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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: East Asia; Published: 07 June 2015; Hits: 90089

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I’ve mentioned that on several occasions we were taken to streets where there were local food vendors or small restaurants and set loose to find our own food of choice. But on others we were taken to larger establishments where the meal was part of our tour. At several of these restaurants some dozen or more local dishes were presented as a banquet to be shared.

The Taiwanese are very proud of their food and believe it to be the best in the world.

I’m on record elsewhere as saying that I don’t like spicy food. But Wendy and Craig do with Sonia on the fence. Others in our party were mixed as to taste preference.

But no one took to a special green soup that appeared several times as a delicacy. Having said that, most other dishes quickly disappeared into the collective digestive system, some with more enthusiastic praise than others.

I certainly didn’t starve but on the whole those of us who had been to China agreed that the food on the mainland, particularly in Beijing, is better.

By the end of the trip I was glad to get to Hong Kong and then to China to eat something less monotonously 'Taiwanese'.

Anyway, the local wine and beer was good and wine and beer from elsewhere was inexpensive too.

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Travel

Istanbul

Or coming down to earth...

When I was a boy, Turkey was mysterious and exotic place to me. They were not Christians there; they ate strange food; and wore strange clothes. There was something called a ‘bazaar’ where white women were kidnapped and sold into white slavery. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or was it Errol Flynn, got into all sorts of trouble there with blood thirsty men with curved swords. There was a song on the radio that reminded me over and over again that ‘It’s Istanbul not Constantinople Now’, sung by The Four Lads, possibly the first ‘boy band’.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Secret

Lansing Michigan was a fine place to grow up, she guessed. It was nice; and safe.

Her dad worked in the Michigan State Government and her mum stayed home. They weren’t rich but they were comfortable. Their new house was big, the nicest they had lived in and it was in a really good area.

She had never been overseas, unless you count nearby Canada, and that was mainly on trips to Niagara Falls, usually when one of Mum’s sisters came to stay. When they passed through Sarnia, into Canada, Dad would always say "Yea! Overseas again!". It was about his only joke.

Sometimes they went through Detroit. But after what had happened there the last time, she shut that out of her consciousness. No wonder she is timid and takes fright easily. Now if a friend even seemed to be driving in that direction she would go into the foetal position and shut-down.

Opinions and Philosophy

Science, Magic and Religion

(UCLA History 2D Lectures 1 & 2)

Professor Courtenay Raia lectures on science and religion as historical phenomena that have evolved over time; starting in pre-history. She goes on to examine the pre-1700 mind-set when science encompassed elements of magic; how Western cosmologies became 'disenchanted'; and how magical traditions have been transformed into modern mysticisms.

The lectures raise a lot of interesting issues. For example in Lecture 1, dealing with pre-history, it is convincingly argued that 'The Secret', promoted by Oprah, is not a secret at all, but is the natural primitive human belief position: that it is fundamentally an appeal to magic; the primitive 'default' position.

But magic is suppressed by both religion and science. So in our modern secular culture traditional magic has itself been transmogrified, magically transformed, into mysticism.

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