Categories
food

Bangkok Food

During a recent work trip to Southeast Asia, I partook on a quick weekend jaunt to Bangkok. It’s a fascinating city and a fascinating culture with a wonderful vibrancy. It also has an intimate relationship with food with more than 20,000 food-serving establishments in the city. So when I went to Bangkok I took not one but two food tours.

The tours I took were offered by Bangkok Food Tours. Aside from the food, it was a good opportunity to see parts of the city I would not have explored otherwise.

In the morning, I took the Historic Bangrak Tour. It began inauspiciously as I was late to the meeting point because I came out the wrong exit at the metro station. However, I found the group and soon thereafter we were heading through a sprinkle of rain to the first destination. There, we were served a simple but delicious plate of roasted duck on rice. That was followed by a more adventurous item: duck feet wrapped in pig intestine (looked like bacon) and stuffed with more pig product. The first dish was quite tasty, the second was just an experience.

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Categories
sport

Continental Performance in the World Cup

Football fans tend to identify with the sport at one or both of two levels: club and national team. However, the utterly global nature of the game makes it possible to identify at a third level: continental. It seems bizarre that we could categorize entire continents into buckets that we could then compare, discuss, and argue. What ties say Ireland and Bulgaria together, or South Korea and Qatar, beyond geological boundaries of continents? ((Geological boundaries which football’s governing bodies have cheerfully ignored with the likes of Israel, Georgia, Armenia, and Kazakhstan plying away in “Europe” and Australia a recent member of the Asians.))

Continent # of 2014 Participants
Africa 5
Asia 4
Europe 13
N America 4
S America 6

Regardless, continental policy matters. It is how FIFA decides on the number of teams that a given continent can provide to the World Cup. One of the narratives of the current World Cup ponders whether global football power is shifting away from the Old World. ((http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/28117029 and http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/28/continental-shift-world-cup)) A relatively miniscule cadre of six European teams survived the group stages and many have disdained even that number as supposed lightweights Switzerland and Greece had also snuck in. So is the rest of the world catching up to Europe?