Properly filmic, dynamic walking music. Sometimes things sync up. Also, for the first time ever, I went upstairs on a 747. Not for the shiny flat-bed nonsense with the champagne and all that, but they had some economy seating up there too, and I’d highly recommend it if you get the chance. Five or six rows, no screaming kids, two stewards just aching to refill your g&t, an almost perfect toilet-to-passenger ratio. Almost worth the 800-odd quid ticket, in fact.

In Miami, I turned into Hugh Grant to deal with the customs and immigration people. It seemed easier just to add ‘I’m terribly sorry’ to every sentence and let them think ‘another dumb Brit’ than actually try to interact with them on a human level. They might actually be automatons, come to think of it. Although the chap who told me to take off my belt and boots before going through the whole body scanner (!) was slightly more interested than any TSA operative has a right to be.

American Airlines flight from Miami to La Paz was. Well. I’d rather not go through it again, let’s put it that way. I was so far down the alarmingly small plane that I began to scan my boarding pass for the words ‘sitting on the engine’. I was in the middle of a row and I am not a small, easily compactible dude. The food was genuinely god-awful – I had fundamentally the same thing as on the Virgin flight – beef stew, mash, carrots and french beans, a salad, some sort of biscuity thing and a bread roll. On Virgin, the beef was tender, tasty, undersalted but something I’d not be unproud of if I’d cooked it myself. The mash was smooth and potatoey, which is all you can ask of it, and the vegetables had crunch and texture. The (greek) salad was absolutely superb in taste, if a bit heavy on the feta-to-olives ratio for my preferences. The biscuity thing was biscuity. The chocolate pudding was small but perfectly formed, and sublime right down to the lower strata of banoffee stuff. The bread roll looked and tasted like a bread roll. On AA, by stark contrast, the whole beef-mash-veg thing was swimming in liquid – not meat juices or gravy, just…liquid – which was a shame because the cut of beef, forequarter flank or whatever they call it in the States is quite good in any other circumstances. The salad was the cheapest bag-salad you can imagine, all misshapen chunks of iceberg lettuce and dried out carrot shreds, and the dressing was the most astonishing interpretation of ‘oil and vinegar’ I’ve ever seen. It glooped. It glopped. It very possibly moved about the dish under its own steam. The bread roll was a small beige thing that I ate only because it didn’t seem likely to be biodegradable if they threw it away. And the ingredients of the white, sweet butter – 44% something and 4% actual dairy product – left a huge neon questionmark hanging over the other 52%. The biscuity thing was biscuity, but somehow less so.

I passed 6 hours and 50 minutes in flight, and about an hour and a half waiting on the taxiway, in a strange position of inability to find any remotely comfortable way of sitting. If this blog reads a little rambly and disconnected, more so than usual, it’s because I woke up at 6am on Sunday and I haven’t slept since. And I’m in the bar of the hostel, waiting for them to tell me I can check in.

I’ll go into more detail about the hostel and La Paz in another post, but suffice it to say I’ve had a wander around, and it’s filthy, polluted, bright, noisy, dangerous and bloody fantastic. A bit of light-headedness in the airport, and the walk back from the centre of town to the hostel this morning got my heart pounding good and proper, but apart from that I’ve felt very few effects of the altitude. From where I sit, though, I can see the top of the ridge that marks the edge of the El Alto slum city (and it is a slum, there’s no other word) and it seems like another world. Some exploring needed, I feel.

I’m going to sign off now, go and check in, then have a shower, then sleep for approx. 3 years. Cheerio for now.

Evo Morales is the president of Bolivia, the first indigenous president elected by that country (with nearly 54% of the vote, which if you know anything about national elections is pretty impressive) after decades of military juntas, coup d’ etats, counter-coups and latterly, leaders elected from the white/creole minority who were intent on selling off every last scrap of Bolivia’s natural resources they could find in the raw state (tin, silver, oil and gas, and so on). A hilariously corrupt scheme to sell off the country’s water reserves to a western multinational (backed up by the IMF, who threatened to cut Bolivia’s financial aid if they didn’t) and make people pay western-style water rates – somewhat more than the average monthly salary per month – was the final straw. If that incident seems familiar, by the way, that’s because it inspired a fair bit of the plot of the last Bond film.

Various workers’ groups got together and indulged in the Bolivian national sport, protesting via roadblock. Such were the volume and popular support of the protests that in La Paz, when the military fired tear gas at crowds of protesters and the protesters threw rocks back, the city police got their riot gear and gas masks on, lined up and surrounded the protesters. Facing outwards, to protect them from the military.

Anyway, after much wrangling Morales was duly elected, the first real ‘People’s President’. He’s something of a cultural phenomenon all by himself – he regularly appears for his public engagements (by which I mean memorial speeches, meetings with foreign leaders and public addresses, not staged ‘casual’ photo-ops) in shirtsleeves. After he was elected, Bolivian office wear changed completely, with men discarding jacket and tie for shirts and jeans. Can’t quite see Dave and Gideon pulling that one off.

Anyway, he popped up in the news today, as I mentioned. Here’s the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15409447

Just fancy that. A national leader proposes a scheme that has some benefits and some downsides. The people duly consider it, thumb their collective noses at it, and by the same means that got him elected (blocking the roads, which in a country with Bolivia’s infrastructure, effectively paralyses the country), say No. El Presidente, taking the hint, goes ‘Fair enough, if you don’t want it, we won’t do it’. That, folks, is how politics is supposed to work.

I’m reading a book called Culture Shock! Bolivia, which is a fascinating brief history of the place and its politics and culture. I learned about many of the incidents related above from there, so I suppose it’s only fair I give it a plug. http://tinyurl.com/6exgdo6 is the link. If the whole series is as interesting, informative and drily humourous as that one, then they have my hearty endorsement.

From said book I have one more bit of wisdom to share. Since Bolivia already had it’s economic crisis back in the 80s (the reason for the absurdly low cost of living – Bolivia is regularly cited as the second-poorest country in Latin America, ‘saved from disgrace only by Haiti’, but in actual fact, many indigenous rural areas are self-sufficient without contributing to the GDP, and while said GDP may be low, the cost of living is a fair degree lower. You can get a three-course lunch for the equivalent of $0.50), and is only now beginning to develop into a ‘modern’ nation, whatever the hell one of those is, it has a chance to learn from the mistakes of all the nations that got there first and boy, do they seem hell bent on doing so.

They’re nationalising the natural resources, which are plentiful. Value-added goods have overtaken raw materials as the primary export. And they’ve elected a leader who, when his people say ‘No’, goes ‘Okay’. Wouldn’t that be something.

I did a bit of striding over the hills and dales – just the one hill, actually, but quite steep in places, especially when you’re coming back with a rucksack full of shopping (read: bread, meat and cider) and a baguette sticking comically out of the top. I did a certain amount of pottering about in the garden. I played this game I quite often play when I’m on my own, which is to put on certain accents when I talk to people (in shops, etc) just for the hell of it. I’m pleased to say I managed to perfect a South African/White Afrikaner accent over the course of the week. The key is in certain words and phrases that trick you into the accent, then holding it. In the South African accent case, it’s the way you pronounce ‘tr’, as in ‘country’; there’s a roll to it that flicks the switch. I can add that one to the repertoire, alongside two kinds of Irish, a moderate Glaswegian, Generic European versions 1, 2 and 3, various forms of American (South-east, Midwest, Brooklyn and New Hampshire – the differences are fascinating in themselves) and a Kiwi accent that I’ll probably keep under wraps, to save my cousins from NZ the trouble of rolling about on the floor laughing.

That self-deprecatingly said, I’m actually very good at accents. Very good. It’s one of those stupid, not-really-useful things I’ve picked up, like how to pass exams and almost win pub quizzes. Given a passage of, say, Spanish or Italian in writing, I can read it and sound like a native, but I’ll only have the faintest idea of what I’m saying. That’s the next step.

Preparations go well. I actually booked my flights to Bolivia – leaving on the 30th of October. It’s later than I wanted, but the difference between the middle of next week and the end of the month was nearly £150, so no real complaints.  I’m also looking at a hostel with a microbrewery on the roof. Yes, a microbrewery, on the roof. And a free beer every day, apparently. Swish.

It’s one of those oddities about being my age. I’ve had two or three chances in my life so far to completely reinvent myself – this will be another. Like starting college, or Uni, I get to turn up in a strange place, meet a bunch of strange people, and make another construct of myself to be to them. I’ll be in the lives of some people in La Paz for three months, and in that time I can literally be whoever the hell I like.

On an unconnected note, I’ve just come into posession of a battered leather bush hat and a pair of aviators with dark green lenses. Good start.

M.

A while ago I pretty much swore off chicken. I’ve always (read: last five or six years) been pretty careful about where the chicken I eat comes from, and when I started shopping for myself I would only buy free range, usually those mixed packs of thighs and drumsticks that you get at the supermarket. When I was working as a butcher (nice to have the When I Was there at last, rather than the Since I Am) I was able to be even more picky about the meat I took home, but working in a small supermarket 9 hours a day in a village with very few amenities means lunch options are limited. The odd chicken sandwich, therefore, did pass my lips. No longer.

I’m not going to use the blog as a platform for telling you all about the inhumane vagaries of factory farming – as I said above, you’re smart enough to draw your own conclusions. I assume that anyone reading this isn’t stupid enough to buy or eat chicken that isn’t at the very least supermarket-defined ‘Free Range’ – that means Nandos too. That extremely ropey definition of free-range, by the way, is one of the reasons I decided not to eat chicken unless I knew exactly where it had come from and that the bird had lived its life outdoors and relatively free of stress and pain. Which doesn’t seem like all that much to ask, you’d think, but it’s apparently not covered by ‘Free Range’. Anyway, cutting chicken out of my diet wasn’t that much of a problem considering I didn’t eat that much anyway – lamb and pork (free range, naturally) are the staple meats in our house, and we’re finally getting better at having meals with, gasp, no meat in them at all. Not even a little bit. But curries are a problem.

I like chicken, that’s a problem too. Love it. Taste, texture, the way the skin goes crispy. Yum. Chicken curry, rich with chickpeas and garlic and methi leaves, I have something of a hard-on for, quite frankly. And being as my dad lives dangerously close to a heavy concentration of fine establishments with names like ‘Kohinoor’ and ‘Star of Bengal’, curry’s on the menu a fair bit. We make our own occasionally, and damn good they are too, if I may honk my own instrument briefly. But if it’s a takeaway and I’m not eating chicken, and I don’t fancy the lamb for whatever reason (mainly that it’s nearly always chewy and not from any recognisable bit of a sheep) then what?

Vegetable curry, obviously. Why the hell have I taken two paragraphs to get to this point? Increasingly I’m a vegetarian curry eater, and my new friend is the strange rubbery building block that is paneer. Or panir. Whatever.

Think Feta without the saltiness, think Halloumi without that textural oddity that means you can’t swallow it first go, think Tofu without…no, don’t think Tofu, actually. Ever. Panir is a curd cheese and one of the main sources of protein for the largely vegetable-based cuisine of India. And, conveniently, you can get it in good-sized blocks in international food shops and (some) (big) supermarkets. I’d love to suggest a more readily-available alternative, but I can’t think of one, its close cousins above being ruled out by, well, the above.

Anyway Sag Paneer, Spinach and Paneer curry, is a fairly common sight on any given takeaway menu (Mottor or Mutter Paneer is another) and this is a completely made up recipe that happens to include both spinach and paneer. Got there eventually.

Ingredients:

• 3large tomatoes, or one 400g tin of tomatoes
• 1 large white onion and 1 medium red onion (This is purely for aesthetic purposes, you don’t have to be as picky as me)
• 2 large peppers, red and yellow
• 1 250g block of paneer cheese
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 large bag of spinach (or 8 large leaves of cavolo nero, which is what I used because I’m just that much of a fucking hipster)
• 1 large red chilli (or 2, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing)
• 3 tsp garam masala (standard curry spice mix, buy it ready ground or whole and grind it yourself in a pestle and mortar)
• Tomato puree
• 500ml chicken or vegetable stock (you may not need this if you’re using a tin of tomatoes)
• 3tbsp natural yoghurt

Roughly chop the large onion and bung it in a food processor with the roughly chopped or tinned tomatoes, garlic (peeled and halved), half the chilli (seeds and all) and about one-third of the paneer, in small cubes. Halve and de-seed the peppers, then roughly chop one half of each and add to the processor. Pulse until the whole lot is finely diced but not a paste. If you don’t have a food processor, then you’ll have to finely chop all of the above. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d stick an audiobook on if I were you, you’ll be there a while.

Roughly chop the spinach (or thinly slice the cavolo nero, losing any thick stalks). De-seed and finely chop the rest of the chilli and peppers, and set the whole lot aside.

Finely slice the other (red) onion into half-rings,  cut the paneer into 1cm cubes, and fry the lot over a low-medium heat in a glug of unflavoured oil for about 10 minutes, or until the paneer cubes are getting crispy and brown at the edges. Set aside on some kitchen paper to drain off the oil.

(If you’re using whole spices: Wipe the pan dry with some kitchen paper, then toast the spices for a couple of minutes until the frangrances start to make your entire house smell like curry. Grind to a powder in a spice grinder or pestle and mortar). Another glug of oil in the pan, medium heat, add the spices and a good squeeze of tomato puree, fry together for a minute or two, stirring constantly.

Add the veg from the food processor and cook for 10-15 minutes until the onion is soft. If the mix is still quite dry, this is the place to add some stock – gradually, like a risotto, until the sauce is the consistency you like. I like the actual sauce of a curry to be quite thick and free of chunks, so I used a stick blender here and whizzed it all to hell. Stir in the yoghurt.

Stir in the spinach, peppers and chilli. Let it cook for another ten minutes or so, before adding back the paneer and onion. A further five minutes, then switch the heat off and leave it for 20-30 minutes to let the flavours mingle. Stick a lid on the pan if you have one.

Munch.

Poorly-lit photo makes this actually look like a takeaway curry. It's not that yellow in real life, I swear.

That’s your lot for now. M

((EDIT: apparently ‘unflavoured oil’ is just too cheffy a term for some folks. What I mean is, a cooking oil that is neutrally flavoured, like Groundnut, Sunflower, ‘light’ or ‘mild’ Olive oil. Not bright green extra virgin olive oil, basically, which you shouldn’t be using for cooking anyway – it has far too much spicy-pepperyness. Avoid vegetable oil full stop.))

First of all, I have to thank Ryan Sanford, for giving me the boost needed to drag this blog back from the dead space. Truth to tell, I’d been toying with the idea for a while, but now that adventures are underway and I have recovered some of my faculty for writing after a long period of malaise (of which more later), I’d more or less committed myself to it without, up until this point, actually doing anything about it.

As I said, I need to thank Ryan Sanford, whoever the hell he happens to be. He recently swooped out of the interblag’s upper reaches to reprimand me for taking ‘a really good domain name’ (it’s a doozy though, ain’t it?) and ‘never doing anything with it’, thus ‘preventing anyone else from using it’. Aside from issuing a well-intentioned and comprehensive ‘Fuck You’ to Ryan Sanford and anyone else who thinks a sarcastic ‘Well done’ is any way to round off a comment on a blog by someone you’ve never met, it gave me exactly the catalyst I needed to revive the blog – in doing so, I could not only document my forthcoming adventures in travel, food, film and the rich experience of life, but also add my own small signature to the undoubtedly great mass of irritations and niggles in the life of some asshat in Portland, OR. Two birds with one stone, as they say.

As regards the previous posts on this blog, entertaining and fulsome in their wit as they undoubtedly were, they don’t fit with the new and shiny ways of what this new blog will be. They were unfocused, they rambled. Some verged on ranting. They covered disparate topics. In short, everything this new blog will be, but at least two years out of date and oh, so very student-y. So, since WordPress lacks a function to ‘cast into the outer darkness’, I’ve had to leave them where they are – to delete them would defeat the point and show no progression in my style, opinions or management of wild moodswings – but as a compromise I have password locked them.

If you really want to read them, be my guest – with my customary modesty, I’ll admit that there’s the odd gem in there, and indeed the odd germ, as I wrote at first. The password, like the tag and the category, is ‘ArchivePost’. Knock yourself out.

In any case, the themes and subjects of the new blog. A spot of background first: On approximately October 18th 2011, I’m going to Bolivia to work for three months at a clinic for people who need prosthetic limbs, but who can’t afford medical care. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America (which is saying something) and, while as far as I’m aware has had no major wars or minefield-related incidents in the past few decades, certainly has enough citizens short a limb or two to warrant the excellent work of the Centro de Miembros Artificiales in Obrajes District, La Paz. (If you want to send a telegram, letter, cash donation, plastic donation, spare limb or other missive, try the French Embassy and I’ll pop across the calle and pick it up from their post room.)

After that and a brief sojourn back to the mother country, with any luck I’ll be off to South Korea for a year to teach English to some poor unfortunates who have so far lived a blameless life and certainly don’t deserve to have a blighter like me inflicting his society upon them. With the rich life experiences, soul’s awakening and, more prosaically, flipping great wodges of Korean Won I will find there, I will return to England a happier, more rounded, more settled human being. For about six months. After which (with any luck – progression in life seems to depend on luck and application forms in equal measure) I will be moving to Vancouver, Canada to pursue a Masters Degree in Journalism. I might even pop over the border to deliver that ‘Fuck You’ to Ryan Sanford in person.

That’s a broad and ambitious plan for the next few years. Experience has taught me that rarely does any plan survive first contact intact, but any plan is better than no plan at all. This blog will, hopefully, chronicle the places I go, the people I meet, the food I eat and cook, and the strange and profound mysteries I contemplate along the way. In all probability, there will be political commentary, movie reviews, thoughts-for-the-day and cock jokes too.

I will of course continue my long-standing tradition of titling each post for whatever song I’m listening to (or is in my head) as I begin the post, but this time round I’ll also add a little addendum, such as the ‘A Resurrected Blog’ above, to remove the ‘lucky dip’ element trying to find anything specific I’d written on the pre-hiatus blog.

(By the way, if you’re a first time reader or have never met me and know little of my character, speech patterns or mannerisms, fair warning: I worked long and hard to sound this pompous. Get used to it.)

Enough for now, I’m cresting dangerously close to the 1k word mark. More soon.

M