#bosco is also like an onion

[phrynewrites]

42 just screams blind date au

It truly does and tbh It's given me the opportunity to write one of my favorite scenes from blind date au. Idk if you were expecting the cooking class scene and a touch of insecuresco (tm), but here we are. Enjoy!

42. This is where you impress me, right?

___

Seeing Bosco’s cold stare at the onion on the chopping board, Jasmine thinks the vegetable had personally wronged them. 

She’d asked them “could you at least dice the onion?” throwing in, “this is where you’ll impress me with all your secret cooking knowledge, right?” before turning back to the stove, adding oil to the pan before turning the heat to medium. 

But it’s as though Bosco hadn’t heard, or really wasn’t capable of hearing. The only thing keeping Bosco out of their own world was the slight glances Jasmine could see them paying the other couples, their hands and their knives practically flying compared to Bosco’s somber and still grip on the chef’s knife. 

Jasmine sheds the garlic of its skin and gives it a rough chop, waiting for Bosco to follow her lead. 

“Sco,” she says, though it sounds like a warning. 

And Bosco breaks their languid trance, meeting Jasmine with wide eyes, grip on the knife still white knuckled. 

“Are you going to chop that onion, or…”

It takes a moment, but scanning over them, Jasmine can see that something bigger is at play here. Their skin is pale, flat, like they’ve encountered some great terror that they couldn’t snark their way out of. And their breathing— it was usually punctuated by sharp laughs, especially when Jasmine had let out a groan upon seeing Bosco come up from the subway a block away from the cooking school, following their irritating joy with a dancing brow and “after you, my love” as they held the door open for Jasmine, both of them acutely aware that their meeting here was not coincidental, but rather the work of their friends and their incessant flinging of these two together. 

But that was gone, and its place stands a recoiling Bosco. 

When their lips finally part, they let out, voice small, body smaller, “I don’t know how…”

They set the knife down, wrapping their arms around their waist, like they could fold into themself in a moment’s notice and be eaten up by the air around them. 

Jasmine settles the wooden spoon against the lip of the pan. It made sense, the more she thought about it. She’d never seen Bosco cook, and though they had espoused their abilities while they grabbed their aprons, had looked up at the instructor showing the final product and announced, “oh, it’s just fucking rice,” had hip checked Jasmine as she was gathering the vegetables, causing her to drop a squash, it was all lacking. It was as though Bosco’s confident, glossy sheen had been stripped away, leaving only something stark and matte and frankly, sad. 

As annoying as Jasmine found overconfident Bosco, insecure Bosco, staring back at Jasmine with a flat little smile, just waiting to be slain by her words, was heartbreaking. 

She brings her hand up, resting on their shoulder, noting the flinch as she comes closer. 

“Hey, it’s okay.” Jasmine keeps herself measured, scrunching their shoulder. “Not everyone knows how to do this.” 

“Everyone but me seems to be doing just fine.” It was a snap, a whip lashing against bare skin. Jasmine would be offended, if Bosco’s facade weren’t already cracked. 

“Well no one ever taught you is all.” Jasmine lets her hand trail down their arm before taking up the knife. “Here, let me show you.”  

With that, she rounds Bosco, settles in behind them. But as she goes to hand them the knife, she comes to the conclusion that it won’t work. She can’t see over them. 

“Here, switch,” She says, though she’s already fitting herself in front of them, between their arms. “You’re stupid for being tall.” 

“I’m stupid for not knowing how to chop a fucking onion,” Bosco quips back, letting out a quick breath through their nose. Jasmine’s hairs stand at attention. 

She whips around, poking Bosco in the chest. “You’re not stupid, you just haven’t learned.” 

So Bosco grabs the knife, Jasmine taking a deep breath before wrapping her hand around theirs. And she narrates the movements, keeping the tip of the knife on the board, the knife bobbing, cutting through the layers of the onion like a boat at sea. Once they fall into a rhythm, Bosco’s chin falls upon her shoulder, and all Jasmine can think about is how close their lips are. 

It brings her back to the picnic date. To Bosco’s apartment. To Bosco’s wet leather jacket falling from her shoulders, landing in a heap. To Bosco’s harsh words and soft lips pressed against her neck. Just a turn, just a few inches of distance, and Bosco could do it again. 

Caught in her thoughts, idly chopping, she doesn’t register that Bosco’s let go of the onion, wrapping their arm around Jasmine’s waist instead. 

Jasmine swallows and cleans the knife with her finger, looking over the even cuts. Looking over Bosco’s fingers under hers, how cool her hand feels against all their rings, winding like silver vines. 

“See,” Jasmine tries, but her voice is choked. “That wasn’t that bad. Now you could probably do it on your own.” 

But as Jasmine turns to move, Bosco’s grip stays firm. Jasmine’s stomach feels hot under their touch. 

“Could we maybe try one more.” Their voice had grown stronger, though Jasmine could see they were still on unsteady ground. “I, um… I still need your help.”

And when Jasmine dares turn back, glance up at their face, capture the flush of embarrassment paired with a weak smile, she nods and brings a teasing hand up to cup their cheek. “Of course, babycakes.”  

The laugh Bosco lets out at the cloying nickname rang sweet in Jasmine’s ears, though it’s ruined in an instant when Bosco rolls their eyes and spins Jasmine back around. 

“Don’t touch me with your onion hand.” 

[lee-scribbles-and-doodles]

Reactions to Episode 01

Sam and Max are really cute together so far.

I love how they play off of each other, they're just really funny.

The rat just puked out the phone!? I agree with Sam I wish I could unsee that.

I love Bosco and Sybil.

But why is Bosco light purple? Will that be explained or is that just a thing?

Asdfgs Bosco's tear gas launcher is just a spud cannon that shoots onions??? I stan!?

Max deserves as much cheese as he wants, and the way he sniffles when I had to have Sam put it back made me feel bad.

I kind of hate the Soda Poppers? Their voices are annoying and Peepers creeps me the fuck out.

On the upside I got to drop a bowling ball on one of their heads. Love how gleeful Sam and Max were to do it.

I know Sybil isn't a proper therapist, and that's she's a parody of know-nothing-know-it-alls but when I was in college I knew several first year psych students who acted exactly like her.

Asdfghs I chose Max and the Wedding Cake the first time I did that dream discussion thing and can I just say how nice it was of Sybil to be so supportive when she saw the obvious implications.

Queen really said "I support my new mlm clients/friends."

Sam gets brainwashed but Max doesn't? Is Max just too weird to brainwash?

Wish I could unsee dream-Max eating dream-Brady's head.

Aw, Bosco gave Sam the anti mind control helmet free of charge. Although I'm pretty sure it was just because he wants to get rid of Brady but still.

Also the helmet is just a pasta strainer and a metal coat hanger???

Brady Culture is lucky Sam didn't go Noir on his ass. Kind of hate that we had to use the Soda Poppers to beat him.

The boyfriends are back together ❤

[bluewatsons]

Paul Elie, How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?, New Yorker (June 15, 2020)

She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy.

A habit of bigotry, most apparent in her juvenilia, persisted throughout her life. 

In 1943, eighteen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor went north on a summer trip. Growing up in Georgia—she spent her childhood in Savannah, and went to high school in Milledgeville—she saw herself as a writer and artist in the making. She created illustrated books “too old for children and too young for grown-ups” and dryly titled an assemblage of her poems “The Priceless Works of M. F. O’Connor”; she drew cartoons and submitted them to magazines, noting that her hobby was “collecting rejection slips.”

On her travels, she and two cousins visited Manhattan: Chinatown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University. Then they went to Massachusetts, and visited Radcliffe, where one cousin was a student. O’Connor disliked both schools, and said so in letters and postcards to her mother. (Her father had died two years earlier.) Back in Milledgeville, O’Connor studied at the state women’s college (“the institution of higher larning across the road”). In 1945, she made her next trip north, enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she dropped the Mary (it put her in mind of “an Irish washwoman”) and became Flannery O’Connor.

Less than two decades later, she died, in Milledgeville, of lupus. She was thirty-nine, the author of two novels and a book of stories. A brief obituary in the Times called her “one of the nation’s most promising writers.” Some of her readers dismissed her as a “regional writer”; many didn’t know she was a woman.

We are still learning who Flannery O’Connor was. The materials of her life story have surfaced gradually: essays in 1969, letters in 1979, an annotated Library of America volume in 1988, and a cache of personal items deposited at Emory University in 2012, which yielded the “Prayer Journal,” jottings on faith and fiction from her time at Iowa. Each phase has deepened the portrait of the artist and furthered her reputation. Southerners, women, Catholics, and M.F.A.-program instructors now approach her with devotion. We call her Flannery; we see her as a wise elder, a literary saint, poised for revelation at a typewriter set up on the ground floor of a farmhouse near Milledgeville because treatments for lupus left her unable to climb stairs.

O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of previously unpublished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth” (Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia,” suggest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where she might have been all along.

The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

The work largely deserves the love it gets. O’Connor’s fiction is full of scenarios that now have the feel of mid-century myths: an evangelist preaching the gospel of a Church Without Christ outside a movie house; a grandmother shot by an escaped convict at the roadside; a Bible salesman seducing a female “interleckshul” in a hayloft and taking her wooden leg. The late story “Parker’s Back,” from 1964, in which a tattooed ex-sailor tries to appease his puritanical wife by getting a life-size face of Christ inked onto his back, is a summa of O’Connor’s effects. There’s outlandish naming (Obadiah Elihue Parker), blunt characterization (“The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two icepicks”), and pungent speech (“Mr. Parker . . . You’re a walking panner-rammer!”). There’s the way the action hurtles to an end both comic and profound, and the sense, as she put it in an essay, “that something is going on here that counts.” There’s the attractive-repulsive force of religion, as Parker submits to the tattooer’s needle in the hope of making himself a holy image of Christ. And there’s a preoccupation with human skin, and skin coloring, as a locus of conflict.

O’Connor defined herself as a novelist, but many readers now come to her through her essays and letters, and the core truth to emerge from the expansion of her body of work is that the nonfiction is as strong and strange as the fiction. The 1969 book of essays, “Mystery and Manners,” is both an astute manual on the craft of writing and a statement of precepts for the religious artist; the 1979 book of letters, “The Habit of Being,” is bedside reading as wisdom literature, at once companionable and full of barbed, contrarian insights. That they are books was part of O’Connor’s design. She made carbon copies of her letters with publication in mind: fearing that lupus would cut her life short, as it had her father’s, she used the letters and essays to shape the posthumous interpretation of her fiction.

Even much of the material left out of those books is tart and epigrammatic. Here is O’Connor, fresh from Iowa, on what a writing program can do for a writer:

It can put him in the way of experienced writers and literary critics, people who are usually able to tell him after not too long a time whether he should go on writing or enroll immediately in the School of Dentistry.

Here she is on life in Milledgeville, from a 1948 letter to the director of Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York:

Lately we have been treated to some parades by the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The Grand Dragon and the Grand Cyclops were down from Atlanta and both made big speeches on the Court House square while hundreds of men stamped and hollered inside sheets. It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with electric light bulbs.

On her first encounter, in 1956, with the scholar William Sessions:

He arrived promptly at 3:30, talking, talked his way across the grass and up the steps and into a chair and continued talking from that position without pause, break, breath, or gulp until 4:50. At 4:50 he departed to go to Mass (Ascension Thursday) but declared he would like to return after it so I thereupon invited him to supper with us. 5:50 brings him back, still talking, and bearing a sack of ice cream and cake to the meal. He then talked until supper but at that point he met a little head wind in the form of my mother, who is also a talker. Her stories have a non-stop quality, but every now and then she does have to refuel and every time she came down, he went up.

Reviewers of O’Connor’s fiction were vexed by her characters’ lack of interiority. Admirers of the nonfiction have reversed the charge, taking up the idea that the most vivid character in her work is Flannery O’Connor. The new film adroitly introduces the author-as-character. The directors—Mark Bosco, a Jesuit priest who teaches a course on O’Connor at Georgetown, and Elizabeth Coffman, who teaches film at Loyola University Chicago—draw on a full spread of archival material and documentary effects. The actress Mary Steenburgen reads passages from the letters; several stories are animated, with an eye to O’Connor’s adage that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” There’s a clip from John Huston’s 1979 film of her singular first novel, “Wise Blood,” which she wrote at Yaddo and in Connecticut before the onset of lupus forced her to return home. Erik Langkjaer, a publishing sales rep O’Connor fell in love with, describes their drives in the country. Alice Walker tells of living “across the way” from the farmhouse during her teens, not knowing that a writer lived there: “It was one of my brothers who took milk from her place to the creamery in town. When we drove into Milledgeville, the cows that we saw on the hillside going into town would have been the cows of the O’Connors.”

In May, 1955, O’Connor went to New York to promote her story collection, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” on TV. The rare footage of O’Connor lights up the documentary. She sits, very still, in a velvet-trimmed black dress; her accent is strong, her demeanor assured. “I understand you are living on a farm,” the host prompts. “Yes,” she says. “I only live on one, though. I don’t see much of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.” He asks her if she is a regional writer, and she replies:

I think that to overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge. I think that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world. So that you have a great deal of detachment.

That is a profound and stringent definition of the writer’s calling. It locates the writer’s art in the refinement of her character: the struggle to overcome an outlook that is an obstacle to a greater good, the letting go of the comforts of home. And it recognizes that detachment can leave the writer alone and apart.

At Iowa and in Connecticut, O’Connor had begun to read European fiction and philosophy, and her work, old-time in its particulars, is shot through with contemporary thought: Gabriel Marcel’s Christian existentialism, Martin Buber’s sense of “the eclipse of God.” She saw herself as “a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness” and saw the South as “Christ-haunted.”

All this can suggest points of similarity with Martin Luther King, Jr., another Georgian who was infused with Continental ideas up north and then returned south to take up a brief, urgent calling. Born four years apart, they grasped the Bible’s pertinence to current events, and saw religion as the tie that bound blacks and whites—as in her second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away,” from 1960, which opens with a black farmer giving a white preacher a Christian burial. O’Connor and King shared a gift for the convention-upending gesture, as in her story “The Enduring Chill,” in which a white man tries to affirm equality with the black workers on his mother’s farm by smoking cigarettes with them in the barn.

O’Connor lectured in a dozen states and often went to Atlanta to visit her doctors; she saw plenty of the changing South. That’s clear from her 1961 story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” (The title alludes to a thesis advanced by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw the world as gradually “divinized” by human activity in a kind of upward spiral.) A white man, living at home after college, takes his mother to “reducing class” on a newly integrated city bus. The sight of an African-American woman wearing the same style of hat that his mother is wearing stirs him to reflect on all that joins them. The sight of a black boy in the woman’s company prompts his mother to give the boy a gift: a penny with Lincoln’s profile on it. Things get grim after that.

The story was published in “Best American Short Stories” and won an O. Henry Prize in 1963. O’Connor declared that it was all she had to say on “That Issue.” It wasn’t. In May, 1964, she wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, a playwright who was born in Tennessee, lived in New York, and was ardent for civil rights:

About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I dont think is the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says Cassius, “and you leave, that dont mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems.

That passage, published in “The Habit of Being,” echoed a remark in a 1959 letter, also to Maryat Lee, who had suggested that Baldwin—his “Letter from the South” had just run in Partisan Review—could pay O’Connor a visit while on a subsequent reporting trip. O’Connor demurred:

No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.

O’Connor-lovers have been downplaying those remarks ever since. But they are not hot-mike moments or loose talk. They were written at the same desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode of correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature. This has put her champions in a bind—upholding her letters as eloquently expressive of her character, but carving out exceptions for the nasty parts.

Last year, Fordham University hosted a symposium on O’Connor and race, supported with a grant from the author’s estate. The organizer, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, edits a series of books on Catholic writers funded by the estate, has compiled a book of devotions drawn from O’Connor’s work, and has written a book of poems that “channel the voice” of the author. In a new volume in the series, “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor” (Fordham), she takes up Flannery and That Issue. Proposing that O’Connor’s work is “race-haunted,” she applies techniques from whiteness studies and critical race theory, as well as Toni Morrison’s idea of “Africanist ‘othering.’ ” O’Donnell presents a previously unpublished passage on race and engages with scholars who have offered context for the racist remarks. Although she is palpably anguished about O’Connor’s race problem, she winds up reprising those earlier arguments in current literary-critical argot, treating O’Connor as “transgressive in her writing about race” but prone to lapses and excesses that stemmed from social forces beyond her control.

The context arguments go like this. O’Connor was a writer of her place and time, and her limitations were those of “the culture that had produced her.” Forced by illness to return to Georgia, she was made captive to a “Southern code of manners” that maintained whites’ superiority over blacks, but her fiction subjects the code to scrutiny. Although she used racial epithets carelessly in her correspondence, she dealt with race courageously in the fiction, depicting white characters pitilessly and creating upstanding black characters who “retain an inviolable privacy.” And she was admirably leery of cultural appropriation. “I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro,” she told an interviewer—a reluctance that Alice Walker lauded in a 1975 essay.

All the contextualizing produces a seesaw effect, as it variously cordons off the author from history, deems her a product of racist history, and proposes that she was as oppressed by that history as anybody else was. It backdates O’Connor as a writer of her time when she was a near-contemporary of writers typically seen as writers of our time: Gabriel García Márquez (born 1927), Maya Angelou (1928), Ursula K. Le Guin (1929), Tom Wolfe (1930), and Derek Walcott (1930), among others. It suggests that white racism in Georgia was all-encompassing and brooked no dissent, even though (as O’Donnell points out) Georgia was then changing more dramatically than at any point before or since. Patronizingly, it proposes that O’Connor, a genius who prized detachment, lacked the free will to think for herself.

Another writer of that cohort is Toni Morrison, who was born in Ohio in 1931 and became a Catholic at the age of twelve. Morrison published “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” in 1992. “The fabrication of an Africanist persona” by a white writer, she proposed, “is reflexive: an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness.” Invoking Morrison, O’Donnell argues that O’Connor’s fiction is fundamentally a working-through of her own racism, and that the offending remarks in the letters “tell us . . . that O’Connor understood evil in the form of racism from the inside, as one who has practiced it.”

The clinching evidence is “Revelation,” drafted in late 1963. This extraordinary story involves Ruby Turpin—a white Southerner in middle age, the owner of a dairy farm—and her encounter in a doctor’s waiting room with a Wellesley-educated young woman, also white, who is so repulsed by Turpin’s condescension toward people there that she cries out, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” This arouses Turpin to quarrel with God as she surveys a hog pen on her property, and calls forth a magnificent final image of the hereafter in Turpin’s eyes—the people of the rural South heading heavenward. Some say this “vision” redeems the author on That Issue. Brad Gooch, in a 2009 biography, likened it to the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., spelled out in August, 1963; O’Donnell, drawing on a remark in the letters, depicts it as a “vision O’Connor has been wresting from God every day for much of her life.” Seeing it that way is a stretch. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech envisioned blacks and whites holding hands at the end of time; Turpin’s vision, by contrast, is a segregationist’s vision, in which people process to Heaven by race and class, equal but separate, white landowners such as Turpin preceded (the last shall be first) by “bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.”

After revising “Revelation” in early 1964, O’Connor wrote several letters to Maryat Lee. Many scholars maintain that their letters (often signed with nicknames) are a comic performance, with Lee playing the over-the-top liberal and O’Connor the dug-in gradualist, but O’Connor’s most significant remarks on race in her letters to Lee are plainly sincere. On May 3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.” Two weeks after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.” She died at home ten weeks later.

Those remarks show a view clearly maintained and growing more intense as time went on. They were objectionable when O’Connor made them. And yet—the argument goes—they’re just remarks, made in chatty letters by an author in extremis. They’re expressive but not representative. Her “public work” (as the scholar Ralph C. Wood calls it) is more complex, and its significance for us lies in its artfully mixed messages, for on race none of us is without sin and in a position to cast a stone.

That argument, however, runs counter to history and to O’Connor’s place in it. It sets up a false equivalence between the “segregationist by taste” and those brutally oppressed by segregation. And it draws a neat line between O’Connor’s fiction and her other writing where race is involved, even though the long effort to move her from the margins to the center has proceeded as if that line weren’t there. Those remarks don’t belong to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.

Posterity, in literature, is a strange god—consecrating Dickinson and Melville as American divines, repositioning T. S. Eliot as a man on the run from a Missouri boyhood and a bad marriage. Posterity has favored Flannery O’Connor: the readers of her work today far outnumber those in her lifetime. After her death, the racist passages were stumbling blocks to the next generation’s encounter with her, and it made a kind of sense to sidestep them. Now the reluctance to face them squarely is itself a stumbling block, one that keeps us from approaching her with the seriousness that a great writer deserves.

There’s a way forward, rooted in the work. For twenty years, the director Karin Coonrod has staged dramatic adaptations of O’Connor’s stories. Following a stipulation of the author’s estate, she uses every word: narration, description, dialogue, imagery, and racial epithets. Members of the multiracial cast circulate the full text fluidly from actor to actor, character to character, so that the author’s words, all of them, ring out in her own voice and in other voices, too. ♦

[bellatrixobsessed1]

A Flame For A Cabbage (Part 7)

“This is madness.” 

“Go back to your own universe.” Azula frowns. 

“You can’t just brainwash people into joining your side.” The woman insists. 

“I can and I am.” Azula frowns. “And my boyfriend is helping me do it.” 

“My fiance once helped me commit monstrous crimes against humanity, it doesn’t end well.” The woman argues, her fern green eyes burning into her. 

“There is nothing monstrous about cabbages. If anything, I am helping them achieve healthier diets.” Azula folds her arms over her chest. 

“You’re going about this the wrong way.” The woman says. 

“Fuck you and your eyebrows!” Azula declares. 

The woman narrows her eyes. “I’m trying to keep you from making a mistake. Brainwashing people is unethical.” 

“Brainwashing people is unethical.” Jet mocks in the background. 

“Don’t tell me what’s unethical!” Azula snaps. “You tried to murder your fiance with a spirit canon!” She does not know where from she has acquired this knowledge. 

“I didn’t try to murder my fiance. He asked me for nudes, I misread the text and sent nukes.” She pauses. “Honestly, I think it was kinda hot.” 

“Yeah, I suppose that is kind of sexy.” Azula agrees as Jet mutters something about how it is actually quite horrifying.

“Who are you?’ Azula asks.

“I’m you, but Earth Kingdom.”  The woman declares. 

“Fascinating.” Azula replies. It makes little sense being as this woman is older than she, but somehow, on an instinctual level that it is true. This woman...they are the same person. And if that is true, then she knows exactly how to get her to leave. “Your mother doesn’t love you.” A single tear slips down Azula’s cheek. But it is worth it, the woman shouts, “PROTEIN”, punches a hole through the wall with her foot, looks back, and gives Azula what has to be the most regal and well-mannered middle finger that she has ever seen. 

Yes. They definitely are, somehow, the same person.

Except Azula is the better her. Clearly, better. If nothing else, she has much better eyebrows than her swol, Earth Kingdom counterpart. 

With a final desperate look and another, “don’t do this, don’t make the same mistake I did…” the air around her closes in on her and sucks her back into whatever pocket in space that she had emerged from. 

“Yeah, fuck you, you better run!” Jet declares. 

“Jet, she got consumed by the universe.” Azula replies. “I got consumed by the universe.” She adds more softly. She turns back to her brainwashing equipment. If the man strapped to it wasn’t shitting bricks already, he certainly is now that he has witnessed that display. “Now. Where were we?” 

.oOo.

“Ooooor I can make onion and cranberry juice.” 

“Guru Pathik…” Aang grumbles. 

“How abo-ooo-ot…” He makes spazzical jazzhands. “...Onion and sulfuric acid juice!” 

.oOo.

“Thank goodness we're in time!” Sokka shouts.

“In time for what?” Kuei asks. 

Basco glowers at Sokka from the corner. “Nevermind…” boy says.”

TyLee pushes the matter with a, “Yeah. What are you in time for,” she wriggles her eyebrows. “cutie?”

“Uh, I'm kinda doing activites with Suki.” 

“Who?”  TyLee asks. 

“I don’t think that those guys are Kyoshi warriors.” Toph says. 

“How do you know have you ever seen Kyoshi warriors.” Mai asks.

“No but I can smell the emo on you. I know what the clank of Hot Topic jewelry sounds like. Kyoshi warriors don’t recruit emos or anyone who uses axe bodyspray. Trust me, I know. I use axe bodyspray.”

Mai flinches, for she thought that she was the only one emo enough to access the secret interdimensional Hot Topic store. She must eliminate the competition at once. With a flick of her wrist she launches a daggers at the girl. One of them is shaped like a Keanu Reeves, she resents that Toph will not be able to fully appreciate its beauty. 

TyLee decides that productivity is second priority and takes to dancing with Sokka she makes a few jabbing disco motions which Sokka imitates. “Oooh, it's like we're fighting each other!”

.oOo.

“Everyone, stop!” Jet calls. “Hammer time!” 

“What’s hammer time?” Sokka asks asks. 

“Quiet, or I’ll run the Earth King through.” Azula says. 

Sie clears his throat, “mam, that’s a cabbage.”

“Yes.” Azula nods. She finds it most effective to hold enemies at cabbage point. “I assure you all that you don’t want to know what damage I can do with a single cabbage.”

“Okay, but I’m supposed to be the one holding the Earth King hostage.” 

“You are holding the Earth King hostage.” Long Feng says. 

“Then who is this?” Azula asks. 

“Oh I’m just Quin Bohyuk Ching Shang the fourth. I am a hunter of anomalies.”  He pauses. “I am here for…” 

“I won’t let you hurt Basco!” Kuei declares from where Sie has him held at flame point. 

“You have no choice.” Sie declares. “This fight is over.”

Toph and Sokka drop their weapons and TyLee, being ever so cautious, chi blocks them. Momo, tries to fly but the Dailluminati are well aware that the creature is surprisingly and unapologetically jacked. He is also not allowed to be a Kyoshi warrior, for he too wears axe bodyspray. Knowing such, they encase him in stone. But Momo is not afraid, Momo can flex his way out of this if he has the desire. He hasn’t the desire though, he just wants some lychee berries. 

Having no more use for the Earth King, Sie shoves the king away. “Get them all out of my sight.”

“What. An. Asshole.” Azula mutters. “What kind of person does that?” She turns to Jet. “What kind of person holds an Earth King at flame point?” She asks as if she hadn’t fully intended on doing that herself. Jet does not point this out. Jet values his budding relationship with the socially inadequate cabbage merchant. 

Long Feng strides arrogantly into the room with some more Dailluminati agents in tow. “Now comes the part where I double cross you. Dailluminati, arrest the Fire Nation princess!” One of them steps forward, but this is only because he has tripped over Mai’s Keanu Reeves knife. “I said arrest him! What is wrong with you?!”

“It's because they haven't made up their minds.” Sie says. “They're waiting to see how this is going to end.” He casts a squeamish look at the cabbage merchant. He can see the malice in her eyes. She is plotting something. She is always plotting something. But what? 

“What are you talking about?” Long Feng asks. 

But he isn’t quite sure. The cabbage merchant is though. He can see it in that smug expression. He opens his mouth to speak but the merchant talks first. “I can see your whole history in your eyes. You were born with everything, so you never had to struggle, and connive, and claw your way to power. But true power, the divine right to rule, is something you work for.” Yes, indeed the divine right to rule is bestowed upon those who have earned it. The fire princess hasn’t earned it, not like she has. And Long Feng...well he definitely had the strugglys too she can see his whole history in his eyes (she in fact sees everyone’s histories in their eyes, she had once wanted to become a history teacher but she sacrificed that dream for greener cabbages) but he has not had to work as hard as she. And therefore he should not be blessed with the divine right to rule. “The fact is, they don't know which one of us is going to be sitting on that throne, and which one is going to be bowing down.” She adds.

Sie’s look of concern grows. “But I know, and you know.” She sits down on the throne and crosses her legs. “You have no idea who much these shoes hurt my feet.”  

Both Long Feng and Sie seem to deflate.

““Do I still get my ~*really cool~* prize?” Long Feng asks.

“I suppose.” Azula rolls her eyes. “I am, afterall, getting exactly what I want.” 

Long Feng squeals in delight and holds his hand out. 

“Jet.”

Jet steps forward. “Here you go.” He smiles. 

Long Feng unfolds the slip of paper. 

“Wh-what is this?” Long Feng asks. 

“It is dickbutt.” Azula replies. “I drew it myself.”

Long Feng deflates once more.  “You’ve beaten me at my own game.” he remarks as a single manly tear rolls down Sie’s cheek.

Azula smirks, “Don't flatter yourself! You were never even players.”  Her smile fades, for neither was she. 

Bosco grins in the corner. 

Azula swallows. 

They all swallow. 

Basco cackles.

[easyfoodnetwork]

What to Eat at Costa Rica’s Dazzling Mercado Central

Breakfast at Soda Tala: coffee, aguadulce en leche (panela or unprocessed cane sugar in warm milk), a Talapinto with salchichón, and a tortilla con queso.

Wander the maze-like aisles of San José’s historic market for gallo pinto, picadillo, and anything else you could ever want 

When navigating Costa Rica, landmarks are your main guide. Though street and house numbers definitely exist, the country has never fully developed a nationwide address system. Instead, you find places according to their proximity to other places: houses that belonged to famous historical figures, government buildings, statues, restaurants, and even trees are all possible reference points. If it’s a well-known spot, it’s bound to be used in an address. And the Mercado Central is the best-known of them all.

Established in 1880 and located in the heart of downtown San José, the Mercado Central is the city’s main market and spans more than an entire block of the Avenida Central. It’s a winding labyrinth of alleys and narrow corridors overcrowded with herbal remedies, flowers, local handicrafts, leather goods, spices and, of course, food.

“People here like to think of it as Costa Rica’s first mall,” says Roberto Campos, the administrator of the Mercado Central. But to describe it as a mall would be underselling its cultural importance. The Mercado’s role in Costa Rican society is vast and nebulous; this is where home remedies, staple recipes, local crafts, and traditions have lived on for more than a hundred years. The building was formally declared a cultural patrimony (a designated place of cultural importance) in 1995.

One of the most enduring parts of the market’s charm are the sodas — small restaurant stalls and cafeterias — many of which have been operating with the same menus for more than a century. These casual eateries are where you can find some of the best traditional Costa Rican cooking from all over the country. But without much in the way of signage, finding the best sodas takes a little work: Ask other customers or vendors and follow the crowds.

In fact, it is said there are two things that will happen to anyone visiting the Mercado, regardless of whether you’re a regular or a first-time customer: you will get lost, and you’ll get distracted. The way the Mercado is organized is the result of organic growth over time rather than careful planning, which might explain why you’ll find a soda selling empanadas next to a jewelry shop, and a flower shop plunked in front of a spice stall. Some of the sodas are easy to spot and others a bit hidden, so it’s best to ask around if you’re looking for something specific. Better yet, explore.

At the time of writing, the COVID-19 regulations issued by the Costa Rican Ministry of Health still require all bars and cantinas to remain closed, including those at the Mercado Central. But the food stalls and other businesses are open as usual, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. Some stalls accept cards and dollars, but Costa Rican colones are best. Here, then, is what to seek out for the ultimate taste of the Mercado Central.

Breakfast

The best-known breakfast dish — or possibly any dish — in Costa Rica is the gallo pinto, a magical concoction of rice and beans mixed together until the bean broth is completely absorbed by the rice. A typical gallo pinto breakfast is served with fried plantains, corn tortillas, slices of fresh cheese or a dollop of sour cream, and a protein of some sort: maybe bacon, sausage, a couple of fried eggs, fried cheese, or a steak.

At the Mercado Central, almost every soda offers its own take on the classic. Soda Tapia, a famous diner founded in 1893, serves a gallo pinto with plenty of olores (the Costa Rican version of the sofrito, with onion, cilantro, and sweet bell peppers) and optional sides including fried eggs, fried cheese, and slices of buttered bread.

Soda Tala serves another version of the gallo pinto known as the Talapinto: a thin egg omelet with chives at the base, a hefty portion of pinto, and a couple of slices of fried salchichón (sausage) on top. Natalia Cervantes (known as “Tala”) created the Talapinto at the behest of her customers, and it’s become so popular she’s trademarked the term.

Another popular breakfast dish here is the tortilla con queso or tortilla aliñada. Soda San Martín, founded in 1910, has two versions of this dish: the regular tortilla, which mixes fresh cheese into the white corn masa, and the tortilla rellena, a decadent riff stuffed with copious amounts of aged cheese and served with sour cream.

Gallos and Other Small Bites

A gallo, as defined by Costa Rican food historian Marjorie Ross, is something that can be wrapped up in a corn tortilla. That means just about anything can be a gallo, and virtually everything tastes better as one. One gallo is meant to be an appetizer; a couple make for a satisfying lunch, and you’ll find gallos at virtually every soda in the Mercado. Just pick your favorite filling.

At Soda San Bosco, which is right next to Soda San José, you can have a gallo de chile relleno (fried beef-stuffed peppers served over a couple of corn tortillas) or a gallo de barbudos (green beans, battered and fried). There’s even a gallo de canelón, which is a fried cannelloni filled with minced beef.

Gallos are also the perfect way to enjoy a good picadillo. The mixture of finely minced beef, vegetables, and spices is a requisite at any Costa Rican meal. Try the potato and chorizo version from Soda Flor del Carmen. The earthiness of the achiote, a red-hued spice commonly used throughout Central and South America, accentuates the heat of the chorizo.

The taco de camarón from Soda Flor del Carmen

And then, of course, there’s the almighty empanada, that stuffed-and-fried pocket of white corn masa that’s a ubiquitous street snack throughout Costa Rica, and much of Latin America. Recipes vary by region, and many are represented at the Mercado. The empanadas from Soda Puntarenas are considered some of the best in San José, perfectly spiced and crispy. The empanadas at Soda San Martín are known for their crunchy, herbed masa that goes great with cheese. The ones from Soda Flor del Carmen feature inventive fillings, like the pizza-flavored empanada and potato picadillo.

Lunch and Bigger Plates

Virtually every soda at the Mercado Central has its own twist on the Costa Rican casado, a combo plate of rice, beans, a protein of any kind (usually grilled or breaded chicken, pork chop, steak and onion, or fish) and salad. The formula is basic, but how each soda interprets it is what’s fascinating.

At Soda San José, the casado includes an option of chicken in tomato sauce or breaded fish, served alongside starchy sides including parboiled potatoes and spaghetti. The owner, doña Tere, always asks if you want an additional side of salad or tortillas. Soda Cristal’s casado, on the other hand, includes either breaded chicken or fish with accompaniments like a riff on Russian beet salad, spaghetti, tortilla chips, and picadillo, and a bowl of beef broth called sustancia.

Soda San Martín, which also offers casados, is known for another traditional Costa Rican dish — the olla de carne, a beef-and-vegetable stew boiled for several hours until the meat is soft and flaky. This version comes in three separate bowls: one with clear beef broth, another with meat and vegetables, and a third with plain white rice. You could try each bowl separately, but the idea is to gradually add the rice and vegetables to the broth, mixing them all together.

The caldosa — a type of Costa Rican ceviche served in a bag of Picaritas (a local brand of barbecue-flavored corn chips) — from Marisquería Costa Rica

The Mercado Central is one of the few places that still sells figurines of Nigüenta, a popular character in Costa Rican folklore, which are believed to bring good luck.

The Mercado Central is a point of confluence for many regional cuisines, and few are featured as prominently as the marisquerías, or fish shops, from the Pacific Coast. Seek out the arroz con camarones (stir-fried rice with shrimp) at the Marisquería Costa Rica, fish soup at Marisquería San José, or fried sea bass at Soda Cristal.

Coffee and Dessert

In a country known for incredible brews, a quick stop at Cafetería Central for a cup of coffee is mandatory before leaving the market. Ask for a café chorreado, a pour-over method specific to Costa Rica that uses a wooden stand fitted with a cotton sack in lieu of a paper filter.

For something sweet, La Sorbetera de Lolo Mora offers helado de sorbetera, or artisanal ice cream. “Sorbetera” is the Costa Rican Spanish word for the hand-crank ice cream maker. There’s only one flavor here, but it’s the only one you need: a delicately spiced vanilla ice cream with hints of nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove. It’s been made the same way by the Mora family for more than a century.

But if variety is your thing, try the specialty scoops at Soda Tapia in flavors like cas (a relative of the guava) and soursop, topped with chopped tropical fruits and heaps of cherry gelatin.

Lolo Mora’s famous artisanal ice cream with fruit, gelatin, and wafers

Sofía González is a Costa Rican food, culture, and technology writer living in San José.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2IpebyG https://ift.tt/3kmUoNA

Breakfast at Soda Tala: coffee, aguadulce en leche (panela or unprocessed cane sugar in warm milk), a Talapinto with salchichón, and a tortilla con queso.

Wander the maze-like aisles of San José’s historic market for gallo pinto, picadillo, and anything else you could ever want 

When navigating Costa Rica, landmarks are your main guide. Though street and house numbers definitely exist, the country has never fully developed a nationwide address system. Instead, you find places according to their proximity to other places: houses that belonged to famous historical figures, government buildings, statues, restaurants, and even trees are all possible reference points. If it’s a well-known spot, it’s bound to be used in an address. And the Mercado Central is the best-known of them all.

Established in 1880 and located in the heart of downtown San José, the Mercado Central is the city’s main market and spans more than an entire block of the Avenida Central. It’s a winding labyrinth of alleys and narrow corridors overcrowded with herbal remedies, flowers, local handicrafts, leather goods, spices and, of course, food.

“People here like to think of it as Costa Rica’s first mall,” says Roberto Campos, the administrator of the Mercado Central. But to describe it as a mall would be underselling its cultural importance. The Mercado’s role in Costa Rican society is vast and nebulous; this is where home remedies, staple recipes, local crafts, and traditions have lived on for more than a hundred years. The building was formally declared a cultural patrimony (a designated place of cultural importance) in 1995.

One of the most enduring parts of the market’s charm are the sodas — small restaurant stalls and cafeterias — many of which have been operating with the same menus for more than a century. These casual eateries are where you can find some of the best traditional Costa Rican cooking from all over the country. But without much in the way of signage, finding the best sodas takes a little work: Ask other customers or vendors and follow the crowds.

In fact, it is said there are two things that will happen to anyone visiting the Mercado, regardless of whether you’re a regular or a first-time customer: you will get lost, and you’ll get distracted. The way the Mercado is organized is the result of organic growth over time rather than careful planning, which might explain why you’ll find a soda selling empanadas next to a jewelry shop, and a flower shop plunked in front of a spice stall. Some of the sodas are easy to spot and others a bit hidden, so it’s best to ask around if you’re looking for something specific. Better yet, explore.

At the time of writing, the COVID-19 regulations issued by the Costa Rican Ministry of Health still require all bars and cantinas to remain closed, including those at the Mercado Central. But the food stalls and other businesses are open as usual, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. Some stalls accept cards and dollars, but Costa Rican colones are best. Here, then, is what to seek out for the ultimate taste of the Mercado Central.

Breakfast

The best-known breakfast dish — or possibly any dish — in Costa Rica is the gallo pinto, a magical concoction of rice and beans mixed together until the bean broth is completely absorbed by the rice. A typical gallo pinto breakfast is served with fried plantains, corn tortillas, slices of fresh cheese or a dollop of sour cream, and a protein of some sort: maybe bacon, sausage, a couple of fried eggs, fried cheese, or a steak.

At the Mercado Central, almost every soda offers its own take on the classic. Soda Tapia, a famous diner founded in 1893, serves a gallo pinto with plenty of olores (the Costa Rican version of the sofrito, with onion, cilantro, and sweet bell peppers) and optional sides including fried eggs, fried cheese, and slices of buttered bread.

Soda Tala serves another version of the gallo pinto known as the Talapinto: a thin egg omelet with chives at the base, a hefty portion of pinto, and a couple of slices of fried salchichón (sausage) on top. Natalia Cervantes (known as “Tala”) created the Talapinto at the behest of her customers, and it’s become so popular she’s trademarked the term.

Another popular breakfast dish here is the tortilla con queso or tortilla aliñada. Soda San Martín, founded in 1910, has two versions of this dish: the regular tortilla, which mixes fresh cheese into the white corn masa, and the tortilla rellena, a decadent riff stuffed with copious amounts of aged cheese and served with sour cream.

Gallos and Other Small Bites

A gallo, as defined by Costa Rican food historian Marjorie Ross, is something that can be wrapped up in a corn tortilla. That means just about anything can be a gallo, and virtually everything tastes better as one. One gallo is meant to be an appetizer; a couple make for a satisfying lunch, and you’ll find gallos at virtually every soda in the Mercado. Just pick your favorite filling.

At Soda San Bosco, which is right next to Soda San José, you can have a gallo de chile relleno (fried beef-stuffed peppers served over a couple of corn tortillas) or a gallo de barbudos (green beans, battered and fried). There’s even a gallo de canelón, which is a fried cannelloni filled with minced beef.

Gallos are also the perfect way to enjoy a good picadillo. The mixture of finely minced beef, vegetables, and spices is a requisite at any Costa Rican meal. Try the potato and chorizo version from Soda Flor del Carmen. The earthiness of the achiote, a red-hued spice commonly used throughout Central and South America, accentuates the heat of the chorizo.

The taco de camarón from Soda Flor del Carmen

And then, of course, there’s the almighty empanada, that stuffed-and-fried pocket of white corn masa that’s a ubiquitous street snack throughout Costa Rica, and much of Latin America. Recipes vary by region, and many are represented at the Mercado. The empanadas from Soda Puntarenas are considered some of the best in San José, perfectly spiced and crispy. The empanadas at Soda San Martín are known for their crunchy, herbed masa that goes great with cheese. The ones from Soda Flor del Carmen feature inventive fillings, like the pizza-flavored empanada and potato picadillo.

Lunch and Bigger Plates

Virtually every soda at the Mercado Central has its own twist on the Costa Rican casado, a combo plate of rice, beans, a protein of any kind (usually grilled or breaded chicken, pork chop, steak and onion, or fish) and salad. The formula is basic, but how each soda interprets it is what’s fascinating.

At Soda San José, the casado includes an option of chicken in tomato sauce or breaded fish, served alongside starchy sides including parboiled potatoes and spaghetti. The owner, doña Tere, always asks if you want an additional side of salad or tortillas. Soda Cristal’s casado, on the other hand, includes either breaded chicken or fish with accompaniments like a riff on Russian beet salad, spaghetti, tortilla chips, and picadillo, and a bowl of beef broth called sustancia.

Soda San Martín, which also offers casados, is known for another traditional Costa Rican dish — the olla de carne, a beef-and-vegetable stew boiled for several hours until the meat is soft and flaky. This version comes in three separate bowls: one with clear beef broth, another with meat and vegetables, and a third with plain white rice. You could try each bowl separately, but the idea is to gradually add the rice and vegetables to the broth, mixing them all together.

The caldosa — a type of Costa Rican ceviche served in a bag of Picaritas (a local brand of barbecue-flavored corn chips) — from Marisquería Costa Rica

The Mercado Central is one of the few places that still sells figurines of Nigüenta, a popular character in Costa Rican folklore, which are believed to bring good luck.

The Mercado Central is a point of confluence for many regional cuisines, and few are featured as prominently as the marisquerías, or fish shops, from the Pacific Coast. Seek out the arroz con camarones (stir-fried rice with shrimp) at the Marisquería Costa Rica, fish soup at Marisquería San José, or fried sea bass at Soda Cristal.

Coffee and Dessert

In a country known for incredible brews, a quick stop at Cafetería Central for a cup of coffee is mandatory before leaving the market. Ask for a café chorreado, a pour-over method specific to Costa Rica that uses a wooden stand fitted with a cotton sack in lieu of a paper filter.

For something sweet, La Sorbetera de Lolo Mora offers helado de sorbetera, or artisanal ice cream. “Sorbetera” is the Costa Rican Spanish word for the hand-crank ice cream maker. There’s only one flavor here, but it’s the only one you need: a delicately spiced vanilla ice cream with hints of nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove. It’s been made the same way by the Mora family for more than a century.

But if variety is your thing, try the specialty scoops at Soda Tapia in flavors like cas (a relative of the guava) and soursop, topped with chopped tropical fruits and heaps of cherry gelatin.

Lolo Mora’s famous artisanal ice cream with fruit, gelatin, and wafers

Sofía González is a Costa Rican food, culture, and technology writer living in San José.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2IpebyG via Blogger https://ift.tt/38G1cDw

[jessiewre]

Day 7

Sat 11th Jan

I felt ill the next morning, had a headache and felt rubbish - classic case of the gorilla blues - but peanut butter on toast with tea definitely perked me up. We got in the taxi with the annoying man and headed off for Rotunda, the port near Kabale for our Lake Bunyonyi hostel. About a 1.5 hour journey.

The car had no rear view mirror but in its place was a mini tv screen with films playing.

I mean, who actually uses their rear view mirror anyway.

The driver spent a lot of the journey trying to convince us to book him to take us to the next place we were thinking of going - Ishasha, in the South of the Queen Elizabeth National Park - but then he dropped his quote and it landed like a lead balloon. There was no way we were going to pay him 350$.

Then he got a phone call from our hotel guy, to tell him that we had left our travel mosquito net behind. Darn it!

I remembered that the driver had said he was bringing more customers in the same direction in the afternoon, so I asked him if he could bring it to us. He said Yes but I felt like it might have been dependant on us booking him for future travel...

Eww this was more complicated that it was worth maybe.

We got to the little port after about 1.5 hours and the boat taxi said 20000 so we asked if he meant each, and he said yes.

Our annoying taxi driver was really getting on my nerves to be honest so we told him that we would call him later to discuss the transport thing, and the net, and we left on the taxi boat.

The lake and surrounding islands were beautiful and we pulled up to the cute Om Hostel to be greeted by a man called Hillary (as in Clinton, he said). It was on a hillside with a lake house right on the water and other huts up the hill.

He carried our bags up 4 flights to the reception at the top and told us our room would be ready soon. We noticed another couple knocking around and he was organising something for them so we asked to order lunch. The menu looked good and we were starving so we ordered Pad Thai, quesadillas & a giant samosa!

What a winning combo.

The chef was away from the kitchen on an unknown errand so we waited an hour or so for him to arrive - ok I was staaaarving by this point - then the super friendly likeable Bosco arrived, apologising profusely for being unavailable and we instantly liked him and told him of course no worries.

We were thrilled when the combo turned up and we got stuck in.

However the pad Thai was a packet of cheap noodles with sauce on top, the quesadillas was a folded chapati with sauce and some cheese inside, then the samosa was giant, I’ll give it that, but with sauce inside too.

Each one had EXACTLY the same sauce made from tomatoes, peppers and onions. Roy would have loved it.

Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t taste bad - but it was a little bit repetitive.

Phil didn’t seem to mind one bit, he was tucking in like Joey and the trifle.

Still, it filled a hole and we decided we’d maybe ask the chef for some recommends for dinner.

We checked into our room but Phil remembered that he had booked the lake hut and this clearly wasn’t it. We asked Hillary who had inadvertently given it to the other couple just before we’d checked in as he thought it was available.

Phil had booked this lake hut TWO months previously, so it was kind of annoying.

But we agreed that we would just shift there the next day as the couple were leaving then. Plus our room was closer to the kitchen and campfire area, so less steps.

Hillary let us use his phone to quickly call the annoying driver and say Please don’t come to the hostel as he’d said he was going to, just to leave the net at the port and we’d work it out from there. He agreed to call Hillary when he’d dropped it off.

We got ourselves organised and went for a hike up around the lake into the hills and it was SO NICE. Within about 5 minutes, the views were amazing and it was a really fun trail with rocks to climb and cute paths. We went past local houses and the children waved and smiled.

Then a teenage boy appeared and started to chat to us and invite us to his craft shop - we’d been told this might happen - so we obliged and went along. There we met his brother Apollo who said he’d love to walk with us further up the hill and tell us a little bit about the Lake and its history. Again, we’d been given a heads up this might happen - so we cracked on and heard about Punishment Island, Upside Down Island, Zebra island and Dr Sharp (will fill you in another time on these). Some children turned up and were playing football, but we looked closer and realised their ball was made from plastic bags all rolled up and then tied with rags. So resourceful. What do you do if you want a football but can’t afford one? You MAKE ONE OUT OF RUBBISH.

We hiked back down and jumped into the lake, as its one of the only inland places you can safely swim in East Africa, or maybe even all Africa - no dangerous animals or diseases. Phil did a few little lengths but never ventured too far as he definitely imagined that there would probably be one single hippo or crocodile in the lake who’d travelled there that day just for him and that it would definitely want to eat his chicken legs.

Just after we got out, we heard a boat sound and I just knew - I said to Phil I bet its that driver bloke. Sure enough, there he was, mosquito net in hand to try and make us book him for the next bit of our trip at his extortionate prices. He walked down to the pier to somehow contain him rather then let him come up to the restaurant and spoke to him to explain that we would call him if we needed him but were not in a position to pay this money. Hillary was nearby so I asked him how much the boat should be so we could pay for it - and he said 15,000 which was annoying as we’d paid 20,000. But anyway, we paid for his boat and he eventually left. I really didn’t like him by this point.

Dinner was a massive step up, Bosco really came into his own and we had delicious vege burger, vege curry and onion rings.

We sat round the campfire with the other couple (Dutch and Lithuanian) and Hillary and Bosco joined us, telling us about the dowry marriage system in Uganda - how men have to pay the family of the girl they want to marry, and if that can’t afford to do this then they can’t marry her. The father of the man used to pay the dowry for his son, also earning the right to take the virginity of his sons new bride, but this stopped around the 80s apparently. Can’t think why. WTAF.

[venuebookingz]

Best Kitty Party Venues in Jayanagar Bangalore

List of Best Best Kitty Party Venues in Jayanagar Bangalore with Facilities, Menu & Prices, Reviews, Ratings, Photos and Manager Contact Number.Bangalore is one of the top metropolitian city with more than 1000+ Banquet Halls in Bangalore

Halcyon Conclave Koramangala

Address: Halcyon Conclave, No. 9, Drafadilla Layout,4th Block, Koramangala, Koramangala, Bangalore

Features: Seating Capacity:30, Floating Capacity:50, Food: Veg & Non Veg, Liquor:Allowed, Car Parking: 50 Cars

About Venue:Halcyon Conclave is one of the most famous banquet hall located in the heart of the city Koramangala, Bangalore. The venue is best suitable for Engagement, Reception, Wedding, Ring Ceremony, Birthday, Mehandi Function and All Corporate Events. The venue can host comfortably up to 50 People. Halcyon Conclave is best suited for kitty-party. Veg & Non Veg food is allowed in Halcyon Conclave & liquor Allowed. Car Parking capacity is 50. Nearest Bus Stop is Kormangala Bus Stop: 100 M & nearest railway station is Majestic Railway Station : 10 KM.

Timepass Dinner Party Hall Basavanagudi

Address: Timepass Dinner Party Hall, No.37 , 4th Floor , Bosco Court , Gandhi Bazaar Main Road, DVG Road, Gandhi Bazaar, Basavanagudi, Bangalore

Features: Seating Capacity:400, Floating Capacity:500, Food: Only Veg, Liquor:Not Allowed, Car Parking: 15 Cars

About Venue:Basavanagudi is a well-known locality in Bangalore, and Timepass Dinner Party Hall is located in heart of Basavanagudi and equally famous banquets in Basavanagudi. The venue is ideal to host medium-sized gatherings, and they also render services for other wedding-related festivities. Timepass Dinner Party Hall is best suited for kitty-party. The venue offers a seating capacity 400 and maximum floating capacity of around 500 guests. The lighting in the banquet hall with stunning chandeliers add a scintillating effect to any function held here.Only Veg is allowed & Liquor Not Allowed. Every event is just a picture-perfect memory with the help of their panel of in-house decorators. This banquet hall is at walk-able distance to shopping malls like big bazaar, central mall

Red Onion Banquet Hall Shanthi Nagar

Address: Red Onion Banquet Hall, KH Road, Double Road, Shanthi Nagar, Bangalore

Features: Seating Capacity:80, Floating Capacity:200, Food: Veg & Non Veg, Liquor:Not Allowed, Car Parking: 12 Cars

About Venue:If you are looking for a budget banquet hall in Shanthi Nagar Bangalore, then Red Onion Banquet Hall in Shanthi Nagar is a multipurpose venue suitable for a Engagement, Reception, Wedding, Birthday & Naming Ceremony.Clad with all the modern equipment, the hall ensures a successful event. Hall can accomodate up to 80 people and 200 floating crowd. Red Onion Banquet Hall is best suited for kitty-party. Our banquet hall sports a massive chandelier and a large carpet area

Ugadi Banquet Hall Jayanagar

Address: Ugadi Banquet Hall, 609, 10th A Main Road, 4th Block Jayanagar , Jayanagar, Bangalore

Features: Seating Capacity:200, Floating Capacity:250, Food: Veg & Non Veg, Liquor:Not Allowed, Car Parking: 10 Cars

About Venue:If you are looking splendid space and big venue in Jayanagar Bangalore for your kitty-party, then Ugadi Banquet Hall is a classy option. Outside food or catering service is not allowed and out side vendor like decorator strictly prohibited. So if you are looking for a venue that will make your kitty-party look amazing, then this venue is the perfect.Nearest Bus Stop is Jayanagar 4th,Block & nearest railway station is yeshwanthpur.

Golden Palace Party Hall Banashankari

Address: Golden Palace Party Hall, 47, 2nd Cross Rd, JHBCS Layout,Padmanabha Nagar, Banashankari, Bangalore

Features: Seating Capacity:250, Floating Capacity:350, Food: Veg & Non Veg, Liquor:Not Allowed, Car Parking: 100 Cars

About Venue:One of the most prominent and exclusive banquet hall in Jayanagar Banashankari Bangalore. If you are looking for a noise-free, acoustic banquet hall in Banashankari, then Golden Palace Party Hall is perfect place.Veg & Non Veg is allowed & Liquor Not Allowed. 2 AC dress changing rooms available.We provide amenities like projectors and different seating styles (theatre, round table, regular etc.) to suit your needs.

Srinathjis Hayagriva Banquet Hall Basavanagudi

Address: Srinathjis Hayagriva Banquet Hall, # 112/8, Beside More Megastore, Bull Temple Road, Basavanagudi, Bangalore

Features: Seating Capacity:400, Floating Capacity:500, Food: Only Veg, Liquor:Not Allowed, Car Parking: 100 Cars

About Venue:The beautifully-designed and well-lit Srinathjis Hayagriva Banquet Hall can easily accommodate around 400 guests and floating can manage upto 500 people, which makes it ideal for hosting kitty-party.This banquet hall in Basavanagudi Bangalore is well-equipped with all the modern amenities like AC, Stage, Mike, Green Rooms & AC making it a perfect venue.Nearest Bus Stop is Basavangudi Bus Stop & nearest railway station is Majestic Ralway Station 7km.

Green Gardenia Banquet Hall Banashankari

Address: Green Gardenia Banquet Hall, 376, 1st Floor, Tripura Arcade, MK Puttalingaiah Road, Above SBI Bank, Banashankari, Bangalore

Features: Seating Capacity:300, Floating Capacity:500, Food: Only Veg, Liquor:Not Allowed, Car Parking: 30 Cars

About Venue:Green Gardenia Banquet Hall is well suited for kitty-party.Venue is located in heart of Banashankari Bangalore. The banquet hall seating capacity is 300. Nearest Bus Stop is Padmanabhanagar Bus Stop & nearest railway station is Majestic Railway STation. Experience premier banqueting facilities at our business hotel in Bangalore, where you can completely immerse in fervor of the occasion and leave all the worries to us.

Best Biryani Food for kitty-party

If you are looking biryani food, then check Biryani Restaurants in Jayanagar, Biryani Restaurants in JP Nagar, Book Truck Online in Bangalore, Book Truck Online in Mumbai

[danialmilford3-blog]

Diet strategy To shed stomach Fat

This cafe is extremely vegetarian friendly! They have tons of choices from breads to pizzas to salads. My preferred salad on the menu is Insalata Italiana. The flavorful blend of Combined Greens with Marinated Artichokes, White Beans, Sundried Tomatoes and Parmesan Cheese is delectable and only expenses $6.ninety five! The pizza that really feeds my urge for food is the Bosco which toppings consist of, tomato, mushrooms, spinach, crimson onion and mozzarella cheese. I usually go for the 8" ($11.seventy five), but there is also a 12" ($17.seventy five) choice. As you do this on a conscious basis for a little while, and if you're severe about dropping excess weight, you'll notice that you will automatically start making options that are more oriented towards good diet. It just occurs normally. Your body wants to be healthy if you just get out of its way and let it.

Good consuming habits play a component to getting healthy skin. Do not overeat and attempt to include more fruits, vegetables and nuts in your daily diet plan. Consume much less at evening as bodily actions reduce so that your body does not have to function so hard. For more information on 바카라사이트 take a look at the web page. Dieting: Certain foods -- like fish, berries, and choice vegetables -- assist protect and even mend the pores and skin. Include such meals in your diet and your pores and skin is sure to experience the rewards. If you are a enthusiast of peanut dressing on your salad, you're likely to discover Avocado roll Wasabi on 82nd to be 1 of the best sushi eating places in Indianapolis. Known for its spectacularly new fish (not so simple to discover in a citymuch from the ocean), their rice is usually what we think aboutcompletely cooked. These type of detailsmake a difference to diners. You can be. You have a correct to be. And you deserve to be as wholesome and as pleased as you want at any wholesome excess weight with out at any time showing on national television, without ever adorning a journal cover, with out enviable, photogenic six pack abs, with out bulging biceps, and without at any time fitting into your skinniest at any time denims. For their temaki or what they call cones, which arrive pretty stuffed, you can purchase the avocado prawn sesame for 8.fifty Euros, or the spicy salmon or the spicy shrimp for 7.fifty Euros or the spicy tune for 9.fifty Euros.

[thehecticvegan]

New Post has been published on The Hectic Vegan - Eating Vegan – The Lounges

New Post has been published on http://www.thehecticvegan.com/eating-vegan-lounges/

Eating Vegan – The Lounges

The Lounges are a collection of cute cafes/restaurants/bars (as they call them – ‘lounges’) all over the UK, and they have a great vegan menu! 🙂

For a list of locations, see the bottom of the post.

Check out the items below that are suitable for vegans:

Brunch

Vegan Breakfast – Falafels, hash browns, baked beans, slow-roasted tomato, sautéed mushrooms, spinach, wood-roasted pepper and toast.

Vegan Avocado Brunch – With lime, chilli, coriander and tomato on toasted ciabatta.

Toast – Two slices of white or brown with vegan spread and jam, marmalade or Marmite.

Tapas

Vegan Patatas Bravas

Hummus – With extra virgin olive oil and smoked paprika.

Avocado, Tomato & Chilli Dip – With toasted pumpkin seeds and smoked paprika.

Mains

Falafel & Hummus Wrap – With red cabbage, wild rocket and carrot tapenade, served with vegan house slaw.

Butternut Squash, Lentil & Coconut Curry – With jasmine rice and flatbread.

Vegan Falafel Burger – With wood-roasted pepper, rocket, tomato, red onion, chimichurri and lemon & coriander hummus in a sourdough bun, with vegan house slaw and fries (you can upgrade the fries to sweet potato fries, and add any of the following extras to your burger: Hummus, Sautéed Mushrooms, Jalapeños, Guacamole, or Avocado).

Soup of the Day – With warm ciabatta.

Salads

Vegan Falafel Salad – With butternut squash, wood-roasted peppers, black quinoa, mixed leaves, coriander and French vinaigrette dressing (you can also add some avocado if you like).

Vegan Big Lounge Salad – Avocado, spinach, wild rocket, cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, tenderstem broccoli and croutons, tossed in French vinaigrette dressing (you can add some falafel too).

Sides

Ciabatta (you can also ask for it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar)

Fries

Sweet Potato Fries

Vegan House Slaw

Little Lounge Salad

Desserts/Cakes

Dark Chocolate and Ginger Torte

Fruity Flapjack

  Download the menu here to keep a copy

  For more info, please check The Lounges’ website

If you have any updates or comments about this, please add them below, we want this to be as updated as possible so any tips you have will be greatly appreciated!

First written April 2017, last updated 24 Apr 2017

Lounges locations include:

Alcampo Lounge, Brighton

Alto Lounge, Reading

Arcado Lounge, Christchurch

Arco Lounge, Birmingham

Argo Lounge, Peterborough

Bacco Lounge, Rugby

Banco Lounge, Bristol

Bevano Lounge, Urmston

Bonzo Lounge, Keynsham

Bosco Lounge, Woodley

Brasco Lounge, Liverpool

Brezo Lounge, Cheadle

Brunello Lounge, Weston-super-Mare

Caballo Lounge, Epsom

Capo Lounge, Mansfield

Cappello Lounge, Newcastle Under Lyme

Carnero Lounge, Derby

Castello Lounge, Wellingborough

Centro Lounge, Loughborough

Circo Lounge, Bournemouth

Como Lounge, Witney

Concho Lounge, Newquay

Conto Lounge, Bournemouth

Cordero Lounge, Frome

Croeso Lounge, Mumbles

Cultivo Lounge, Letchworth

Curio Lounge, Stroud

Delfino Lounge, Poole

Desco Lounge, Solihull

Drago Lounge, Newport

Edmundo Lounge, Bury St Edmunds

Estero Lounge, Monmouth

Expo Lounge, Manchester

Faro Lounge, Lichfield

Fino Lounge, Cardiff

Grupo Lounge, Bristol

Impero Lounge, Portishead

Juno Lounge, Cardiff

Kino Lounge, Kettering

Loco Lounge, Birmingham

Lounge, Bristol

Ludo Lounge, Bournemouth

Marino Lounge, Wallasey

Maritimo Lounge, Southampton

Mercado Lounge, Market Harborough

Metro Lounge, Amersham

Milo Lounge, Liverpool

Modelo Lounge, Hove

Molino Lounge, Oldham

Molo Lounge, Southend-on-Sea

Nautico Lounge, Weymouth

Nostrano Lounge, Staines-upon-Thames

Novello Lounge, Telford

Ocho Lounge, Cardiff

Orto Lounge, Evesham

Otto Lounge, Heswall

Palacio Lounge, Falmouth

Paletto Lounge, Corby

Pato Lounge, Orpington

Pico Lounge, Glossop

Pinto Lounge, Banbury

Portivo Lounge, Gloucester

Porto Lounge, Bristol

Puerto Lounge, Exeter

Quinto Lounge, Sutton Coldfield

Renato Lounge, Birmingham

Rivo Lounge, Chippenham

Santo Lounge, Southampton

Seco Lounge, Plymouth

Tappeto Lounge, Kidderminster

Tarro Lounge, Hinckley

Teatro Lounge, Clevedon

Tinto Lounge, Bristol

Toro Lounge, Cirencester

Trago Lounge, Southampton

Truro Lounge, Cornwall

Unico Lounge, Wilmslow

Valeroso Lounge, Trowbridge

Velo Lounge, Bath

Verdo Lounge, Sutton Coldfield

Visto Lounge, Torquay

Vivo Lounge, Dorchester

Zapato Lounge, Northampton

Zinco Lounge, Swansea

[phrynewrites]

i was the anon with the bad day and u killed it!!! thank u babes

Ah thank you babes!! I’m so glad you enjoyed it and again sorry it took forever!

[phrynewrites]

omg bosco cooking their cooking class dish for their anniversary 🥺 probably practiced making it everyday for weeks to perfect it too 🥺

Literally like every night that week they’re taking that same cooking class again, with the same instructor they said “fucking rice” to, hush trying to get it right. And every time the risotto is a little too underdone and doesn’t thicken up enough and the vegetables are cut uneven and sometimes still have the core and the seasoning is nonexistent. But Jasmine instilled that they should try anyway so they’re going to try anyway.

And even though on the night of it’s still crunchy, and now it has probably too much salt, and the risotto didn’t absorb all the liquid, and Bosco has a pizza under the broiler because they know it’ll be necessary, They plated it nicely and put out some flowers and candles and Jasmine’s in tears over how sweet it is and how they remembered and tears up more to know they put the effort into going to that class for a whole week again and again to learn (now she can see why they weren’t hanging out with her during her night shifts) and she’s just…she just can’t believe someone put forth all this effort for her.

But bosco reassures she’s worth the effort. And also that it’s not good risotto. And she doesn’t have to actually eat it. And that there’s pizza in the oven for them instead

[phrynewrites]

that cooking class blind date sounds so domesticated i love it

Too bad Bosco’s ruining it a bit by muttering about how they’re gonna cut their fingers off and don’t know what they’ll do then because they “need at least two but probably three of those” and jasmine has to remind them that “the knife doesn’t just cut on its own and you can put it down at any time” before and has to step in to stop a stubborn Bosco.

Also when the instructor is tells they’re making risotto and shows the example Bosco says a little too loudly that it’s just fucking rice and Jasmine can’t help but cackle, which makes the instructor stop.

[phrynewrites]

have you seen the cooking video with jasmine on james mansfield youtube channel bc i keep thinking thats how blinddate au jasmine will guide bosco around the first time they cook together the bit with the garlic at 9:10 tickled me in particular

Ok but yes literally that's it like. Like Jasmine spends 10 minutes introducing exactly what they're making while Bosco stares off into nothing. And then when Jasmine says it's a grilled cheese they look over all the stuff like...um...literally all you need is bread and cheese what is this nonsense. Probably puts half of it away because Jasmine's confidence in them is meaningful of course but she's trying to do way too much.

Also Jaymes reading out "one medium onion, coarsely chopped" is literally a Bosco v. Onion moment: round 2 Electric Boogaloo: Now more coarse. They'd fully be like "what is coarse?" and Jasmine would be like "just chop it like usual, baby" knowing that Bosco only has one mode and it's coarse as fuck.

[phrynewrites]

If you want to keep talking about blind date au, please talk more about their cooking class. I think i read somewhere that jasmine is a good cook and bosco isn’t? 😆

Oh ok so Jasmine is actually excited for this one because she is actually a great cook but again, disappointment hits when she sees Bosco get off at the same stop and just *knows* it’s another date with them.

But it’s a little different like typically confident bosco, who rips into their designs and eats all her hummus while doing it is now bashful and admits they, like burn water and there’s a 0% chance they’ll make anything edible.

So Jasmine spends the whole time helping them out and relaying the instructions in an understandable way. And she stops Bosco before they slice their fingers chopping an onion. And she tries to guide them from behind but is a little too short to see what she’s doing, so they switch positions, Bosco resting their head on her shoulder as she shows them how to properly chop it, her hand guiding their motions.

Also everyone there clocks them for looking so couple-y, like they’re getting asked how long they’ve been together as Jasmine raises the spoon to Bosco’s lips so they can taste the first unburnt thing they made and Bosco practically chokes before explaining it’s a stupid blind date and explaining the whole scheme and how annoying it is. And everyone’s like huh and you two are funny storytellers too. Bet it keeps the relationship spicy.