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Evening walk @ Bangkok - 2019.03.06

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Weary Travellers

After a week of restful stay in Sélestat, we have proceeded with a crazy amount of traveling via train during our last week’s stay in this small town.

We spent a day in Colmar, then we took a 4hrs train to Grindelwald in Switzerland. The next day we went to Strasbourg (was going to Paris after) but due to lack of time we ended up going to Baden-Baden in Germany. On our last day, we took a train and spent a day in Paris finally.

It is somewhat crazy to think that some much is done within such a short period of time. And the vast extent of variety that is tightly scattered on this continent that can be easily travelled to.

Today, we are making our way from Sélestat to Prague. We are journeying through Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Nürnberg, then finally we arrive in Prague.

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Strasbourg

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I started this trip in January 2019, the year in which I would turn 30. I remember taking this photo and thinking that it was still so far away (March).

Now that it's passed, life simply goes on.

The only person that really made a big deal about it was me. And I can't believe what a big deal I made out it... Yet, I'm forever thankful that I decided to be traveling while it passed.

Although, my antics weren't easy for my travel partner to endure. I'm so happy to have her in my life. As well as her unwavering support for all my ever-changing endeavors. I left my comfort zone by going on this trip, but I can safely say it was worth it.

Now, I can say I actually say "I quit life, and traveled the world", and I saw Europe before 30, and built such a strong relationship with someone that I care dearly about - the only person I've had direct contact with for the last five months, lol.

Love you, 🐰🐇

You mean the world to me.

P.S. I'm sorry for being dramatic (I told you I'd be a good actor).

-G

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TAIPEI | Architecture

The streets and alleys of Taipei are lined indiscriminately barred windows, power-lines, shop signs, and electrical transformers. This is a place imbued with the complexity not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also in its history and identity. Its architecture is the reflection of the unique cultural backdrop and survival principles.

When the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, the Nationalists led about two million Mainland Chinese to escape to Taiwan. It was never meant to be home, it was seen as a “temporary base of operation”.

With the arrival of about two million Mainland Chinese, Taiwan (especially its urban areas) faced a serious housing shortage. Expediency, not beauty was the priority of Taiwan’s mid-twentieth century architects. Added to the mix was the fact that the political party ruling Taiwan in the mid-twentieth century didn’t see Taiwan as a permanent home, and therefore weren’t particularly motivated to make their “temporary base of operations” look pretty. So while Taiwan experienced seriously rapid growth in the second half of the twentieth century, most of it tended to lean towards practicality rather than beauty.

But what happens when expectations aren’t met, and what is supposed to be temporary becomes permanent? How does that affect the psychology and identity of a nation?

When the Nationalists acknowledged that recovery of Mainland china was impossible; by the end of 1980s, the people of Taiwan had been forbidden from knowing their own history, but then started to build up their own history piece by piece to fill the void.

The architecture in Taipei may not be attractive in plain sight, but perhaps there is beauty nonetheless. Its beauty lays in its spirit, the spirit of endlessly striving, striving for survival against all odds.

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Sélestat | A Vacation From Vacation

We arrived in Sélestat @ 20:20 after the most epic train ride from Bologna. Our Airbnb host picks us up from the train station and we headed for our two-weeks refuge.

The host is quite an interesting lady — she doesn’t speak much English and upon generously picking us up from the train station, she simply dropped us off in our apartment and viola, there she goes like the wind.

It has almost been a week here now. We both got sick, and it has been so relaxing to just stay in everyday. We ventured out to Colmar for a day but that’s pretty much it.

We started this tumblr blog, hoping that this will be the place for us to revisit our memories. Isn’t memories such a fickle thing? The more effort we put in preserving it, the more we remember and value it. And we have a lot of catching up to do, four and a half months of memories.

I hope we can persist, I hope we don’t give up on this blog...

xx

M

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Location: Athens, Greece

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Location: the lamest mall in Italy

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Italy | The Autogrill

My first encounter to this striking bridge-like structure built on top of the Italian highways is the drive to Verona. It is difficult to miss this imposing structure, and one may say, to feel truly Italian, one must visit the Autogrill.

The Autogrill in actuality is a highway rest stop, it is a crossroads for millions of Italians to stop daily for coffee, a sandwich, a break at the cafeteria after their long weary drives. 

Celebrated initially as a symbol of wealth and modernity and then criticized as an image of consumerism and a post-modern “non-place”, the roadside Autogrills have come a long way, from simple no-frills bars and cafés to the millions of coffees and sandwiches that are sold each year along the Italian motorway network.

Between the late 1950s and 1960s, Italy boomed. The economy car became the symbol of a rapidly changing country, which was discovering new products and lifestyles: those were the years of mass motorisation, of the Fiat 500 and 600. Amid Italy's radical transformation, motorway rest areas grew exponentially.

The Motta-grill and the Alemagna bars started competing with the Pavesi Autogrill restaurants, giving life to architectural masterpieces – the bridge-style Autogrill restaurants, bold designs that came to symbolize Italy's optimism and were born out of the fascination with the future and the car. Between 1959 and 1971, over a dozen of them were realised across the country.

The first, completed in 1959 and designed by Angelo Bianchetti, is located in Fiorenzuola d'Arda, between Parma and Piacenza: made completely out of steel, with two entrances on the sides and a glass-walled gallery housing the restaurant, it was the first of its kind in Europe. Motta did not sit on its hands: in 1961, the Motta-grill in Cantagallo opened its doors, a colossus that would come to dominate the segment of the Autostrada del Sole (“Motorway of the Sun”) between Bologna and Florence. Since then, everything changed for Italian motorists: the motorway was no longer just a connection, but a destination in itself.

People had their Sunday lunch at bridge-style Autogrill restaurants to watch the cars speed beneath from the glass walls, and also strolled around the shops selling the products advertised on the first television shows. It was the beginning of the consumption society, and Autogrill restaurants were the first to offer an experience that would soon become familiar to Italian consumers: the opportunity to choose from a wide range of products and styles, inspired by both local traditions as well as the trends from overseas.

http://www.autogrill.com/en/about-us/our-history 

1959: The bridge-style Autogrill designed by Angelo Bianchetti

Conan and Jordan Schlansky at The Autogrill

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Osteria Senz'Oste

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Chiang Mai | Into The Woods

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Taiwanese food is magical, although the entire country's cuisine disenchants itself after about 4 to 5 days of living off, basically carbs, carbs and more carbs.

Outside of the infamous Taiwanese Night Markets, I thought that local food could be considered healthy. Yet, save the ubiquitous green onion, "greens" are not exactly easy to come by, and if they do come at all, they come at a price...

...because, the absurdity continues when you actually do order vegetables only to find out they're a small fortune in comparison to their meat-centric-carbo-loaded counterparts.

The capital city Taipei basically runs on various styles dough baked into plethora of breads and rolls, eggs and buckets of soy-milk - with green onions sprinkled atop of all three.

Needless to say, here are some of my favorite renditions of ‘authentic’ Taiwanese food:

1. A cong you bing (simplified Chinese: 葱油饼; traditional Chinese: 蔥油餅; pinyin: cōngyóubǐng; literally: 'scallion oil pancake'.

This is what immediately caught my eye when I woke up in Taipei roaming the streets for breakfast. The first time I had something like this was at a Chinese Restaurant in Vancouver in which my friend called it a “Beef Roll” because the cong you bing was layered with strips of thinly sliced beef and rolled into something that resembled petit fours, because the “Beef Roll” was sliced into  bite sized chunks and skewered with a wooden sticks.

2.  Youtiao, also known as Chinese cruller,[1]Chinese fried churros, Chinese oil stick,[2]Chinese doughnut, is a long golden-brown deep-fried strip of dough commonly eaten in China and (by a variety of other names) in other East and Southeast Asian cuisines. Conventionally, youtiao are lightly salted and made so they can be torn lengthwise in two.[3]Youtiao are normally eaten at breakfast[4][5] as an accompaniment for rice congee, soy milk or regular milk blended with sugar.

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3. Doujiang. In China, the usual term doujiang (lit. "[soy]bean broth") is used for the traditional watery and beany beverage produced as a by-product of the production of tofu, whereas store-bought products designed to imitate the flavor and consistency of dairy milk are more often known as dounai ("[soy]bean milk"). In other countries, there are sometimes legal impediments to the equivalents of the name "soy milk". For example, in the European Union, "'Milk' means exclusively the normal mammary secretion obtained from one or more milkings without either addition thereto or extraction therefrom".[4] Often, only cow's milk is allowed to be named "milk" on its packaging, and any other milks must state the name of the respective animal: "goat milk" or "sheep milk". In such jurisdictions, the manufacturers of plant milks typically label their products the equivalent of "soy beverage" or "soy drink.

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The combination of Doujiang and Youtiao is legendary.

The dish is savoy. Vinegar is added to the Doujiang (soy-milk), which curdles it, making for a thicker consistency. Green onion, of course, is sprinkled inside and adds a depth of flavor. And, finally, the Youtiao (Chinese doughnut) adds to the theater of textures: creaminess from the curdled soy-milk, and crispiness from the fried dough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx_f33wKr58