Interesting Chip Flavours

What can't be flavoured like bacon?

I think this speaks for itself:

I'll just add that the picture on the box looks like that because Americans usually eat streaky bacon (rarely "Canadian" back bacon and never middle rashers).

Family Reunion

Today Mum, Dad and Erin arrived. Their hotel, the Outrigger on the Beach, is just on the other side of the market from us, only a few hundred metres away. We went there just a little before they arrived so that we could greet them with leis. They were tired but Erin was surprisingly perky, thanks to her travelling drugs, and insisted that we eat lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. I had a Hawaiian pizza and we all struggled to share a piece of Kahlúa cheesecake. (I didn't really need dessert but you can't go to The Cheesecake Factory and not order cheesecake!)

Cindy and I spent the afternoon showing them around the market and getting them oriented. Then we went out to dinner at The Hard Rock Café. Erin and Cindy ordered drinks that came with free hurricane glasses (they actually give you clean ones) and we had vouchers for a free gift, which just turned out to be a lanyard and pin but we received two.

Waikiki Beach

Today we shopped. We explored the market in front of our hotel and got some cheap souvenirs then caught a "trolley" (shaped like an old wooden tram but with bus wheels) over to the Ala Moana shopping centre. That was like most other American malls but have a couple of interesting shops like Hilo Hattie and As Seen on TV!
This evening we went down to the beach bar at the Hilton for a drink with my friend Matt who was coïncidentally in Waikiki for a chemistry conference and his wife. After a nice Hurricane we went to a tropical hamburger restaurant where all the waitresses were dressed in grass skirts.

Hawaii

Yesterday I went in to uni and marked a big stack of my students' final essays along with the professor and the other assistant instructors. I got home a little after lunch time and Cindy and I went to get the hire car that we planned to take to the airport the next morning. I had made the reservation a few weeks before and the car was ready for us (the guy started telling us aboutthe seat warmers) but when it came time to pay we discovered that Hertz does a full credit check on anyone paying with a debit card. After we ran around and got our social security numbers, it turned out that they would not let us hire the car at all. Our flight would leave too early for the Bloomington-Airport shuttle so we had to ask our friend Charly to take us. He's an early riser but it was still very kind of him to come pick us up at 3.30 am and drive an hour each way. The crazy part was that in the queue for security Cindy saw someone from her lab who had driven himself up - if only we had known!

We flew with US Airways because their flights to Hawaii go through Phoenix, Arizona and we didn't want a repeat of the Xmas before last when we spent a night in Chicago and our bags were lost. Because both legs of the trip were domestic, we didn't get any food, we had to buy it at the airport. That's not good for a 6-7 h flight to Hawaii because the food gets cold. US Airways was even worse than United in some ways, like trying to charge us $5 for headphones to watch the movie. But the trip itself was pretty uneventfull.

We got to the hotel around dinner time and went straight out for a cheap meal in a Chinese-Hawaiian takeaway.
I was feeling dizzy from exhaustion by that time because it was well after midnight in Indiana and I had had only a couple of hours sleep the night before and a couple more on the plane. But Cindy insisted that we couldn't go to sleep at 7 pm localtime so we wandered around a little touristy market for a bit before retiring for the night.

The hotel is quite nice, even the cheapest of Waikiki is pretty luxurious for us - I think it's the nicest hotel I've ever paid for.

Christmas Fare

I know I've mentioned pumpkin pie ice-cream before but an update is required: I've discovered that a luxury ice-cream brand here is making pumpkin ice-cream with cheesecake chunks in it!

I was going to take a photo of the fridge full of different egg-nogs, including Jack Daniels and pumpkin, but the shelves were a bit bare. Still, you'll be relieved to know that there's not one, but two varieties of egg-nog ice-cream (the slow-churned one is low fat):

That sounds like it could be good for Xmas in Hawaii!

Thanksgiving 2010

Today's Thanksgiving. This year I'm not cooking a turkey (Cindy's out of town) and didn't get invited anywhere. But my friend Larry heard that Bloomington's best pizzeria was hosting a free Thanksgiving lunch, so we went.

Believe it or not, they were serving turkey pizza: mashed potato, turkey slices and stuffing, with gravy and cranberry sauce on the side! We thought we were arriving early but the place was already packed, so we had to sit in the waiting area and eat off our laps but I was grateful for a free meal.

The Turducken of Cakes

So you all remember what a turducken is? Well this, my friends, is the cake equivalent.

You take a pumpkin pie, place it in a cake tin, pour chocolate cake batter on top and bake it into a cake. Then you bake an apple pie into a vanilla cake. The two layers are stuck together and iced all over with American-style butter-cream frosting. Voilà:


Apparently they're actually selling this in Philadelphia, from a café in Reading Terminal Market. I left town too soon!

Concert

Tonight Cindy and I drove up to Indianapolis to see a show. The headline act was Billy Bragg. He's getting a bit long in the tooth but still knows how to play a mean guitar. It was a great performance, he changed a couple of lyrics just to make the better-known songs more interesting.

When I was buying the tickets I was surprised to see that the warm-up act was Australian Darren Hanlon. He's completely unknown here, which might explain the supporting role.
I've liked his music for a while so it was nice that I actually got to have a chat with him and bought a CD, which he signed.

Oh, what's that? Yes, we went to IHOP on the way.

Automotive Decoration

This car is parked outside my building. I wonder what the occasion is.

Ice Cream Flavors

The latest in our ongoing series of crazy American food:

Fancy Frozen Fruity Flavours

Last night on my way home I stopped at a gelateria that's apparently very famous around Philly. Knowing it was expensive I chose the two most obscure flavours on offer -- blueberry and thyme, and rockmelon and absinthe. Both combinations were surprisingly good. The blueberry and thyme got a bit gritty by the end of the scoop, what with the berry seeds and dried thyme leaves, so I might not order it again. But I'd think about infusing a little next time I make blueberry crêpes. I think the other combination might be more easy to accomplish. All it would take is a blender, chunks of rockmelon, crushed ice or sorbet and a dash of pastis (which I already have a bottle of).

Update - 31st July
The champagne and mango is not bad. There's plenty of real mango in it but I think they were not completely ripe when they made the batch I got.
It's not a weird flavour but their hazelnut is fantastic, the best I've had in many years.

West Philly

Philadelphia has a bad reputation in America; the crime in some parts of town is seen as a symptom of the city's age, it's a city past its prime. That does seem to be true of the part of town where I'm staying, too far west to benefit from the gentrification happening around the universities.

Still, vestiges of earlier investment in the area remain. The main high school is in a very nice crenellated castle, there's a big domed insurance building on the other side of the tracks and down the road there's a nice old sandstone church.

Coffee

Apparently I haven't discussed American attitudes to coffee before. You probably already know that Americans in general drink a lot more coffee than tea (except at the CHF, where I was surprised to find a lot of tea drinkers). The problem is, drinking more of it doesn't mean they're any better at making coffee. For one thing, they over-roast it; so if you try to brew it strong it's too bitter and the only way to make it less bitter is for it to come out watery.

They're so obsessed with drip filter coffee that they're yet to embrace espresso. I don't mean in homes, I mean restaurants and even cafés serve filter coffee and only fancier places also have espresso coffee, which they charge more for. They've even started combining frothed milk with drip coffee, which is what you get if you ask for a café au lait (only by using the Italian name, caffè latte, do you get espresso and steamed milk). So strange that two foreign terms would get you the same thing in different parts of Europe but get you different things here.

Here's the weirdest thing: the rarity of espresso coffee makes some Americans think that it's not a type of coffee. A couple of times before I've heard them say things like, "espresso or coffee" and when I call them out on it they always say, "Oh, I meant normal coffee!" which doesn't change the fact that espresso is clearly a type of coffee.
Today Cindy told me that when she went to Dunkin' Donuts there was a poster that had two options that looked identical: iced coffee or iced latte. When she asked what the difference was, she was told, 'The iced coffee is made with coffee; the iced latte is made with espresso and milk, so there is no coffee in the iced latte'! Her response being, 'Instead of my daily dose of caffeine from the Coffea arabica coffee beans I'm going to get my daily dose of espresseine from espresso beans, growing on the espresso tree, Espressoa arabica (someone needs to tell Wikipedia to create a new page for this new species!)'

Bastille Day

Yesterday I went to the Philadelphia French conversation club, like most Saturdays, but this time we heard that there would be Bastille Day celebrations at an historic prison, so we headed over there afterwards.

The star was Marie-Antoinette, who was up on the ramparts yelling abuse at the sans culottes below. The scripted exchange was extremely hammy, consisting mainly of topical banter but when Marie-Antoinette said her famous line, they all started throwing free cakes into the crowd (a brand I had not seen before, which is apparently only available in the Philadelphia area). They had an impressively large guillotine set up in the street, which made short work of a watermelon.


It's a bit ironic that this sort of thing doesn't happen in France. They don't even call it Bastille Day, it's La Fête Nationale or simply le quatorze juillet. They don't do anything historical, instead they have military parades through Paris including tanks and fly-overs. It's funny that the 4th July parade we saw in Washington last weekend had only one or two military bands with only about a dozen armed soldiers. I guess the American armed forces are a bit too busy overseas whereas the French have nothing better to do.

Sandwiches

Americans have a reputation for preferring to eat with their hands, whether it be hamburgers or pizza etc. This is quite true but people in other countries probably don't realise just how far this goes. 

Americans consider hamburgers a type of sandwich (where I would reserve that word for something between slices of bread, 'Do you want a sandwich or a roll?') and it's sandwiches more generally that they worship. They prefer to eat with they're hands so they put all manner of nice things on rolls and pretend it's haute cuisine. It took a few years of living here to realise just how pervasive this phenomenon is - it's not just cheap lunch shops that sell fancy sandwiches, it's family restaurants (like Applebees and, my favourite, TGI Friday's) and even semi-fancy restaurants with nice décor. The other night when we were at an Italian restaurant Cindy was disappointed to see a kid at the next table eating his pizza with his hands, she thought it was too nice a place for that sort of behaviour. Then I pointed out that she had ordered a hamburger and I a fancy sandwich.

I don't know if it has more to do with the tough economic times of the last couple of years or just a willingness to consider sandwiches civilised but there's also a neglect of real food. I read an article a little while ago about a group of people who go around New York reviewing the hamburgers (this might be it). The thing is, if you're going to appoint yourself a connoisseur of beef, at least compare steaks!

Having spent some time in Philly, I've come to see their famous cheesesteak as a decent compromise. It's made with shaved or finely sliced steak (and they don't have döner kebabs here) and I've found that if you go somewhere decent (without a long queue of tourists), then a provolone cheesesteak with "sweet peppers" can be very nice.

Washington

For the Independence Day long weekend Cindy and I met up in Washington. I caught a dirt-cheap coach ($17.50 return) and Cindy flew. We stayed in a motel at the end of the metro line in Huntington, just south of Alexandria, Virginia.

Saturday we walked until our feet were sore, seeing all the monuments, memorials and museums. I got to see a couple that I hadn't seen the first time, like the Jefferson and FDR memorials. It was stinking hot but there were plenty of bubblers for us to refill our bottles with tepid water. I have a new appreciation for the Smithsonian Institution now; all their museums are free and air-conditioned, they provide a great place to cool down and sit, where there happens to be some art to look at while you're relaxing.

Sunday we watched the big parade. Before it started a couple of cyclists rode down the cleared street dressed in bright pink and waving signs saying "Peace is patriotic", declaring that they were part of the parade; the police soon moved them along. There were a few military groups marching but mainly brass bands. It was a bit strange to hear them playing God Save the Queen and The British Grenadiers but this wasn't an inappropriate gesture, those tunes have been given American lyrics, which everyone else was humming.
The assortment of random characters was a bit second rate (Paddington Bear, Madeline, Strawberry Shortcake all as balloons), a real Lone Ranger made it a little more American. What made it all worthwhile was that I got to see a real DeLorean!
We tried to stay out of the heat that afternoon while we waited for the fireworks. There were a lot of people but there was plenty of space on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial so we got a decent view without being too crowded.


Monday we spent the day looking around the old quarter of Alexandria, Virginia. It's a nice old port town on the Potomac with lots of little shops, a few good restaurants and two ice-creameries.

Chemical Heritage Foundation

This week I started my fellowship at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. They've given me an office near the library with the other fellows. They all back onto a big atrium and we get natural light through large windows. Occasionally someone will stop by and talk to someone else through the window opening but generally we don't feel too much like monkeys at the zoo.

Everyone has a computer in the office with a personalised account on a central server but it's all Windows. After a couple of days of fiddling around, hitting the wrong keys and not having my files with me, I decided to just bring my own laptop and only use their computer to print. I've managed to get the PC's keyboard and mouse working with it (and, although the CHF email won't work with the Mac for some reason, it does work with my iPod Touch).

There is a kitchenette and this leads to a lot of social activities. Every day around 10.30 people stand around there drinking tea and coffee (the folks here drink a lot more tea than your average American) and on Tuesday afternoons at 3 there's biscuits or cake in the atrium (which they call a "public square"). And today I noticed a lot of people walking around with rolled up rubber mats -- apparently it's yoga day.

Delaware

My current fellowship is for visiting institutions in the Philadelphia area, apparently that extends down to Wilmington, Delaware. Today I went there for the first time, that's another state off my list!

I went to the Hagley library to look at some of their Lavoisier stuff. I was lucky enough to get a ride down with one of the CHF fellows so we didn't stop for souvenirs but I did save the money it would have cost to hire a car or catch a train and taxi.

The library and archives are spread across a couple of buildings on a few acres, which used to be the DuPont gunpowder factory. Now it's a nice park with an industrial museum.

Memorial Day at the Museum

Today I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's an impressive looking building that you've probably seen before - those are the steps Rocky ran up. I didn't run up them because I was wearing things but I did have to walk up. Apparently the building's famous for the movie even among the locals so they put up a statue.

It's an enormous museum with quite a few famous paintings (Monets, Renoirs, a couple of van Goghs) but it was laid out a bit strangely with paintings, statues and antique furniture all together in a room without anything tying them together.