The Twilight Report

Today in New York we stopped by the Tuck Shop where I had two aussie meat pies (one lamb and one Thai chicken) and Lena had some Boylan's lolly water. Everything was delicious, but still supports my thesis from a while back in that it wasn't at all much like the tucker that you get in actual Australia.

Flying back to EWR via ATL as I type this. The land in New Mexico was enchanting :)

I dreamed last night that a number of my old friends from high school were playing lacrosse for the U of A in a very exciting game. Only instead of playing in a field they were playing in a huge multi level parking lot with intricate playground equipment, and instead of trying to score goals, the objective was to collect star bits a la Super Mario Galaxy while having possession of the ball. You might ask how that is much at all like lacrosse and I might answer how do my dreams ever make any sense? They were carrying the ball around with lacrosse sticks at least. The U of A was expected to lose the game by a huge margin, but it was very close and in the final moments of the game my old friend Clayton managed collect enough star bits to capture victory. Blasic had his name signed into the playing field in star bits. Apparently he had a hand in designing the playing “field”.

I remember quite specifically Clayton and Dom were playing for the U of A, and Blasic was in the dream too, which is funny because none of them went to the U of A. It’s also strange because I don’t really have much at all to do with Clayton anymore. One of us friended the other on The Facebook at some point, but our lives have little to do with each other now. I am also pretty sure they never played lacrosse. I don’t even know whatever happened to Blasic.

I tire of people trying to tell me that you can get any type of cuisine in New York City. My experience is that the city offers a varied and often delicious choice of restaurants, but that most, if not all cater to the particular tastes of New York City. This is plainly good economic sense. If I were to open a restaurant in any place, even if it were a specific ethnic or cultural speciality, I would need to cater to the local pallet or I would go out of business.

If I had a bakery in New York City that sold lamingtons and custard tarts, then any economist would tell me that I wouldn’t sell many after I explained to him what they were. I would also have trouble finding some of the ingredients. Although lamingtons seem a simple thing to make, the cake in the United States is too moist and the coconut is too sweet, and cut in a different way. To make lamingtons in the United States I would have to import the ingredients, or make them from scratch (ever try to make shredded coconut from scratch?). So I could either spend a lot of time/money making lamingtons that nobody wants or I could make something that people would recognize and buy readily.

If you happened to be opening an Italian restaurant in New York City you could probably get away with making it actually authentic because there are lots of Italians in the area (I can’t say that I am a particularly good judge of authentic Italian food either way). If you were going to open a New Mexican restaurant then you’d probably end up with the sort of place that I went to once that purported to have Southwestern cuisine and called itself “Santa Fe”, although

• The enchilada I had was rolled, not stacked in layers
• The enchilada did not use any detectable green chili
• The enchilada was made with flour tortillas, not blue corn
• There wasn’t a fried egg on top
• ...

While none of these things makes it necessarily a bad enchilada, it is clear that they are not trying to make food that has anything to do with the namesake of the restaurant! This is generally my gripe with the Mexican food pretty much anywhere outside the state of New Mexico, not that it is bad (some of it is good, tasty and quite enjoyable), but because it isn’t the sort of food that I grew up with. New Mexican food is magical and special to me because I grew up consuming its spicy deliciousness. Right about when I am trying to explain this to someone they will tell me “oh well you can find any type of food in New York City”. But it isn’t true. There are many things that you cannot find in New York City. There are many things that you actually have to travel to places outside of New York City to experience. If you believe New York City to be a perfect microcosm of everything in the world, then it is likely that your experience is lacking.

Today we experienced the great outdoors by climbing Mt. Tammany.