Greetings from Istanbul

It's spring awright!!!





Location: Istanbul Istanbul

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The Banaue Rice Terraces: A Living Cultural Landscape

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My interest in exploring the northern part of the Philippines started from looking at a piece of art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, California.   Among the display of ceramics and pottery engraved with gold and other decorative stuff,  a wooden carving of a male figure squatting on a platform with the lower arms on top of each other, resting upon his knees, caught my eye.  According to the docent, the wooden sculpture was called "Bului" which literally means "granary guardian" in the "Ifugao" tribe dialect. The carved wooden sculpture was set on a platform on top of another platform, a mortar.   Our docent explained the significance of the wooden mortar (which was used with the pestle, to separate the husk from the rice, sort of rice mill) and linked the story to the Rice Terraces in the Cordillera Mountains of the Philippines built 2000 years ago by the “Ifugao” tribe. So two years and three hundred kilometers north of Manila later, we explo...
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Montevideo, Uruguay: Where's the Beef

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Tell anyone that you’re going to Argentina and they’ll tell you to try the ‘steak that melts in your mouth’ in Buenos Aires. Yes, eating beef is quintessential as Tango in Argentina. On a trip to South America, we stopped in Montevideo, Uruguay before Buenos Aires, so that’s where I got my introduction to Tango (a topic worthy of another blog) and the food scene, which is a lot of meat. The importance of the beef industry is evident everywhere in South America, but nowhere more so than in the restaurant and stalls of Mercado Del Puerto in Montevideo, Uruguay. There are barbecued beef the size of 'South America', beef platters, steak sandwiches, barbecued kidneys and sausages, blood sausages, chorizo and snacks of spicy sausage in a hot dog roll, and beef club sandwiches. While I understand that food represents so much about a country's culture, the display of meats in Mercado Del Puerto brings to mind a list of questions about beef and the environmen...
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Transylvania, Romania: The Land of Dracula

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When we hear the place Transylvania, we almost always think about Dracula, the bloody vampire, that always makes a good Halloween story. So, when I visited Transylvania early this year, it's hard not to associate the places, like the Bran Castle to the famous novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker.  It’s said that Bram Stoker’s inspiration for the Dracula was a historical character Vlad Tepes or Vlad III, the ruler of Wallachia in the 15th century. During Stoker’s research on the region of Transylvania, he came across the brutal accounts of the atrocities committed by Vlad III, also known as Vlad Dracul, aka Vlad the Impaler. He was known for committing brutal acts of war and was under constant threat of attack from the Ottoman and Hungarian forces. During his infamous retreat from the Ottoman forces, Vlad the Impaler had the bodies of his enemies and his people alike impaled on large spikes in the field surrounding his county.   The inspiration for the made-up character ma...
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