the Marathas, who ruled Mumbai. I, however, come from central India, and its ruling clans and their battles are lesser known. So, in the middle of all this mango imperialism, I could not even talk about the humble but delicious Badami variety that ruled our hearts and tongues for a good two months of the year. Which is why when I was first drawn by the intense smells of fresh Pakistani mangoes flown in from Karachi at Apna Pakistan, I was seriously questioning my allegiances to my country. This could be heresy, blasphemy, even pure treason!

Seventy years ago, India was partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan. Some of my closest Indian friends can still trace their ancestries to Pakistan. They all had the same story, grandparents who migrated from the western state of Punjab, or Eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh) settled in Indian Punjab, Delhi, or Kolkata, and began life afresh. It was later, in Dubai, when I first met people who had very similar stories but the other way around. People my age who were third-generation kids of those who had migrated away from India to Pakistan. In talks over lunch, we would exchange stories of how similar our halwa puris were, or the nuances that made their kshir korma different from our dessert kheer. It was also in Dubai where I first tasted mangos that traced their origins to India but were loved all over Pakistan.

The Anwar Ratol was one such variety. Pakistanis swore by its sweetness. In his book A Tryst with Mango, Dr. Om Prakash quotes an article in The Pioneer newspaper published in July 1981 about Ratol mangoes being gifted by Zia Ul-Huq to Indira Gandhi, then the Prime Ministers of Pakistan and India respectively. It then goes on to quote a former Nawab (ruler) of Ratol, a village in the northern province of India, who claims that a sapling of this plant was taken from India to Pakistan during the partition.

These mangoes had to be pampered, caressed, and cajoled into oozing the juice

Ratols, though, reminded me of the summer holidays we spent at my Nana’s place, where not one, not two, but dozens of very small desi mangos (very similar to Ratol) would be drowned in a bucket of water, to drain out their excessive heat. As kids we would pick up one or two, roll them between our palms and suck out the juice from them, a natural tetrapack. When the Indian mango season passed (the mango season in India runs roughly from April to July and in Pakistan from June to September) and the Anwar Ratol from Pakistan continued to flood Dubai markets, I started buying them for the mandatory ras at home. But this juice couldn’t be made by cutting the mango in pieces and throwing it into a blender, the way my mother made it. The Anwar Ratols had to be pampered, caressed, and cajoled into oozing the juice, and then sieved into a large bowl, the old-fashioned way, the way my grandmother did, sitting for hours, extracting juice for the entire family: children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. This was slow food at its best in a pint-sized mango.

Then there was the Sindhri, which came from the province of Sindh in Pakistan. In summers, Sindh swelters in heat and, as my Pakistani colleagues tell me, the hotter the climate, the sweeter the mango. Sindhri has a very thin yellow skin, has very little fiber content, and is big, sometimes too big to hold in one hand. Even in the larger fresh vegetable markets of Dubai, in the historical Deira neighborhood, Sindhri’s widespread aroma can take first timers by surprise. The taste is as sweet, though a tad less so than the Ratol. The people of Sindh—Sindhis—are known for their sweet tooth. Many Sindhis fled from Pakistan at the time of the partition and settled in makeshift colonies in different parts of India. An Indian Sindhi friend once told me she wanted to learn the script for Urdu, Nastaliq, because all texts in the Sindhi language were written in it. That knowledge went missing when the people migrated, as did the quintessentially sindhi mango, Sindhri, which is rarely found in Indian markets, barring a few in and around Delhi.

It was on the Muslim holiday of Eid that I went to Apna Pakistan to tell the owner that I was taking their Sindhri mangoes home to India. The owner, a middle-aged man in white kurta-pyjama, stood possessively beside the crates of mangoes as I examined each variety in my hands. “If it’s for India, you must take Chaunsa then. It’s the sweetest, and doesn’t grow in India.” However, the Chaunsa is indeed grown and eaten across India, especially northern areas. When I revealed this, he was astonished, much the same way I was when I first found the treasure of Pakistani mangoes. Deep in his eyes I could see that perhaps my revelation had broken his heart a teeny, tiny bit.

Sindhri of Pakistan in the Aweer market in Dubai. Photo by: Harshad Mehta

Finally, there’s the langda variety. When literally translated, the name means ‘lame’ in both Urdu and Hindi. The mango, however, is anything but. It’s an interesting combination of tangy and sweet, interspersed in lots of fiber. As a kid, it was my favorite, the juxtaposition of its twin tastes a fascinating puzzle for the senses. After thirty years, my fascination reached new highs when I found the sweetest version of this childhood favorite in the Pakistani varieties of langda.

Over the last three summers, I have spotted more langda, far more Chaunsa, and yes, a huge bunch of Dussehri, at Pakistani stores across Dubai. And each of them, I am forced to admit, has been sweeter and tastier than their Indian counterparts. My conscience was jolted. My taste buds—my traitorous taste buds—have been overjoyed.

In some ways, the partition was probably the single most unfortunate event in the 5,000-year history of Indian lands. There was a lot that was lost at that time. The lives of at least a million people, the homes of another nine million, villages on either side of the border, and our goodwill towards each other. We also lost the prospect of an invincible cricket team and, very few people know, the sweetness of a six-month long mango season. If only our soldiers on the border could share mangoes rather than bullets every few weeks.

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Nothing Says “Play Ball!” Like Hot Noodles

This week, we’re running a series on our favorite stadium eats from around the world.

Udon in Japan

The crack of a bat; the slurp of noodles. These are the sounds that fill baseball stadiums across Japan. Forget portable snacks; for baseball fans that flood the 12 NPB—Nippon Professional Baseball—stadiums throughout Japan, it’s all about one thing: a steaming bowl of udon.

Throughout the open arena, spectators balance brightly colored umbrellas and tiny bowls garnished with aonori—seaweed powder—and katsuobushi—fish flakes. Chants rise up over the bleachers and are thrown across the divide as fans root for their chosen team.

Others choose classic fare like gyoza, edamame, and bento boxes. And though you can get hamburgers and hot dogs, nothing says “Play Ball!” here like digging into a pot of hot noodles.

The stadium food may be a far cry from peanuts and hot dogs, but it still hits on the ideal trinity of summer junk food: chewy, salty, and umami. Udon, a classic Japanese street food, involves thick, buckwheat flour noodles, nori (seaweed), and crunchy vegetables like green onions that bring color to the beige tangle of noodles. Occasionally, a generous mayonnaise drizzle makes an appearance.

Some hybridized versions include stuffing the noodles into hot dog buns, and some even chop up hot dogs into the noodles as a meaty garnish. Perhaps the only downside to this savory dish is that tossing the coated noodles in outrage over a bad call or an opposing team’s run would involve quite the cleanup. Save your edamame shells for your unsportsmanlike conduct.

At Japan’s oldest ballpark, Meiji Jingu Stadium, you can bring your own food and drinks inside—but isn’t part of the whole sports experience paying exorbitant prices for refreshments? In true sports stadium fashion, a small, generic beer is still going to cost you an arm and a leg—roughly $10 USD.

Photo by Kagawa YMG

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Who Needs Sausage and Eggs When There Are Fried-Milk Pancakes?

Malpuas in Pushkar

It is a cold December morning when we step out of our hostel in Pushkar to grab some breakfast. The Hindu temple town three hours from Jaipur is strictly vegetarian, so eggs and sausages are off the menu. In any case, after stuffing our faces with kachoris (deep-fried lentil pastry) and jalebis (Indian sweet pretzels) throughout our trip in Rajasthan, we weren’t missing omelets at all.

We walk through the lanes of Sadar Bazar, past shops selling colorful Rajasthani jewelery and leheriya dupattas (tie-dye stoles), dodging people and cows.

Stomachs growling, when we reach Laxmi Mishtan Bhandar near Gau Ghat it is bit past 9 a.m. “Two plates of kachoris, please,” we say, and dive into Rajasthan’s favorite breakfast. The kick from the spicy lentil filling, and the promise of a hot and sweet chutney that follows with every bite have us smiling.

A craving for something sweet keeps us going, and the sweet shops of Pushkar know how to satiate. A typical scene is that of a man sitting next to two huge iron woks—one with hot ghee or clarified butter to fry things and another with sugar syrup to soak those things fried. We were staring at Pushkar’s best-kept secret—its malpuas. These small pancakes are made with a batter comprised of rabdi (milk that has been reduced on low heat for hours), khoya (thickened and dried milk) and plain flour. After being deep-fried, they’re soaked in a cardamom-scented sugar syrup.

We have eaten malpuas all our lives. During Holi (the Indian festival of colors), at high-end restaurants, and during Ramadan on the streets of Mumbai. But nothing I had tasted so far came close to what I ate now. Deep-fried in the fattiest oil and soaked in the sweetest syrup, it was a recipe for death.

“Aur ek khayenge? Kuch nahi hoga. Yeh desi ghee hain.” (Do you want to eat one more? Don’t worry, it’s made of homely clarified butter), says the bespectacled man. We oblige.

Over the next couple of days, we walk up and down the bazaar, past Laxmi Mishtan Bhandar and its happy sweet-maker. Each time all it takes is a wave of his hand, and we find ourselves polishing off Pushkar’s famous fried-milk malpuas, fingers dripping with syrup.

Don’t leave Pushkar without learning the recipe for malpua. And don’t forget to thank the cows for the milk.

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The Sand Castles of a Forgotten Empire

We had been driving through seemingly endless desert for 30 miles when Axmad admitted he wasn’t entirely sure where the qalas were. It didn’t bode well for the desert castles, which are seeking World Heritage Site status, that a local driver had never visited them. Nor did it bode well for our chances of finding the structures. There were no road signs and, although we were close, neither formidable ramparts nor crumbling towers jutted out over the land to help guide us to our destination.

Instead, village after featureless village of pre-fab Soviet houses blurred past the window with the air of Levittowns. Except we were around 25 miles outside Bustan in central Uzbekistan, and instead of white picket fences and freshly mown lawns, there were clay bread ovens that smoked like tiny volcanos outside the front doors.

Melon sellers along the road suspended their wares on poles above the ground as our car ker-thunked over potholes. Before long, the villages gave way to hamlets of mud houses. A goatherd guided his flock in search of sustenance by the roadside. They nibbled at the brown grass lackadaisically.

“Nobody visits these places,” said Axmad in reference to the famed castle structures. He scratched the back of his head before replacing his flat cap and pulling in front of three men riding a cart pulled by a robust looking mule. The 61-year-old driver asked a rotund man holding the reins for directions to Kyzyl Qala, one of at least fourteen castles spread along the north side of the Amu Darya river, known more commonly as the Oxus.

Axmad indicates his lack of interest in Guldursun Qala.

The castles form part of what UNESCO has dubbed the Golden Ring of Khorezm. The term refers more to the color of the earth than to the affluence or history of the place. The castles are steeped in mystery and sand rather than jewels and precious metals.

“Right there,” replied the rotund man, pointing across a field. As it came more clearly into view, Kyzyl Qala looked modestly magnificent; plonked in the middle of the maize field and surrounded by irrigation channels as though somebody had misplaced it. A row of poplar trees led up to its aged mud walls, which speared the sky like jagged, broken teeth.

A sand road to the qala looked all but impassable, especially to Axmad’s ramshackle Daewoo Nexia, but he gunned it over the humps and hillocks with expertise and we arrived at the foot of the qala.

Kyzyl Qala was originally built around the 1st century CE as an auxiliary fortress to the main township of Toprak Qala, which was visible across the fields a mile away. It is thought that Kyzyl Qala was used as a military garrison, while Toprak was the main town where commerce and religious activities took place.

Axmad took a brief look at the castle, then decided to wait in the car. “There’s nothing to see, it’s just some old walls and lots of sand.” The original walls were in a sorry state. The mud bricks, although compact, hadn’t weathered well. The walls were buttressed around their base with a modern wall to keep them upright. Arrow slits still pock-marked the sides.

A goatherd keeps apace with his grazing beasts on a mule outside Kyzyl Qala.

Mongols were mostly to blame for the destitution of Kyzyl and all the other qalas in the region. The current remains of Kyzyl castle belong to the version constructed in the 12th century, when the important Silk Road caravanserais and trading posts, hugging the Oxus to avoid the Kyzyl Desert to the north, were at the height of prosperity.

Then, in the 13th century, Mongols swept through the area. By the time their empire had reached its end a century and a half later, the sand castles in Khorezm were in ruins and the Silk Road, largely closed for business during this time, had started to be replaced by ships as a preferred method of trade and transportation.

Getting into Kyzyl Qala involved a scramble up a hardened sand bank through a gap where the wall had fallen in. Sand storms had deposited layers of sand inside the fortress over the centuries, which was packed and baked hard like cement. In this way, the interior floor was almost as high as the tops of the walls. Saxaul had taken root. Holes in the sand, formed by draining rain water, suggested that an excavation would reveal lower levels, buried below.

Why bother building a castle if it ends up like everything else?

Clambering back down out of the castle, I noticed some goats had meandered over while the goatherd calmly watched on. “What are you doing here?” he asked out of curiosity, rather than suspicion. It was odd but it seemed as though visitors were not common here. Before waiting for a response, he said, “There’s treasure in there, you know.”

I asked him if he had tried to look for it. He stared off to the horizon. “Nobody can get it, it’s guarded by a serpent,” he said, returning his gaze to the ruins. “I don’t need it anyway. We live simple lives here. Why bother building a castle if it ends up like everything else?” Noticing his flock had ambled on, he spurred his donkey and moved away.

Revving the engine, Axmad made it clear it was time to leave, and we pressed on towards Ayaz Qala, a cluster of three separate forts. Visiting them now, it is a wonder why anybody would be interested in conquering the surrounding land. Over time, the compact sand of Kyzyl Qala has been replaced by the shifting sands of the Kyzylkum desert, out of which Ayaz Qala rose as we drew nearer.

Today the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, one of Uzbekistan’s most impoverished regions, encapsulates the Elliq Qala castles (as they are also known) of ancient Khorezm. The castles weren’t originally surrounded by desert, although the desert was always close by.

Left: The walls of Ayaz Qala’s second fort are still largely intact. Right: The smaller fort at Ayaz Qala, blending in with the surrounds.

The land had been long nourished by the Oxus. When the Soviets initially expanded the system of water channels around the river for irrigation, it was a success. Then they got greedy; Soviet cotton production targets overstretched the river. The Aral Sea, fed by the Oxus over 200 miles away, dried up.

Those water channels didn’t reach as far as Ayaz Qala anyway, so the ensuing depletion of the river welcomed the desert back in. The castle, on a hill, overlooks nothing but desert.

Few live in the region now. On the day of our visit, the ruins of an abandoned farmstead were being investigated by a camel. Wind-driven sand rippled an untrodden path up to the fort, whose walls were first constructed in the 4th century BCE. In places they still stood 30 feet high. Arched galleries, now filled with sand and impassable, ran the entire way around the interior of the qala.

Despite the sand’s omnipresence there is a subtle beauty to the landscape. The contours of the land took on different hues depending on how the light hit them, so that the ocher foreground blended to sienna, then mauve and eventually violet. Such was the isolation that sounds from far away took on a surreal quality. The grunt of a camel somewhere was distorted into the metallic scrape of a sword replaced into a scabbard. A car horn in the distance became the bugle call of an approaching army.

The wheezing prattle of shelducks could be heard long before they were seen as I got my first look at the second fortress. Sat atop a lower rocky outcrop, its walls were more complete, and much thicker. An impregnable citadel. Two ruddy shelducks were perched atop the walls. Another two scudded across the desert backdrop, their black wingtips tinged with green. On the road beyond, Axmad caught sight of me and beeped his horn again.

A pair of ruddy shelducks do a Qala flyby, with two more perched atop the ramparts.

It wasn’t until visiting the final qala that Axmad appeared genuinely intrigued by what we saw. Guldursun Qala was only a few miles from where he had grown up. After asking for directions from a melon seller, we found Guldursun above a small agrarian town, which lapped at its lofty walls. Most of the houses were built of mud bricks, with corrugated iron roofs.

Not a single structure remained inside the high castle walls, just scrubland with a small pond in the middle. Axmad raised his hands. “See there is nothing here,” he told me. “What use are these places to us now if nobody comes? They’re pointless.”

His frustration is understandable. Modern Uzbekistan remains a relatively unknown entity as a tourist destination. Organized groups visit Silk Road gem cities like Bukhara and Samarkand, but there is little independent tourism.

This may be about to change. Islam Karimov, the autocratic ruler who had run the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, died last year. His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has begun to open the country up and changed visa laws so that travelers from many countries, including the U.K. and anyone from the U.S. over the age of 55, can get a visa on arrival. It’s an odd stipulation, but points to progress.

Karimov was not so friendly to outside interests. While reliant on UNESCO to save the fortresses, NGOs have not always had an easy time of things in Uzbekistan.

Fierce international criticism to the brutal suppression of protests in Andijan in 2005, in which hundreds were believed to be killed, led the Karimov government into knee-jerk retaliation. Western organizations like the UNHCR branch in Uzbekistan and the BBC World Service were kicked out of the country. It was a huge setback for the preservation and international showcasing of the Golden Ring of Khorezm.

Guldursun Qala reveals a lot about a fascinating period of Khorezmian history. Besides trade goods, ideology also passed along the Silk Road. Muslim armies ushered in a new era of faith-driven power in the 8th century and Khorezm became a vassal of the Khwarezmshahs, also emanating from Persia. Guldursun Qala was one of their most important settlements in the region.

Local kids gather atop the ancient fortifications of Guldursun Qala.

More than a millennium after its importance had dwindled, voices continued to ring out from the structures during our visit. But it was unclear initially where they emanated from. As I circumvented the walls, the voices came again. They were followed by a small stone that whizzed past my face.

A group of young boys peered out from the jagged ramparts, giggling and ducking only to reappear further along. One boy with a runny nose squealed and leaped from a crumbling tower onto the wall and hoisted himself up.

This was the best-preserved tower of Guldursun Qala. The wall walks and arrow loops remained intact. The interior of a defensive tower still had the slots that would have held wooden rafters at one time. It is now the playground for the local children.

“This is our castle,” one of them said proudly. And indeed, for today it is. But in time they might have to share their sandy playground with greater numbers of tourists, if they can find the castles in the desert. As a passing goatherd noted, “It’s a shame to see such beauty ignored.”

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[skygoal]

Reflecting on Two Years in China

By Tony Inglis

As someone who likes to write, it shouldn’t be too difficult for me to express my opinions, thoughts and experiences as words. In fact, it should be near embarrassing if I find such a task so challenging as to render me useless.

But, this is exactly how I find myself upon returning to Glasgow after two years living in China. Condensing this thing that I did into a few hundred words now seems pointless and impossible. If you can’t answer the question “So, how was China?” with anything other than some fumbling and a meaningless sentence like “oh, really great…”, that kind of non-response you give to a question so utterly gigantic and encompassing that you might as well have been asked the meaning of life, then how are you supposed to boil that time in your life down to a pithy blog post? The fact is there is no way to comprehend a solution to this problem – you just have to do it, to at least try and convey even that speechlessness, to put into words the reason why you can’t talk about it in a detailed and articulate way, if not describe the actual experience itself. What a lengthy tome it would be to even type out the events, activities, thoughts, feelings, disappointments and achievements in list form of two years living in any place, never mind somewhere as truly bewildering as China.

By pure coincidence, and the fact that niche music memoirs are extremely hard to come by in the sprawling city of Wuhan, I have been reading a couple of books that have helped me figure out what I want to say about this period in my life. One of these is Girl in a Band, written by Sonic Youth member, the endlessly inspirational and cool, Kim Gordon. Around forty-five pages in, I discovered that, due to her father’s work, she too lived for a period in east Asia, specifically Hong Kong, a mere five hours and a metro ride away from the place I called home in China. Her first impressions of the city are vivid and familiar to me:

“The air was so hot and humid it was like stepping inside a kiln, and you had to gasp to catch your breath. The smells and sounds were overpowering. My first night there, I remember knocking into people on the street, and crying, which fogged and blurred the city’s yellow lights even more. I felt so overwhelmed by Hong Kong’s heat, chaos, clamour, and odours that I was convinced I would never—never—survive there a year.”

That last sentence has resonated with me. When I arrived in Wuhan, I also had a strong feeling of helplessness, questioning my decision to go there, wondering if I would make it through my time there. Just as Gordon felt, it was almost unthinkable to consider that I would survive there. But I survived, and I lived, and adapted, and thrived, and even excelled.

The similarity of our first impressions are where the comparisons between mine and Gordon’s experiences end. She was ten years younger, not there through choice, and even the place is strikingly different. (Despite Hong Kong’s geographical proximity to mainland China, because of its culture and politics it remains wildly contrasting to its communist neighbour. Even though Gordon moved there in the mid-60s when it was less developed and prosperous than it is now, I have no doubt that it was a different transition than moving to the mainland).

China is a country where everything is different. Picking yourself up and deciding that there’s nothing that motivates you in your home to then move thousands of miles across the earth to a place where not a single thing feels familiar is quite a drastic choice to make. Food, people, weather, buildings, customs, manners, working life, relationships; ways in which you interact with the world are utterly changed as soon as you step off the plane. It’s no surprise to me, especially as a Scot, that Gordon is immediately hit by the temperature there. In the summer months, it’s unlike any kind of heat or humidity you come by in the UK and, while I often complained about how that heat and humidity was so heavy it seemed to regularly hold you down and punch you repeatedly in the face, now that I am back in Scotland and seem to have swapped the relentlessly hot for the relentlessly miserable, I have weirdly fond memories of requiring multiple showers and shirt changes each day.

Curiously, there’s a part of arriving and living in China that I didn’t really appreciate until I returned home. Coming back here, to the UK, is strange; to a country irrevocably changed by circumstances that I have felt apart from, outside of, in the years I have been away. In this time of Brexit, nationalist tensions and political and economic turmoil, it feels weird to be welcomed back with such open arms when many other people arrive here to blunt feelings of disdain and intolerance. The UK has become a claustrophobic place filled with ill feeling and superiority complexes that all stem from the complete intolerance of people different from the norm and an unwillingness to see those people live alongside you as an equal.

This was a feeling I never, ever felt in China. Two caveats: I am a white, heterosexual male and so I am completely shielded from intolerance no matter where I go; and I realise that Chinese people perhaps don’t show the same warmth to all other peoples, even to ethnic minorities that reside permanently in China. Despite this, a few things that people direct hatred towards in the UK applied to me, and my foreign friends and colleagues, as I entered China. I was leaving a country in which, at the time, I felt I couldn’t prosper. OK, it wasn’t war torn, I wasn’t forced to leave, but I felt, at that moment, that I could do better elsewhere. Again, there are caveats to this description which you might be able to garner from my writings and recordings on actually being a foreign English teacher in China (I recorded a podcast called Wuhan Weekly). But the point remains: there was no jealousy, no unfriendliness. There was only respect and total hospitality. I’m not, by any means, trying to compare this situation to a Syrian refugee who has been forced from their destroyed home; or an expert in their field who leaves a country that is ravaged economically to do a job they are completely overqualified to do; or a woman who leaves a conservative society in order to be able to live her life freely; or an elderly man who is rejected disability benefit and forced to work because he isn’t of retirement age yet and his two heart attacks don’t disqualify him from being able to job seek in the eyes of the state. I am so much more fortunate than these people, and stepping into another culture and society as an outsider has made me thankful for being that fortunate and made clear how entitled people in the UK can be and have been in the time I’ve been away.

This feeling of being an outsider is something that Kim Gordon, and Carrie Brownstein in her memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, talks about a lot. I’m not sure I even deserve to call myself an outsider. But it is as an outsider I return to my home. Most of my friends no longer live in Glasgow; they have moved to London or further afield. A lot of my friends are about to become fully qualified solicitors. I’m twenty-four and essentially unemployed, though I am back at university. And I’ve just come back from China having chosen to do something quite a lot different to my peers but that was, in my opinion, no less worthwhile. It has changed me, and only for the better, and even if it has meant that I feel a little apart at the moment, I know that I’m not the only one. So now I’m sitting in my kitchen listening to Joanna Newsom looking out the window and even though it’s clear blue skies I’m daydreaming at rather than clouds of pollution, I miss China so much. The other day I listened to Courtney Barnett’s ‘An illustration of Loneliness’ – a song where the narrator, displaced from her partner, wonders where and what that partner is doing – and I am ashamed to admit I felt myself welling up. It’s not even a particularly sad song. But I too find myself wondering what is happening in a far, distant land, what the people I know are doing, envious of those I know are returning. I may not be able to sum up all the incidents, good and bad, of my time in China, but I know that I feel utterly enriched by having lived there.

Visit Tony’s blog to read more of his writing from China and beyond.

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[skygoal]

The Appropriate Response to Triggered Snowflakes with Nuclear Codes

Budweiser and tuba in Guam

It takes a lot for people on Guam to get collectively riled up. After all, the chill, can’t-be-bothered islander is a stereotype with good reason. But with the repeated threat of missile strikes against my tiny, Pacific home this week, people all over Guam were searching for a way to detox from the anxiety and stress.

My answer? The classic “kick back.” Take two to 20 friends, add alcohol, and feel the high blood pressure reduce with each round of laughter. The ritual isn’t lost on the group I manage to assemble late Friday afternoon. It’s been a long week. Tensions between Pyongyang and Washington—both led by triggered snowflakes with nuclear codes—have escalated over the past several days at a faster rate than ever before. After President Donald Trump’s now infamous “fire and fury” threat, North Korea said it was readying a plan—subject to review—to launch four missiles that would reach the waters off Guam.

Budweiser and Bud Light are the only beers I buy today. I intend to cut this American beer stash with a traditional coconut wine called tuba; an extra dramatic touch to the last-minute session.

The handful of guests that can make it arrive over the course of a half hour.

“So why are we drinking?” Morgan, a local musician asks.

I explain to her that I had basically been asked to get sloshed and rant about North Korea.

“Is it sad that I’m not taking this threat seriously at all?” she says. “The whole thing is fucking stupid to me.”

We shotgun a beer while we wait for the others to arrive. Our discussion drifts to the week’s media attention, which put Guam in a rare international spotlight.

Morgan’s friend, she tells me, sent her the front pages of Reddit when Guam was mentioned: brown tree snakes and a Catholic sex abuse scandal. She, like a lot of residents, are sensitive to how the media portrays the island.

A few more people arrive, and we begin to complain about Guam’s (justifiable) reputation as primarily a military fortress. That in 2017, the media still only counts military personnel and their families as American lives in jeopardy. About the U.S. senators who have pushed for war, because Guam is so far away from “home” territory.

That’s when we start cutting the beer with tuba. It’s a pre-World War II product I drink only when I feel particularly nationalistic.

It hits the spot. Slowly but surely the conversation shifts from whether the presence of the military makes us more or less of a target, towards local gossip and conspiracy theories about the sudden reappearance of a certain 90s local celebrity (who is now a military contractor) and whether it might be connected to this week’s war games. Geopolitics gives way to discussions about our endangered native language. The recounting of news is slowly phased out in favor of stories about our grandparents and our history.

Perhaps it’s a sign that Morgan has it right. The possibility of getting caught in a nuclear war isn’t that serious, for now. Otherwise, would we be able to joke like this?

The sun sets and our normal schedules kick in. Kids need to be checked. Gigs are fast approaching.

And just after the last person leaves, I allow myself to check Facebook. A live video of Governor Eddie Calvo speaking to reporters (local, national, and international) was the first thing on my timeline. He was announcing daily security briefs. He seemed to on board with the president’s “fire and fury” routine.

I turn, and see that the gallon of tuba still has about a quarter left, and chug it. Then I shotgun another beer, and start looking for the next kick back.

Photo by: 白士 李

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[skygoal]

Monsoon in Nepal: visa quests, failed plans, and coffee addictions

What the heck we were doing in Nepal?! Plus what it was like to travel in Nepal during monsoon.

Read on

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