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Tuesday, June 17 Gonzo Congo
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MONDO WEIRDO
This week's bizarre adventure tales bring you user-unfriendly toilets, skewered sparrows and sizzling rats on the barbie. BY DON GEORGE | for the past few weeks Mondo Weirdo has been focusing on amazing food tales from around the world. This week we present four more appetite-enhancing anecdotes, plus we begin to expand the conversation to include bizarre places and situations we have stumbled into in our off-the-beaten-track travels. Keep those cards and letters coming! Send your tales to wanderlust@salonmagazine.com. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I knew we should have packed that Port-a-Potty In the hilly part of Granada, Spain, called Sacromonte, where the few remaining Moors fled when Ferdinand and Isabella cast them out of the great Moorish complex, the Alhambra, and out of the rest of Granada for the last time (1492), the full-blooded Gypsy descendants of those Moors, who have never come down from the foothills to assimilate into Spanish life, still reside. Their homes and taverns are still the caves of their ancestors, and their taverns were certainly never meant for women patrons (some still eschew females). Here, the true and authentic flamenco is danced, the fiery and erotic one that the average American would never take a child to. It's a mysterious place that tourists often hear of but rarely visit, and when they do find a local to take them there, they do not venture far up into the ghetto. Everyone seems to prefer it this way. Great, steep cobblestone and sometimes rocky roads take one deeper into Sacromonte The way is eventually impassable to motor vehicles, so the Gypsies are left to themselves to live their rugged lives as they always have, descending into the city only to sell carnations, pottery or other wares, or often sending waifish, ragged children to sit on cathedral steps and beg. Sometimes they are actually spat upon by the natives. My arrogant and youthfully indestructible group of college peers and I (equally arrogant) began our forays into Sacromonte in our early days of residence in Granada, and inched deeper into it as the months passed. We made ourselves at home in hash houses where our local friends were amazed to learn we visited. But, as I said before, these ancient taverns were never meant for female patrons. And so the crude urinals on the floor were the only, well, outlet for the bitter gin we drank. Often there were no doors on the johns; indeed there was no john, just the urinal, and we women would circle about one another in a lame attempt to cover one another when mother nature's call came. Try squatting over a hole in an ammonia-dampened floor with a skirt hiked up and panties around the knees. Just try maintaining dignity and dry clothing. That circle of women hardly served as a fail-safe drape. Any female traveler who is idiot enough to make this trip at all must at least remember to bring toilet paper or something akin to it. And anyway, the toilet paper in Spain much more resembles a paper grocery bag than facial tissue. -- Denise Showers - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Head's up! In your original column introducing Mondo Weirdo, a gentleman named Tom Cole told about being served sheep's head at a banquet on the Turugart Pass between China and Kyrgyzstan. Mr. Cole could have saved a lot of transportation costs to eat sheep's head. Near the Brooklyn Bridge there remain many Italian restaurants run by people from the southern part of Italy, where you can still get a well prepared head. I ate this all the time growing up as a kid in New York. The simplest way is the best. Cut the head in half, rub with garlic and olive oil, sprinkle on some oregano and put in a pizza oven. Yes, the jowls ( cheeks ) are the best. The brains should be eaten with mashed potatoes and chopped parsley; cooked with eggs is also good. Although my grandfather, like the people in Mr. Cole's tale, liked the eyeballs, I could never bring myself to eat them. -- Richard Pascarelli - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - On a wing and a skewer With a wife who's from Burma, I have become accustomed to sometimes strange foods (including eating our honeymoon lei after we arrived in Hawaii). Among the more foreign tidbits she's described to me over the years are fried sparrows. While in Burma, I somehow missed out on these delicacies, but later, in Bangkok, we found them at a really nice restaurant and snapped them up. Served whole (minus feathers) on a skewer, the little winged wonders are fried to a crisp, so you can eat them bones and all with a spicy red sauce. To my amazement, they were quite tasty. -- Greg Imlay - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Pass me some more of that spicy red sauce While on a Fulbright to Ecuador, I went down to Cuenca to do a seminar for teachers. Not much to do at night except wander around and soak up atmosphere. When you get hungry, there are vendors selling grilled meat on almost every corner. What was the meat? Rat, of course! -- Elaine Johnson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
How about you? Do you have a weird travel tale to share? Send it to wanderlust@salonmagazine.com. And join our Table Talk discussion on travel and food. |
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