What We Loved This Week: The Everglades, Bourbon Balls and Dean Moriarty
Travel Blog • World Hum • 02.15.08 | 3:23 PM ET
World Hum contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days.
Jim Benning
I finally got around to watching Mondovino, the 2004 documentary about the globalization of the wine business. It’s a fascinating look at what the filmmaker sees as a clash of civilizations taking place between traditional wine makers in places like Languedoc and Burgundy and American companies like Mondavi and the wine critic Robert Parker. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it’s compelling, and it offers a vicarious travel thrill to the Mediterranean and Napa to boot.
Adam Karlin
How awesome are the Everglades? Answer: extremely awesome. I’m here researching for a guidebook, and as a lifelong lover of wetlands who thinks estuaries are our best evidence of God’s existence, I am totally enraptured by this landscape: an unbroken love affair between land, water and horizon, a windy womb for wading birds, alligators and river otters, and of course, a delicate ecosystem threatened with devastation by overdevelopment. If America doesn’t preserve this place, I’m throwing out my passport.
Joanna Kakissis
I’m obsessed with NPR’s Kitchen Window. Over the last few weeks, this weekly food feature has gotten me out of the Greek eggplant rut and into a worldly array of dishes such as quinoa pilaf, vegan cupcakes, chocolate-dipped candied orange peels and bourbon balls. This week I got kumquat, endive and watercress salad. It’s hard as hell trying to find the ingredients, but it enriches my Greek vocabulary. Plus, I’m a singing cook—I’m currently screeching with passion to Men Without Hats. I’d like to write my own travel memoir someday and call it “Eat, Eat, Eat: One Woman’s Search for Decadent Iraqi Pilaf With Mastic.”
Eva Holland
My mom visited Arizona not too long ago, and brought back a package of “spicy chile hot chocolate mix” for me. I was skeptical about combining chocolate and chili powder, but the package assured me that the mixture “played an important role in the social and spiritual life of the Mayan and Aztec Indians,” so I decided to give it a shot. This week I’ve been having a cup almost every night, and it’s the perfect cure for the snowy February blues.
Frank Bures
I was just rereading David Foster Wallace‘s story on John McCain from the 2000 campaign, when I came across a reference to a North Vietnamese statue next to the lake he fell into when he was shot down in 1967. I wanted to see it, so instead of having to go there, as I once would have, I started Googling, and sure enough, there a plenty of photos, and even a translation with a diatribe and an account of McCain’s trip back to the “Hanoi Hilton.” It reminded me of many other monuments I’d seen across the world.
Michael Yessis
Lost usually provides a bit of a vicarious travel experience, with the characters bounding from Hawaii to Los Angeles to Sydney to Berlin and on and on around the world. Last night, the creators tossed in an irresistible travel-related Easter egg. The counterfeit Swiss passport of Ben Linus, one of the show’s main characters, read: Dean Moriarty.
Chili pepper photo by Viewoftheworld, via Flickr (Creative Commons)
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John M. Edwards 02.15.08 | 7:30 PM ET
Hi World Hum Contributors:
You have to be crazy telling all of us your innermost deepest dark secrets in public, online.
I was so confused by your suggests, and the blinding white lights of crisscrossed advertising jingles, that while I was wheeling around my Amazon cart, I slipped and fell, with nary a purchase.
Great, you made me forget to chuck into the cart that old Fred MacMurray movie where he pedals around on a bycycle in Hillbilly Territory.
aztec gods expert 05.09.08 | 9:25 AM ET
I agree with Eva, I use the chocolate-chili concoction for almost two years now.
it taste weird at first, but it is great during cold weathers.