Author: zora

Egypt: Tale of a Cairo Tout

Just now up on Lonely Planet’s Travel Blog: A short entry about my encounter with a sweet older “guide” in Cairo’s Khan al-Khalili. An admittedly rare case of a person who wants to sell you stuff actually being nice as well!

Although that then reminds me of the guy who normally pushed papyrus on Talaat Harb taking the time to explain the small protest for Ayman Nour that was going on. So helpful!

See, in retrospect, Egyptians come out looking pretty good. It’s just dealing while you’re there that can be a little challenging.

Tap Water–OMG, You Can Drink It!

I was at my office job the other day, filling up my cup from the tap. An impressionable young intern walked into the kitchen and gasped. “You can drink that?!” she asked.

Oh dear.

Here’s a sensible op-ed in the NY Times on the subject.

It’s basically the polite version of what I would write here, except the ever-succinct Gwyneth Doland beat me to it, in an essay that begins, “Buying bottled water is completely retarded. (Well, not retarded because using retarded in that context is totally gay.)”

I personally am so grateful to live in a country where the tap water doesn’t make your GI tract collapse and your eyes swell up that I drink it every chance I get. We Americans are lucky people, and I don’t think it’s totally gay to say that.

“Is Astoria a cool place to live?”

According to StatCounter, someone used this pertinent search string to find their way to this very blog. Golly, I hope after reading, the guy was convinced!

Mostly I roll my eyes at people who suss out neighborhoods based solely on “cool” rather than ready availability of grocery stores, laundries, subway stops and friendly people. (I guess “cool” is shorthand for “readily available hot chicks.” Ho hum.) But last weekend I couldn’t help thinking the Ditmars area has gotten pretty cool…no thanks to me.

I stopped in at the new Oleput Lollipop cafe, brought to us by the geniuses who own the Sparrow. It’s not like you’d know the name, though–there’s no actual sign on the brown awning at the corner of Ditmars and super-sneaky 32nd Street. They’ve managed to make the space–which used to be a gift shop that sold stuff like Hello Kitty backpacks and those fake “flame” lamps–look actually retro, and not just “retro” in a TGIFriday’s kind of way. I know for a fact these guys are savvy scavengers–the light fixtures at the Sparrow were fished out of the Dumpster in front of the Crystal Palace on Broadway. All their work shows, in stuff like the great wood-inlay counter and their nice old soda fridge. My limeade was super-delicious, I picked up a bottle of blood-orange bitters, and they’re serving Mary’s Dairy ice cream. And there are actually stylish people sitting around in there! Where did they come form?

And then I went to both the adorable Mimi’s Closet, just up the way on Ditmars, where she’s just started having a sale. And after buying an adorable dress that the adorable Mimi had made herself, I went down to Kristee’s, on 23rd Ave, where I was astounded to see designer denim and drapey knit jersey in abundance. There is some heavy-duty cognitive dissonance when you look down the block and see the Greek guys hanging at 26 Corner. Kristee pointed out the wall of clippings for fall clothes she’s ordering, and said I should put in requests for my size if I was interested–she doesn’t order a lot of sizes, she says, because Astoria is small, and she doesn’t want us to all wind up wearing the same stuff. Is this delusion or complete megalomania on her part?

I don’t know, but I bit. I always suspected this was how people in Boutique HQs like Nolita and Carroll Gardens lived, but I have never wallowed in this sort of treatment myself. I felt the same way I felt when I was in Fez and met the French travel writer who offered to call ahead and arrange a place for me to stay in Marrakech–“Do you want a pool?” the guy asked as he was making phone calls. It had really never even occurred to me to choose lodging based on amenities, rather than price. But it felt dangerously good, and I could also see how you can get very into shopping if you’ve got someone looking out for your personal interests in such a way. So on Kristee’s recommendation, I bought my first pair of shorts in years–and that’s counting those ones I got at Old Navy for $5, and never wear outside the house.

Kristee asked me where I lived, and I told her my prime 30th Ave location–incidentally, very close to groceries and the subway. “Oh, down there,” she said. Then she laughed, sort of apologetically, and said she lived down there too, but all her friends and the shop were “up here,” at Ditmars, which really does seem to be the place to be.

And all this started happening immediately after I, the anti-cool killjoy, moved away about two years ago.

Coincidence? Probably not.

Astorians, don’t fuck this up!

So I got a terrible phone call last night. The voice on the other end of the line told me that people had been spotted taking stuff out of Le Petit Prince Patisserie on Broadway. Like, ovens and stuff. The kind of stuff essential to running a patisserie.

The clear implication was that Le Petit Prince was closing. I wept. I gnashed my teeth.

I biked by this morning and saw a little tiny sign taped to the grate saying the place is closed “temporarily.”

I pray to whatever god smiles down on our blessed neighborhood that this is true, and not just one of those signs people put up optimistically, while they’re trying to figure out how to get out of their lease.

Because if it turns out that Astorians did not support our one source of fucking awesome French bread and croissants enough to keep this place in business, I will wreak some terrible vengeance upon you, my neighbors. My “that’s a little expensive” neighbors. My neighbors who think butter isn’t good for them. My neighbors who can’t walk a few blocks out of their way for bread that kicks the ass of all that Greek and Italian fluff.

I turned my back for two months while I was traveling, and I expected some other people to pick up the slack on the pastry- and bread-buying. Did you? Did you? I can’t do it alone, people. Le Petit Prince deserves our love, even if it might make us a little fatter.

My friend’s 3-year-old daughter has a little song she likes to sing. It goes, “Pain au chocolat, pain au chocolat, pain au chocolat, pain au chocolat, pain au chocolat [BIG GASP FOR AIR], pain au chocolat, pain au chocolat, pain au chocolat, pain au chocolat….”

It’s easy, it’s catchy. I’m going to stand in front of Le Petit Prince and sing it until the place reopens. You’d better be with me.

Ali in the NYT: “rustic bombast”

That Peter Meehan has a knack: very precise and good review of Kabab Cafe in the NY Times today.

Another good turn of phrase: “authoritative inconsistency,” in reference to Ali’s knife skills. Although I do object a little–Ali has pro-chef knife skills, not Grandma-style skills as Meehan says. He can chop an onion into tiny bits in 3 seconds while ogling the ladies, and if that’s not professional I don’t know what is.

Anyway, it’s great to see Ali get some well-deserved press. Bet you’re wishing you’d gotten around to going there before it got too popular, huh?

And it’s also great to see a place I know so well described in a way that is both true and positive. Unlike, say, so many puff-piece travel stories, where you’re left saying, really?

Formative Dinner Parties

The other night I realized that the guy who runs a blog about Syria that I read frequently is actually the very same person I maintained an eight-hour-crush on at a dinner party in London in 1995. He had long, curly red hair then, and knew about the Middle East, which was part of the reason for the crush.

The other reason for the crush was the party itself, which still stands out in my mind as a model for a brilliant night at home. I don’t remember the food, except for the fact that the blowsy British hostess was cheerfully serving us canned Tesco tomato soup, and she got so drunk that she actually fell down in the kitchen while she was doing it. Actually, I suppose I’ve conflated those memories, because what was nice about the dinner was the slow pace–the hostess got up to cook the next course only when we were done with the current one. So I guess she probably fell down while she was fixing dessert? A technicality.

Falling down drunk and canned soup are horrific dinner-party no-nos in the US, and I do try to avoid them myself. But when I feel myself getting a little too uptight about cooking dinner for people, I actively remind myself about this particular British dinner, which was so much more about a bunch of grad students sitting around bullshitting by candlelight and drinking wine until our teeth were deadly gray than it was about the tastiness of the food.

An even earlier formative dinner party came when I was just a sophomore in college, and my not-really-anymore-because-he’d-graduated-boyfriend invited me to NYC to spend the weekend at his friends’ apartment in Brooklyn with him. This was in 1991, before a lot of people had gotten used to saying “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” out loud. I took the train up with another not-yet-graduated friend of the larger crew, and followed her off the subway, down the shady block in Boerum Hill and up the winding staircase in the old brownstone. Dinner was delicious and eaten in a cramped dining room with a happily-reunited crowd packed around a tiny table–as the youngest and most peripheral of the bunch, I felt lucky to be there.

I still make the salad we had that night, with slices of red pepper and dried currants, and it still makes me think I’m adventurous and grown-up. Never mind that the next day was technically a reversion to college–White Castle hamburgers while watching Dune, the movie–we also consoled my not-anymore-boyfriend about his car getting broken into, and that felt edgy and grown-up.

Truth be told, the really formative dinner parties were the ones my parents had, which were exactly the same kind of thing. Candles would melt down into waxy pools on the table, the grown-ups would starting talking extra loud, and I do remember one person falling down, while carrying about twenty plates–not easy to forget. And the food was always special in some way.

But I couldn’t just spring into the world and do exactly what my parents did. Everybody knows that would be totally lame. I had to follow in the footsteps of people just slightly older–and a lot cooler–than me.

And fortunately I had that model, because I guess a lot of people don’t. Or they have their own brief phase of wine drinking and kitchen experimentation, and then it slips away when the primary crew disperses. I’ve been fortunate to have always had friends who got this general concept of fun (duh–that’s why they’re my friends), but I guess that’s not surprising, since I hung out in grad school for a while and then was pretty broke for a long time in New York. Just like it took me until last year to buy a piece of actual firsthand furniture, I still have not shed the habit of saying, “Let’s just stay in for dinner–it’ll be cheaper.” Even though at this point it wouldn’t kill me to pay to eat in a restaurant.

Of course the friend who liked my style and ran with it most has been Tamara, and Sunday Night Dinners are very often an exercise in “Oh well–there’s always wine” but with the best possible results. I don’t think anyone has even been injured in four years!

So, a belated toast to Ariel K., whose idea I think that red-pepper salad was, and to Name-Forgotten Tesco-Heater-Upper. You made me the (sloppy, in a good way) hostess I am today.

Syria: the New York Times Travel Section

See, I’m not crazy: even the New York Times says Syria is a nice place to visit, in this June article. I like that the lede addresses the very first query everyone has: Won’t they hate me because I’m American?

What I find a little irritating is the obsession with new nightclubs in Damascus, and how this is equated with modernizing/Westernizing/objective good. This is such a problematic assumption that I’m having a hard time articulating a cogent response, but basically, when American journalists go around praising how another country’s youth are learning to booze it up and make out while wearing skimpy clothes, it kind of confirms that country’s worst suspicions about American culture and what this “freedom” is that we’re so psyched about.

But I’m not sure what the answer is–it is illuminating for a lot of Americans to read that there are nightclubs in Damascus, because they may have not even had any idea people drink alcohol there. (Oh, they do! And like a culture that’s accustomed to drinking, and not a culture that’s like teenagers when the parents are out of town.) Guess what: Syrians are a lot more like us than unlike us.

What’s even more interesting, if not surprising, is the freakout letters the NYT got in response, which unfortunately I can’t seem to find online. Many were in the vein of “How can you support that evil regime?!”

The only thing going directly to the “evil regime” is my $100 visa fee, which is so high precisely as a diplomatic “right back at ya”. I think it cost $35 back in 1999, when Syria wasn’t part of the axis of evil. Once I get there, I’m doling out cash to extremely nice people in person, and I’m happy to do it, and talk to them face to face. If we limited our travel to officially sanctioned “good” places, we’d get a very skewed idea of what constitutes good. I don’t see anyone objecting to Americans traveling in Egypt, which has an equally self-perpetuating, randomly-arresting, torturing regime. And I will cheerfully visit Myanmar/Burma when I finally get my ass to Asia.

Peter’s blunter analysis is here (scroll past the pics).

Also, Syria Comment has a very interesting summary of Bashar al-Assad’s recent state of the nation speech, and anecdotal responses to it. What Syria’s government says to Syrians isn’t really covered in Western media–we only get to hear official statements to the West, or little snippets like Diane Sawyer’s interview, which is a little excruciating. (More excruciating: the part where she asks him what’s on his iPod. Hard-hitting…and probably for the best it’s not on YouTube.)

End rant. Just wanted to connect my summer vacation with the larger situation.

A *Real* Revelation

While I was sitting on the beach in Greece, staring thoughtfully into my frappe glass (as you do), I figured something out.

That crazy cappuccino Tamara and I had in Rome in 2003? The super-charged stuff that had this super-sweet coffee foam spooned on top in addition to the milk foam?

I think it’s made with Nescafe.

The woman at the coffee joint in Rome told us this crema was the foam from the espresso, whipped up with a ton of sugar, to make this almost meringue-like goo, which you then dollop onto your coffee. The woman also warned us not to put additional sugar in our coffee–we wouldn’t be needing it.

Mind you, all this happened in Italian, which Tamara and I don’t really speak. So we missed some of the finer points.

Which is why for years I’ve been pondering this problem. Did they really make lots of cups of espresso, scoop the foam off and mix it with sugar? Then what did they do with the foamless espresso? Because everyone knows that espresso with no foam is crap espresso–you couldn’t serve it to anyone. And it would take a million shots of espresso to make this crema.

Enter the frappe. The frappe, when done by Greek professionals, is a spoon of Nescafe (the Greek formulation, by the way–it’s stronger than what you get here) and a spoon or two of sugar and a very small amount of water. You whiz that up with one of those things made for ice-cream shakes, which creates a glass half-filled with hardy coffee foam. You then add water (and maybe milk) to fill the glass, and maybe ice.

And that foam, which can sit around for the entire life of the frappe–hours, if you’re a frappe-drinker with restraint–without deflating, is almost exactly like what I had on my cappuccino four years ago. The crema had more sugar, and was glossier because of it, but same idea.

To be “authentic” I will look around for some Italian instant espresso crystals, but I betcha Greek Nescafe would do the trick as well.

Cairo: The Vision Thing

All your nagging questions answered!

No, being blind in one eye did not prove a hindrance in Cairo. In fact, it may actually have helped.

Before my trip, the half-blind thing was just one small part of the much larger wad of anxiety. My thinking went something like: the traffic is so hideous and chaotic there, surely I won’t be able to keep track of it all and get blindsided by a bus! But the disproportionately higher number of people in Cairo with disabilities who get around just fine every day…. (Breathe.) Or maybe it’s not disproportionately higher, because they get killed off faster! (Stop breathing.)

But crossing the street proved no more difficult than it had back when I had two working eyes. Cars still careen nonstop, with no traffic lights, and you have to convince yourself that they will in fact drive around you once you step down off the sidewalk. It is still an overwhelming process that you eventually get a little better at. (Or not–Mandy, who’s lived there ten years, admits she still panics during street crossings, and happily takes taxis just to cross particularly bad intersections, such as the mess around the Ramses Hilton. One native Cairene once said to her, “I don’t understand–you speak Arabic. So how can you not have learned to cross the street?”)

So it’s not like you step off the curb casually, midway in a chitchat with a friend over where to get the best koshari. No, it commands all your attention, and usually gripping tightly to the arm of said friend–there was no chance that I would just, say, forget to look to my left.

But where the blind spot actually came in handy–and I was not expecting this–was with street hassle. It turns out it is so much easier to ignore people if I genuinely cannot see them!

Of course, they don’t know I can’t, so they think I’m a callous bitch either way, but in desperate situations (like trying to dodge someone while crossing a street–v.v. complicated!), it worked like a charm.

Speaking of callousness, I did notice a few beggars trying to capitalize on half-blindness, usually with one eye looking all cataract-y, or rolling horribly off to one side, or just not being there at all.

Dude. Please, I wanted to say. I can see right through you.