Foto Friday: hooray for HOME edition. 9 November 2007 10:36 am
Posted by Tracy in : bangkok, eating, friends, nepal, pictures, tea, travel , trackbackFirst and foremost, happy birthday Liz!
That said, hey! I’m home from Asia, and it is awesome like my trip was awesome. Yay for that! Those of you who have received postcards so far know that I don’t exactly string together the most coherent of sentences these days, in part because my brain is SO VERY FULL of trip amazingness and I don’t really know where to begin writing about any of it. I have a few ideas, but for now I’ll start with pictures, because so far composing photo captions has been a nice sound-byte-y way to ease myself back into writing for Teh IntarGoogle every day, and that’s good. So is the fact that I am almost sort of caught up on laundry, and that in a fit of major cleverness yesterday I went food shopping at my friendly local Asian supermarket instead of freaking myself out with something more well-lit and mainstream U.S.-ian, and that was pretty perfect — lots of stuff I couldn’t read but wanted to eat anyway, not unlike Bangkok. But I digress. Pictures! (As always, images are just a click away from my Flickr.)
Starting even with Thai Airlines in-flight food, I did my best to write down everything I ate on my trip so I could do a Hungry Tracy-style breakdown of my meals and whatnot. When- and wherever it was possible, I took pictures, like so:
That’s rice and three different kinds of dead pig in the back, and wonderful fresh fruit in the front. Also, of course, tea. I should have requested the vegetarian meal options, if only to see what they were, but I forgot to do so, on both the way out and the way back. Oh well. Honestly, it sorta bugs me that vegetarian isn’t the freaking default on stuff like airplane food, which is supposedly designed to be as neutral and inoffensive to as many people as possible, but sigh. At least Thai Airways’ offerings had a surprisingly pleasant amount of spice to them.
But I did not just take pictures of my food, oh no. For instance, here is an attempt to capture the hustle and bustle of Kathmandu’s tourist district, Thamel, through the window of a Nepali taxicab:
The “Best Shopping Centre” (yellow sign under the blue “really this is a traffic noise reduction part of town” banner) turned out to be a little grocery store, but we didn’t figure that out until after our trek. Better still, it turned out to be a grocery store with real fixed prices. Yay for not haggling about the cost of tea in a country that shares a border with China! And while we’re on the subject of tea, let me introduce you to the most beautiful man in Nepal:
Like I wrote in my Flickr description of this picture, this is Mingma Sherpa, one of our cookstaff (yes, we had a cooking staff on trek, and of course I will be singing their praises here in the days to come). He brought me bed tea first thing in the morning for two glorious weeks — in some cases (like the one pictured here) at my very tent, so I didn’t even have to get out of my sleeping bag. In this picture, taken on our last morning in Tengboche, he is giving the camera just a small fraction of his stunning smile. Yes, I got SO VERY SPOILED on this trip.
And while I’m bragging, here’s a picture of me in front of some very tall mountains (their names are in the Flickr caption):
Yeah, I love showing that one off, and since it’s a tough act to follow, I’ll end this entry here. Regularly-scheduled posts will resume on Monkey Monday!
Comments»
i want to go on a trip where people feed me. i can’t wait to hear more!
The automagic posts were cool, but nothing compared to having the real Tracy back
Thank you! Welcome back!
I think Mingma might be one of the most beautiful men *anywhere,* actually… Great pics, I went thru some of your Flickr stuff and will get to the rest. Looking forward to any highlights and/or Easter eggs you may put in here too :D