Boba

by Adrienne Wilson on


Boba World, Westwood – that’s where it all went down for me. A life long disdain for tapioca, gone in several small slurps. One boba, two boba, three – Slurrrrp! Slurrrp! As a child, tapioca was the magic word to make me scrunch up my face, turn the other direction and run like a mad coyote in the wind. These days I can’t get enough it. Just the other day I cruised over to a local Vietnamese owned spot to grab a cool Green Tea Boba smoothie. As I was slurping up the tapioca balls I started to wonder what caused the change of heart after so many years. It took only a few minutes for brain freeze to kick in and knock me from my train of thought. Who cares? As far as I’m concerned boba’s good and unsurprisingly there are several Americans who are so out of touch with this delightful treat On my quest to find some gentle facts for the timid tourist exploring boba for the first time this is what I uncovered:

  • Wikipedia notes that Boba (pronounced Buo Ba in Mandarin) is the tapioca found at the bottom of bubble tea or boba milk tea. The literal meaning for the word is slang for “big breast/nipple” as the tapioca balls resemble a mother’s nipple. Hmm – I never thought so, but that’s certainly something to chew on. Can someone confirm?
  • Boba balls are made from Cassava.
  • There is a village in Vas county Hungary named Boba. Wonder if boba drinks are popular there?
  • A now obsolete Italian word – boba, means “stupid.”
  • Bobafind.com provides several recipes to making your perfect drink in the comfort of your own home.

It might do first-timers some good to swing by the recipes page first to see what the heck is going on in these deliciously wild beverages before going in and making their own funny face when offered the tapioca balls.

Point It

by Adrienne Wilson on

A friend of mine was just telling me about this revolutionary book helping travelers globally become better communicators – Point It. I know we’ve had to have mentioned it here before, but it’s worthy of another blurb. The concept is quite easy. Let’s say you’re in a European restaurant. I’ll be more specific and say mmm… Latvia. You want to tell the waiter you do not wish to have Latvian bacon buns, but you know neither word in the lang. You’re stuck and destined to have this fine Lativan appetizer unless you can point your way out of it. You turn to your trusty Point It guide hoping it has bacon buns pictured with a huge red “X” in there somewhere. Does it? Heck, if I know – my copy is in the post, but you get the idea. If you don’t know how to say it there are 1,200 pictures so – point it.

via Flight 001

Amnesty International Ceasefire Photo Gallery

by Adrienne Wilson on

Here’s something to spend just a few moments checking out. On August 7th, Amnesty International held a global vigil for ceasefire in the Lebanon/Israel conflict. The gallery showcases how members and supporters from over 30 countries came together to show their solidarity for victims and survivors of both sides. Quite moving in a way – it includes shots of people covered in banners, sprawled out in streets, and candles spelling out “ceasefire” in Arabic from Beirut. Take a look at how folks in Paris, Pakistan and Santiago demonstrated their cry for peace and ceasefire.

No Such Thing As Eco-Tourism?

by Adrienne Wilson on

Anneli Rufus may have gained a couple followers tagging along and hi-fiving her long-winded rant which compares colonialism to eco-tourism, but she sure ruffled more than a few feathers. While I don’t necessarily agree with all her commentary myself, the writing is biting, cut-throat, makes you think and has generated what actually looks like 109 well-thought out responses. (Mind-blowing, but not surprising.) Anneli who claims to have been a adventurer in the past, writer of travel books (and actually was) and so-on, no longer wanders into Third World territories, but now deeply contemplates whether First World travelers are doing nothing more than boasting, bragging and dismantling the landscape in their gnarly little eco-tourist excursions. What do you say?

If you’ve got some free time (and I do mean free time) then swing over to AlterNet for a read. Actually, even if you’re very busy at work trying to get through the middle of the work week I suggest you go over and see what side of the picket-white fence you’re on. Are you a status conscious colonialist using eco-tourism for a mask while trampling, intruding and wrecking foreign locales in the name of a snapshot or do you believe differently? Is Anneli totally off the mark?

What does eco-tourism mean to you? How do you define adventure travel

Anti-Americanism Editorial

by Erik Olsen on

We’ve been hearing so much lately about anti-Americanism, it’s almost a cliche as a story. Yeah, yeah, they hate us, we know it. What can we do? Somewhat lost in the debate are the reasons why there appears to be so much disgruntlement (nice word!) with the American way. Sure, the policies of the Bush Administration appear to be to blame…a lot of people around the world don’t like what we’re doing in Iraq. But as this editorial in the LA Times attempts to point out, there’s more to the question than meets to eye.

Julia E. Sweig is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a new book called “Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century.” She points to a host of other issues that have caused people around world to get their panties in a bunch. The Cold war legacy, she says, left a residue of dissatisfaction with American policy. All that nasty business in Latin America and South east Asia, stuff that, she suggest, we’ve kind of forgotten (she nicely quotes Gore Vidal, who quipped we should be called the United States of Amnesia). Then there is the matter of our power. everyone hates the big guy, that’s just natural, so much of the antipathy has to do with being number one.

Let’s see, what else. Oh, yeah, globalization. We’ve run around telling everyone how great free markets are and then when some countries like Peru or Bolivia give the free market thing a try and come up more poor than they were before, they grow skeptical. Add into that equation all this business with American farm subsidies not really being free market after all, and you can see why there’s some doubting Thomasses out there.

My opinion is that this whole-anti-American thing will likely pass. We’re still a country whose heart is in the right place and is a wonderful place to live and visit . I suspect that once this nasty Iraq business is behind us and once the Arab/Israeli imbroglio hits a stasis again (as it will, though it will never be solved), folks will lighten up a bit about America. I could be wrong, but if America is still loathed in five years, I’ll be surprised.

In the meantime, what I suggest we do is hold a contest around the globe for some 5,000 people from every country. We’ll pay for them to come here and hang out with us for a few weeks. Then, when they go back, they’ll tell all their friends about what we’re really like.

Problem solved. See?