Episode 91: A Very Simple Pleasure
Explicit content warning
05/26/20 • 31 min
Along with twitterfights, long calls to the unemployment office, and heartfelt conversations with your new sourdough starters, alcohol seems to be a defining obsession of this pandemic. I’ll leave it to the rehab centers and 12 steppers to clean up the mess afterwards; this week, I just need a drink. But not just a box of wine or something, I want something escapist, evocative, alluring. I want a cocktail dammit, something with some class, and this week I’m taking the Trip to Angola, Japan and Austria to get it. That means tequila cucumber elixirs with Ioanna Morelli, in Hokkaido, Japan. That means a Sichuan Daiquiri with Alexa van Sickle in Vienna, and, to start it all off, a beachfront gin-and-hot-pepper drink in Luanda, Angola with Claudio Silva, the founder of Luanda Cocktail Week.
Show notes:
Luanda Night Life (publication)
20 Things to Know Before You Go: Luanda by Claudio Silva
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Along with twitterfights, long calls to the unemployment office, and heartfelt conversations with your new sourdough starters, alcohol seems to be a defining obsession of this pandemic. I’ll leave it to the rehab centers and 12 steppers to clean up the mess afterwards; this week, I just need a drink. But not just a box of wine or something, I want something escapist, evocative, alluring. I want a cocktail dammit, something with some class, and this week I’m taking the Trip to Angola, Japan and Austria to get it. That means tequila cucumber elixirs with Ioanna Morelli, in Hokkaido, Japan. That means a Sichuan Daiquiri with Alexa van Sickle in Vienna, and, to start it all off, a beachfront gin-and-hot-pepper drink in Luanda, Angola with Claudio Silva, the founder of Luanda Cocktail Week.
Show notes:
Luanda Night Life (publication)
20 Things to Know Before You Go: Luanda by Claudio Silva
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Previous Episode
Episode 90: In Defense of Wet Markets
Conversations about wet markets with four people who know them very well: Ro Vasquez of Eat Like a Local in Mexico City, journalist Austin Bush in Bangkok, Paul Rimple of Culinary Backstreets in Tbilisi, and Auburn University food historian Xaq Frohlich.
If you’ve had the feeling recently everything seems extra bad all at once, in a way that exceeds even your worst and darkest thoughts, well here’s a theory: maybe it’s because everything is related. It’s all one sweater, and this global tug on a single thread just unwound the whole damn thing from. So the big issues—from climate change to corruption to racist bullshit—have just been laid naked by this pandemic, and they there flashing us right outside the window, all at the same time.
But if we know now that it’s all related, we can perhaps contemplate how to win these longstanding battles in the years to come. And one of those battles will be over markets, the subject of this week’s episode. Traditional markets like the wet markets of Asia are being labeled as the enemy, when in fact, they are our once and future salvation. This episode opens with the sound of the quotidian pre-quarantine bustle of the Deserter’s Bazaar in central Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s the sound you get when a butcher named Jumber with forearms like fire hydrants makes short and joyful work of a side of mutton inches away from the person who is going to take that meat home to cook for their family. That sound is precious, that sound is endangered, that sound needs your attention and protection, in the Republic of Georgia or wherever you are.
From Roads & Kingdoms, this is The Trip: The World on Lockdown.
Show notes:
Breathless Australian 60 Minutes Wet Markets in Bangkok investigation
Culinary Backstreets Tbilisi tour
How to butcher a side of lamb at Tbilisi’s Deserter Bazaar (video)
The Food of Northern Thailand by Austin Bush
Xaq Frohlich’s writings on Roads & Kingdoms
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Next Episode
Episode 92: The African-American view, from Taiwan
The writer and comedian Jennifer Neal used to have a deeply smart travel column for The Root called Blaxit, with one very simple premise: things are just too twisted for Black Americans, so they might, like she had, be feeling the urge to go live in some other, freer country. But where? What is it like being black in different parts of Asia, Europe, elsewhere? Jennifer’s column was a way to find out. I recorded with Jennifer in Berlin for a pre-COVID episode of this show that I hope we can play soon enough, but this week she connected me with someone she had written about in her Blaxit column: Reggie Robinson, a African-American native of Dallas who is a middle-school history and English teacher and a longtime resident of Korea and now Taiwan. I had originally wanted to do an episode about Americans abroad generally, but that will wait. For now, as the police are rioting through my city and our nation, and as our miserable president says all the quiet, dirty parts of America’s social contract out loud, I’m glad to be able to spend the entirety of this episode with Reggie and his unusual vantage point from the other side of the world.
Show notes:
Blaxit: Seoul Edition by Jennifer Neal
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