Month: January 2016

This is a popular time of year for lists of all kinds, and while mine isn’t confined to the year 2015 alone, I thought it might be a fitting time to share. It’s a survey of the superlative places, or better put, the places most notable for each superlative category in the whole world*. (*that I’ve been to**.) (**not just in 2015, but in my lifetime.) While my list isn’t as timely as other common year-end lists, it more than compensates for this in originality of categories. Let’s begin with something fairly typical and move on from there. The…

Best Food: Japan
Runner-up: Thailand
Honorable Mention: New York City

Japan’s famous dishes: sushi, noodles, yakitori (barbecue), teppanyaki (the showy iron hibachi grill food) is all great, but in all my time in Japan, every single thing I tried except for the donuts and desserts was excellent. Japanese tastes are usually right on, in my book, except when it comes to sweet foods. They’d probably find a saltine cracker “too sweet. Oh, no, too sweet.” I have no idea how those seaweed-eaters stay so skinny with all that good food around. Maybe because it’s all incredibly expensive?

Thailand is the country with my second-favorite food. Its people and restaurants are close to my heart. Unlike Japan, almost every place you eat at in Thailand is inexpensive and unpretentious. And there are street food vendors galore, so you never run out of new things to try.

New York is probably the place with the best food I’ve tried in my own country, with the very large caveat that it’s all way overpriced, as if the whole city were inside an airport terminal, and way too classy for a simple Iowan like me to navigate and feel welcome in. A longtime resident there asked me my favorite food in the city, and to get out of her glaring spotlight, I replied generically, “Uh, I like the pizza.” But that wasn’t enough to get me off the hook. “Like what, you mean a pie? Or by the slice? What kind of pizza?” She grilled me so bad I wished I had told her I only ate peanut butter sandwiches, but then she probably would have interrogated me on what kind of peanut butter and bread I used and then humiliated me for using mass market name brands.

Best Meal Experience: China
Runner-up: Korea

I’ve written about how fun (and wild) Chinese dinners could be here and here. In short, Chinese dinners, in celebration with family and friends, are hours-long events with many rounds of food, drinking, toasts, and merrymaking. While the average meal was pretty dismal in China, a big dinner was filled with dozens and dozens of different dishes to choose from, and the fun atmosphere of the event filled a whole evening. The dinners really were the highlight of my time in China.

I’m not crazy about Korean food, (unlike Koreans, whom I believe are in a sense really deranged about their own food, with anecdotes of Korean airline travelers telling security guards that they need to bring their kimchi on board because Koreans can’t eat the food in other countries- look it up), but Korea is a great place to eat out with friends. For one, Korea is jam-packed with independently-owned restaurants, most of which are furnished with long tables meant for very large groups. And the up-all-night culture means there is always a place you can find to take a group of one or two dozen people at any time for barbecue or a crowd-pleaser like chicken and beer or spicy chicken stew (jjimdak). While I disagreed with all the sour pickles being served at every Korean meal, I could never turn down barbecue, a fool-proof and plentiful option in the busy streets of Korea.

Jjimdak, from http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/FOD/FO_EN_6_4_4.jsp?cid=586927

Worst Meal Experience: USA
Runner-up: China

In America, the places available to eat at where I live mostly expect you to sit down, order, eat, pay, and go quickly, with a waitress (cue the authoritarian Millennial: “That’s SERVER.”) constantly coming up and asking you, “How’s everything for ya?” or “How’s that tastin’ for ya?” or anything else “for ya?” Then, after turning down dessert “for ya” by asking for “just the check,” you chat a little, then leave and go home and scroll through your phone. Boring. Any place in America that doesn’t follow this model, in my experience, has been a neat independent place, or more likely, an elite dining experience far out of my price range and cultural comfort zone.

Runner-up is China, because although the special dinners there were great fun, they always brought stomach pain in their wake, and the average meal there was something lousy that you would expect to find as a sight gag in a dreary scene of a movie. Limp, oil-soaked vegetables, hardly any protein, unrecognizable bland, soft-textured, gelatinous foods, stinky foods like smelly tofu, and all of it prepared below acceptable hygienic standards. Okay, maybe not ALL of it, all of it, was prepared with poor hygiene, but enough must have been that I had stomach pain on a weekly basis and spent three days in the hospital at the end of my year-long stay.

Worst Food Instincts: Korea
Runner-up: USA

I think, long ago in the time dominated by robed, funny hat-wearing Confucian scholars, the isolated peninsula of Korea considered its mountainous terrain, cold winters, and limited fruit and vegetable production potential, and began philosophically analyzing everything edible with the question, “But what if we pickle it?” As in, “These green beans would taste great if freshly picked and then boiled or grilled, but what if we pickle them?” Americans think they have a taste for the exotic when they express a fondness for kimchi, but little do they realize that Koreans eat kimchi at literally every meal. Kimchi is not just the cabbage stuff either, there are several kinds of kimchi, with the most common being the cabbage and radish kinds, and there are all kinds of pickled foods eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Being helpless to find a healthy meal anywhere in Korea of lean meats and fresh vegetables, or fresh fruits, without breaking the bank, was an aggravating experience that made me want to toss my sanity to the wind and lash out to a Korean audience, “I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU PEOPLE GOT SO BIG! ALL YOU EAT IS CARBS AND PICKLES! AND YOU TAKE THE ELEVATOR AND ESCALATOR EVERYWHERE INSTEAD OF WALKING. BUT YOU’RE THE THICKEST, HEALTHIEST-LOOKING PEOPLE IN THE ORIENT! WHAT GIVES?!” (Cue the authoritarian Millennial again: “It’s called EAST ASIA. Oriental is a rug.” Cue everyone born in East Asia who has learned English and wasn’t educated overseas: “But we say Orient.”)

America gets the shame of being runner-up in this category because of our obvious, out-of-control instincts to manufacture food with high sugar content, and to load comfort foods with craving-inducing things like bacon and melted cheese and so on. Absurd Frankenstein sandwiches like KFC’s Double Down, made out of two “buns” of fried chicken with cheese and bacon in between are a successful parody of America’s eat-whatever-looks-tasty mentality, and could possibly be a surprisingly healthy alternative, like the Double Down is, to even fattier sugar and carb-loaded cousins. (Compare the classic Burger King Whopper and the Double and Triple Whopper.) It’s a shame to have to talk about and try to explain the American diet to acquaintances overseas, and I think a very sad and shameful reality for us Americans to live with. Why do we continue to eat this way?

The Double Down sandwich, from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kfcs-double-down-sandwich-smart-marketing-and-not-as-gross-as-youd-think/

Smelliest Place: Busan, Korea
Runner-up: China
Dishonorable Mentions: Key West, Florida and New York City

When I first came to Busan, an exceptionally glib Korean man introduced himself to me and asked where I was from. When I said Iowa, he responded by telling me, garnished with an unctuous ear-to-ear grin, how he had driven through Iowa once and been bombarded by the wafting stench of manure. Yes, I replied through politely gritted teeth, there are quite a lot of farms in Iowa. I knew it was undignified at the time, but I only had a faint idea how outrageous it was for a Busan resident to be having a laugh at the unpleasant smells of any other place.

Iowa is the US’s leading producer of corn and pork, and there are many other farms producing other crops and livestock, so the farm stink settling over its lonesome highways is an unfortunate byproduct of agricultural necessity. Iowans prefer to endure it with a good-humored perspective by repeating the tongue-in-cheek line “That’s the smell of money.” But Busan’s smell? It’s not a necessary byproduct of anything. It is, as far as I could tell, the smell of incompetent plumbing and infrastructure. Every open creek winding through this otherwise picturesque city reeks like an open sewer, as do most of its busy shopping centers if the competing smells of frying oil and grilling meat aren’t enough to mask it. I’ve lived in Iowa most of my life, yet I only smell bad smells on those occasional trips through the country, and even then it’s not a guaranteed fact of every long drive. In Busan, I smelled the sewer every day. It didn’t matter how I tried to mind my own business, that sewer stink found me. No matter how posh-looking or exciting the lights, sounds, and crowds are in any district in Busan, the fumes of human waste will sneak their way in and bring everyone’s haughty upturned nose back down to ugly reality. When I took walks or runs along Busan’s riverside recreational paths, which was quite a lot since the only other place to take a long walk was up a mountain, I sometimes tried holding my breath or masking my face around open drains. The intense, vomit-inducing odor was the most powerful urban stink I had been overcome with outside of China.

China, in my nickname borrowed after Thailand’s “Land of Smiles,” was the Land of Smells. It could have been shoddy plumbing like Korea, which it partially was, but it was also plant and animal waste left after street markets, restaurant refuse rotting outside, human and animal droppings on the sidewalks and streets, and the world’s worst air pollution. I went on an unwisely long run once on a blazing hot summer day in China, traversing along a riverside road from one city to another, and on my way back, passing alongside a farmer with his small herd of cows, I doubled over from the heat, dehydration, and the burning, sulfurous smell of an adjacent glass factory. I thought I would either retch or faint, and if I fainted, I figured my unconscious body would lie baking in the blazing sun until some concerned passerby called for help. Which could have been a long time, since passersby in China aren’t often concerned (see “the Little Yue Yue event”). I soldiered on, but the rest of my stay in China was never sweet-smelling. Pretty much all of China stinks, or if not, it probably means that you’ve been there long enough to have gotten used to the smell.

Dishonorable mentions of Key West, Florida, for the smell of decomposing seaweed and sargassum around its many island beaches which smells nearly like diarrhea and can be smelled for miles around, and New York City, for the smell of ammonia in every dank corner that I assume comes from human urine.

Safest Place: South Korea
Runner-up: Iowa and Middle America

I begrudgingly award this honor to South Korea because they love bragging about themselves, and Korea’s public safety is one of their most vaunted features. Yes, to answer the question asked of every foreign guest in South Korea, I did feel safe there. I much appreciated the public trust there that made it a casual, thoughtless thing to leave one’s bag and phone unattended at a coffee shop while going to the restroom. I was at times shocked when I saw school-aged girls walking alone through unlit parks and back roads to go home after their late night tutoring and study sessions. In big city America, that would be known as “looking for trouble.” But as far as I know, these girls were rarely if ever harassed. Also, the young men in Korea seldom adopt a tough, confrontational attitude as far as I saw, and I never felt the animosity of aggressive men jockeying for social rank and strong appearance like I have in America. Mostly, people minded their own business, and accidents and slip-ups could usually be smoothed over with a meek apology. There is one glaring inconsistency in Korea’s public safety record: drivers, especially scooter and motorcycle drivers, are reckless and boorish, driving over sidewalks or driving through red lights as they please, racking up an alarming number of pedestrian injuries and deaths every year. So, to rain on Koreans’ pride parade, I would point out that I never feared for my life so much as a pedestrian or car passenger in my hometown.

Speaking of, public safety often never crosses my mind where I live. To avoid the element of danger, I just stay away from bars and crowded nightlife areas. Contrary to the world’s fears about Americans’ private gun ownership, the real danger from guns is from inner-city gangs, drug and alcohol-related crime, robberies, and suicides. If you live in Middle America, like I do, these terrible facts of life can mostly be avoided. I’ve never bought into the hysteria that the average American gun owner has a loose hand cannon just waiting to go off. I should mention though, that like Korea, I worry about traffic accidents and injuries. I’ve thought to myself many times that if I died violently, it would probably be from being crashed into by a teenager texting while driving. Big roads and cars dominate American life, and there’s no way to avoid them.

Most Dangerous: China
Runner-up: Manila, Philippines

If I had to pick a “Most Dangerous” place, I would say China because I almost died there and because many times I thought a wild taxi driver or purposeful truck driver callous to the human life of pedestrians would plow into me without a care. I thought I could have been crushed by panic spreading through one of the many crowds I was inevitably caught in, or from getting sick through poor hygienic conditions, pollution, and exposure to the cold (Chinese buildings aren’t allowed to have central heating unless they’re above the geographical mid-line set by the government, or unless they’re a big public or commercial space like a train station or mall).

I also feared for my life in the mean streets of Manila, where I was eyed as prey by nearly every onlooker, and where relatively safe transportation is hard to procure unless you tip a police officer to flag down a taxi whose driver is likewise eager to extort extra money out of you. Plus, every shopping center and public transportation hub has armed police and metal detectors, and pistol and shotgun-wielding police were a common sight outside of shops and banks. There was a worry of attacks by political groups, but even more so I was afraid that a lax officer’s casual grip on his shotgun handle would send an accidental spray into the street. Manila is also the only place I’ve been pick-pocketed, so that infamy earns it high marks of distinction on the dangerous list.

More ranks of honor and dishonor to come.