One of the things that always puzzles me is how good we are at doing things that are bad for us. Or, to put it another way, how bad we are at doing stuff which is good for us.
Going for a run (good) feels hard, but sitting on my sofa and watching TV (bad) feels easy. Thoughtlessly devouring a side of french fries (bad) at lunch is a cinch. But ordering a salad on the side instead (good) typically involves significant mental preparation. Order the salad. It tastes worse but it is better for you. Ignore the fries... Think about how smug you’ll feel afterwards…. ORDER THE GODDAMN SALAD YOU SPINELESS WEAK-WILLED CHILD.
Sitting down with a colleague for lunch recently, we decided, while I absent mindedly munched my parmesan fries, that we are just really bad at thinking about consequences.
The first thing you see is all the bad things about good stuff and all the good things about bad stuff. We totally discount the good things about good stuff and the bad things about bad stuff, if you get what I mean.
I often feel this way about writing. I enjoy that it gets my creative juices flowing. That it makes me sit down and actually think about the colour and texture of my experiences. It feels a bit like putting together a photo album that I can come back to and revisit with a smile from time to time. Which is a polite way of saying that I write selfishly, for me, and not for you (sorry). I know writing is good for me, but I find it really hard to sit down and do it. Which is why it feels like, and in fact has been, an eternity since my last post. So much has happened since. Where to start?
Well, now that foreign travel seems like a luxury reserved for the few and not the many, perhaps with remembering better times.
Maybe I’ll start on holiday in San Francisco, where most of my calorie intake was in the “bad but I want it” camp. Unsurprisingly, there were a number of food based revelations, not least “garlic noodles”, which, as far as I can tell, is basically a recipe of spaghetti with garlic butter and some other random Asian ingredients like oyster and fish sauce. It sounds like something a midwestern housewife invented up for “Asian night” at the local Rotary Club pot-luck dinner in 1965, but apparently it’s legit (potentially Vietnamese?) American/Asian fusion. And it’s fucking delicious.
There was, in hindsight, an absolute shit tonne of Vietnamese food. Homemade crab curry (YES PLEASE FEED ME MORE NOW). Gargantuan bowls of pho where a single serving of noodles was probably equivalent to entire year’s output of a mid-size Vietnamese rice farm.
There was a US$5 Vietnamese sandwich, stuffed with "fancy" pork, pate and pickled vegetables that I ate in one of the worst neighbourhoods I have ever visited, whilst being watched intently by a hungry homeless lady eating instant noodles straight out of the bag. It was, briefly, a horrifically jarring piece of social interplay. I idly munched my cheap hipster sandwich while a small army of people a few feet away were discarding dirty needles and getting what sleep they could on the cold, hard streets in miserable, dirty tents.
Can you even call a sandwich good when there is so much bad around it? It is soul destroying, but important, to linger on such thoughts from time to time. There is darkness and light in this world. Good and bad. And grey, light grey and dark grey as well.
Talking of grey, the sky in Taipei was, prior to Christmas, pretty grey for the most part.
Everyone talks about the street food there and, on landing late at night, I was propelled into a whirlwind mini food tour with beef and rice, egg and tofu, noodles and laughter. There was also quintessential Taiwanese beef noodles the next day – a deep, heady broth with tender meat and pickled vegetables on the side. There were pineapple tarts and tea and fresh juice and weirdly massive avocados and craft breweries and lu rou fan – fatty pork with rice – and a comforting soup with slightly less comforting, but delicious, sheep brain inside. There was also unbelievably cheap conveyor belt sushi, which was supposed to be a snack, but really wasn’t.
And then there was Japan. Ah Japan. Do they spray something on you when you land to make you feel more relaxed? If not, they don’t need to, because it happens anyway.
The first stop was, ostensibly, an Australian ski resort. “Hey maaaate. Wat’cha want? Avo on toast ok for brekkie?”. This Japan is a different Japan. One where everywhere serves ramen, gyoza, fried chicken and katsu curry, no more, no less. It is a classic case of dumbing down, where the local population don’t believe anyone wants to try anything new, so they just make what they think is popular for westerners and, hey ho, you have a self-fulfilling prophecy of Australians telling you that mediocre ramen is “fucking delicious mate. Best thing in fucking Japaaaaan”. But if you’re there for the skiing, you can’t have it all. So a blue cheese burger and chips please at the standard Australian pub was just fine, thanks.
Happily, this dearth of good food was only a blip, and was made up for at the next stop, a traditional Japanese onsen hotel – Hotel Tamanoyou -where I acted like a pampered house cat, happily bathing and reclining and then gorging on various symmetrically plated, tasty, healthy, and occasionally unidentifiable, Japanese treats. For part of our meal we were also seranaded by a lady on a harp. Yes, a bloody harp! If you want to define “good”, those two nights were it.
There was also the holy grail of sushi - a reassuringly expensive omakase meal in a swanky neighbourhood of Tokyo - which was as delicious as it was Intsa-worthy. Sadly, I was struggling badly with a fever (in retrospect, COVID???) which made the whole experience slightly less awesome than the size of the bill. Happily illness did not prevent a quick stop at the usual favourites - Nagi Ramen and A Happy Pancake, for some low-cost, high quality treats.
Then we went to buy some facemasks (because everyone else was) and returned home, not realising it would be the last foreign trip for a while (possibly the year?). I wonder when my next foreign travel will be? Who knows. Let's hope it's good.