Times Square Fairfield Inn to celebrate “straight 10s” with Shake Shack

by Tom Johansmeyer on

If you kept track of my Shake Shack odyssey a few weeks ago and built up an appetite, you’re a few weeks from being able to satisfy it. On October 10, 2010 … that’s 10-10-10, in case you didn’t realize it … the Fairfield Inn & Suites New York Times Square is going to make it easy for you. To celebrate the day of straight 10s, the hotel will give a $10 gift card per room for guests to use a few blocks away at the Shake Shack on 44th Street and Eighth Avenue (the last stop on my trip).

This deal is pretty wild. Too often, hotels try to ship you over to local tourist trap restaurants, where you really don’t experience the best the city has to offer. Fairfield Inn, on the other hand, is working with a Manhattan institution, making it easier for guests from out of town to dine like a local.

So, is the midtown Shake Shack the “tourist” one? Well, I can tell you from personal experience that it isn’t. This Shack can hang with the other three in Manhattan, and the staff uses the same techniques that it employs at the other locations (e.g., providing menus to customers when the line is long) to keep the process moving easily.

There is one catch, however. Keep your receipt: you may need it to get into the bathroom!

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Wet in Venice: an unexpected gift in Italy

by Suzanne Stroot on

In October 2002, Bush and Cheney were gearing up to invade Iraq and I was encountering my first experiences as a not-so-welcome American in Europe. My whole trip had been carefully scripted, at least as far as where I’d sleep at night, but I’d left open the question of where to stay in Venice, the city I would fly home from. As I sat in the small office off the kitchen of the Tuscan farmhouse I’d been staying in, calling more and more places, the proprietress noticed I was hearing a lot of no’s. She took the phone, saying that she had a friend in Venice with an extra room who could probably use the money. “She’s had cancer, and I’d like to do her a favor,” she explained, already dialing. I was desperate, so the intervention was welcome.

Armed with a little slip of paper on which my Tuscan hostess had spelled out the unusually named Virginia’s address and phone number, I was off.

As it turned out, Virginia lived on a wide cobblestone square in the heart of Venice. Pulling my roller bag across the stones, the racket announcing my arrival, I could see that from this location I would be able to walk everywhere. Weeks earlier, on the flight to Italy, I’d met an elderly man who’d studied Venice, specifically its mosaic floors, his entire adult life. His face had filled with delight as he composed a list of the floors and places I must visit.

I pulled up to a stone building with a big glossy black door presenting a sturdy face to the square. I was buzzed into a foyer, with a notably nice floor, and walked up the steps to Virginia’s flat.Virginia opened the door onto a cozy and modern home. Shelves full of books lined the living area, with the flat tops of the shelves reserved for plants. Behind the plants were windows, opened at a slant. These were too high for me to look out of, but the plants must have had a nice view. There was a sofa, a coffee table with current magazines and a large farm table for dining. Beyond this was the tiniest kitchen I’ve ever seen — about three feet wide and four feet deep. Everything in it, including the refrigerator, was commensurately small. An eye-level window looked out on potted geraniums and other apartments.

My room was just off the main one, with the only bath to my right and her bedroom down a small hall to the left. The futon was already made up for me, with a little reading lamp on a low table nearby. There was just enough room for my suitcase on the floor alongside my bed. And there were more tall windows. Even standing on the futon I wouldn’t be able to see out. I could hear the sounds of the canal below though — water sloshing, gently slapping the building, and voices too, of children playing.

“Alberto will be home this evening,” Virginia said. Oh, there’s a husband, I thought, okay.

My hostess was about fifty-five years old. As I thanked her for making my room so comfortable, I searched her face for signs of illness. She seemed all right, even if her color was a little off.

She showed me how to heat water for instant coffee in the morning and placed a canister of “biscuits,” very plain cookies, on the table for my morning breakfast.

And so my first afternoon in Venice began. I made my way down narrow alleys, up and down steps, pausing to look into shop windows, and I felt like I’d been there before. Not déjà vu, but deja merchandise. This was the exact same stuff I’d seen in my grandparents’ home as a child, things they’d picked up on their travels here: gilt trays of gold, red, and green, blown glass birds, “paintings” made of tiny stones. Suddenly those things that had seemed precious and unique, some of which I now owned, seemed like very expensive knick-knacks, souvenirs Venice had been foisting off on tourists for decades.

As I walked along the canals, lined with picturesque businesses and homes, watching the water lap against the buildings, I noticed that mildew was growing up the sides of some. The place was soggy at its roots, decaying, but putting up a good front. I visited Saint Mark’s Square, had my picture taken amidst the pigeons that have overrun the place, and paused for a rest.

“Could this be?” I wondered. “I really don’t like Venice?” This was an unacceptable conclusion to reach, especially so quickly. I walked along the Grand Canal and looked at the anchored yachts with their matching helicopters. The Canal view was lovely, but I was unmoved. I walked further and further but a feeling that this was a fake place, like Las Vegas or Disneyland, was growing. I decided to review the list provided me by the lover of floors. I would faithfully follow it the next day.

When I returned to the flat, I met Alberto — an environmental engineer working on plans for a massive project that it was hoped would someday provide a shield that would rise and fall with the tides, protecting Venice from periodic flooding.

That night a mosquito was trapped in my room. I turned on the light and went through the routine of trying to see and smash it. And though I washed my hands after visiting the bathroom, they smelled like prosciutto back in my room — Alberto’s favorite, smeared on the bathroom doorknob.

The next day I ate cookies for breakfast, and then — why not? — gelato for lunch. This would become a daily habit. Since it was Alberto and Virginia’s place and Virginia seemed to stay at home, I felt obligated to vacate the flat all day. No afternoon rest, just walking and walking, all day. Fueled by sugar and a determination to like this damp place, I located an English-language bookstore and zeroed in on this title: “The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed,” by Mary McCarthy. “Ah,” I thought, “this will help me.”

Little did I know that Ms. McCarthy hadn’t bought Venice either, though it had lots to sell in her day and apparently had for centuries. I read that it was basically a place created by vendors — a playground destination made purposefully pretty in order to lure people in to buy expensive trinkets and entertainment, including the courtesanal kind. It really had been a forerunner of Las Vegas. I felt vindicated, but not happy.

I pursued the list. Two of the places suggested by the floor-lover improved my feelings about Venice, in part because they were relatively dry. One was the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, one of the guilds dating from the thirteenth century where artisans had learned, perfected and practiced their crafts. The other was the Peggy Guggenheim Collection museum. Its pebbled walkways, trees and gardens were as important to me as its works by Calder. It was one of the few places in Venice where I saw a profusion of plants growing in earth.

That night I was invited to join a dinner party. Virginia and Alberto jostled each other in the kitchen, preparing clams. Alberto was a very large man — tall and top heavy. Though he occupied a lot of space, he had a surprisingly high, sweet and melodic voice, and he giggled often, which made me able to forgive him for the prosciutto-slimed doorknobs.

Their friends arrived and we sat down to eat. This was splendid — candlelight, fresh pasta with clam sauce, red Italian table wine, real Venetians… Only I was on the menu too. Virginia set the tone with a passionate statement about the war the US was about to begin, and the intense suffering we would cause. Only much later would I learn that the Senate had passed a resolution that very day authorizing war. Everyone stared at me, expecting answers. They were as brainwashed as I once was that average Americans could actually deter someone like Bush and those behind him from their agenda. I stumbled through a highly unprepared statement: “I agree with you — I can’t stand Bush’s policies…”

But it was clear that Virginia had experienced the hardships of war’s aftermath as a child. She was furious, my clams were gritty, and it was a relief to escape to my little room. On this night I could not only hear the water outside, I could smell it. Sumpy. This place was sopping wet and rotting. And my only friend, the mosquito, had unfortunately not chosen to abandon me.

The next morning, Virginia was kind again, and gave me a ticket to a piano concert at San Giorgio Maggiore church. She also leant me her thigh-high rubber boots so I could slog through St. Mark’s Square at high tide. It was amusing to traverse the square thus clad, but as I did so, I realized I was weary of so much water.

I awoke the next day feeling very ill. I had a high fever, and was weak. No walkabout today. The next day, I felt worse. I huddled in my little room, hearing the water splish-splash, smelling it, feeling terrible, too wiped out to read, with nothing to do but sleep, take my temperature, and worry. It must have been the fever, because I don’t recall ever crying before over being sick. But I cried, and tried to hide this fact when Virginia knocked on the door and brought me tea. She could see I was disheartened, and I felt a sympathy from her I now attribute to her experience of being sick — sick with cancer, sick with the discouragement that illness brought. She quietly left and I cried some more, convinced I would die there and be buried on San Michele, the soggy graveyard island I’d seen on my way to Murano.

Later that day Virginia returned. She’d been out, she’d bought a bone, and she’d made broth for me. I needed to eat, she said, so I could get strong enough for my flight home, the day after next.

The next day, in spite of the morose place I’d descended to, I did feel a bit better. Virginia brought me more bone broth and a few crackers this time. And jewelry. She wanted me to have a necklace of hers: it was made up of twenty-four intertwined strands of tiny glass beads, the beads mostly blues and reds. The beads were similar to what we call “Indian beads” but finer, smaller and deeply colorful. She told me they were very special beads, endemic to Venice, and that she was only telling me this so that I’d know they were special. The necklace had a gold clasp. She also gave me a delicate chain bracelet with black oblong beads because she’d noticed I tended to wear dainty jewelry.

I slid my suitcase nearer, quickly dug out my little jewelry bag and produced a necklace for her — round onyx balls encased in silver, hanging from a thick silver chain. The look of joy on her face still makes me happy.

A year or two later, I received an email from Alberto. Virginia was dead. Having survived several bouts with cancer, over a period lasting more than a decade, she’d finally succumbed.

It took me many years to start wearing that necklace. Now it is one of my favorite things. I think of her when I put it on, and the bone broth she made, and how she helped me become well.

Suzanne Stroot cut her travel teeth watching thousands of childhood miles stream by the backseat window of a Plymouth station wagon. Though she likes the vantage point of traveling as an adult far more, she wouldn’t trade those early experiences for anything. Suzanne is now a writer based in Northern California.

[Photos: Flickr | Kent Mercurio; Kiernan Lynam; gnuckx; sirgini; gnuckx]

Agatha Christie’s English Riviera

by Lillian Africano on


For one solid week – September 12-18, Torquay celebrated the 120th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s birth. As a lifelong Christie fan, I was looking forward to every minute of the promised “murder, mystery and mayhem,” which all turned out to be the kind of innocent fun of a bygone time.

In this quiet, almost pastoral part of England, there are many remnants of years past, as well as reminders that the world’s best-selling novelist is also the best-loved daughter of the English Riviera.

The anniversary festival opened with an old-fashioned fete, featuring costumed stall-holders, a jazz band belting out period music and the Agatha Christie Dancers, who did the Charleston with energy and style. Actor Martin Gaisford as Hercule Poirot, Christie’s most famous detective, mingled with the crowds, posing for pictures and answering questions from fans. Though David Suchet has been the “official” film Poirot for 19 years, Gaisford is a convincing lookalike, with a formidable mustache that is just as Christie described it in the Belgian detective’s debut novel, “The Mysterious Affair in Styles.”

Christie’s grandson, Mathew Pritchard also appeared at the fete, telling stories about his celebrated grandmother-and assuring fans that Agatha Christie, with millions of books in print, along with DVDs, comics, games and downloadable products, is still a star in this digital age. (Pritchard recently signed a 10-year deal with publisher Harper Collins for worldwide distribution of Christie’s books.)

Also making an appearance at the fete were the two Chinese winners of an Agatha Christie competition, along with several Chinese journalists. The prize was a trip to the festival, personally escorted by Matthew Pritchard.

A 23-year-old member of the group who identified himself as “James,” told me the first film he had ever seen after China opened up to Western culture was “Death on the Nile.” The second was “Evil Under the Sun.” After that he went on to read Chrisite’s books. “I was just amazed by Agatha Christie,” he said, “she writes a good story, with simple language, good dialogue and good puzzles.” He went on to predict that Christie’s fan base “will be great in China.”

My Christie pilgrimage included a remarkably fresh performance of “Witness for the Prosecution” by the Agatha Christie Theatre Company and a visit to the Agatha Christie Gallery of the Torquay Museum, where I discovered a long list of actors who had played Poirot, starting with Charles Laughton’s 1928 West End performance. (My least favorite was Albert Finney, who turned in a near-cartoonish performance in the 1974 Hollywood version of “Murder on the Orient Express.”)

The museum is part of the Agatha Christie Mile, a meandering route that traces landmarks in the life of the Queen of Crime: the Princess Pier, where she roller-skated, Beacon Cove, where she swam (and once nearly drowned) and 800-year-old Torre Abbey, where head gardener Ali Marshall has created a year-round garden of all the poisonous plants used by Christie in her 80 novels.

Dame Agatha had pharmaceutical training as a young woman, so poison was her preferred murder weapon, and she famously wrote: “Poison has a certain appeal…it has not the crudeness of the revolver or the blunt instrument.” Ali Marshall shares Christie’s enthusiasm for poisons found in nature, and her own guide to the plants is prominently displayed in the garden. I learned that cyanide is found in peach kernels and that hyoscyamine (or henbane) is not an easy plant to find-Marshall sourced hers from witchcraft sites.

A highlight of my visit to the English Riviera was the tour of Greenway, the 400-year old holiday home Christie purchased in 1938 for £6,000. To reach the house, which is located on the River Dart, I took the vintage Greenway bus (reservations necessary); the house is also accessible by ferry and by car (advance parking reservations necessary).

Greenway was gifted to the National Trust by Christie’s family, and after a £5.4 million restoration, it was opened to the public in 2009. Stuffed as it is with weird and wacky and wonderful things, the Georgian house is warm and welcoming and very much alive, as if Dame Agatha herself might still be in residence.

A pile of gardening hats belong to her son-in-law rests on a table in the entrance hall, along with a (really) vintage mobile phone that looks as if it weighs 10 pounds. Her personal collections: papier mache, pottery, ceramics, pictures, books and more, fill the rooms, which are light and airy, creating a 1930s setting with a modern (1950s) overlay of amenities. In each room are scrapbooks filled with Christie’s writings, records of parties and entertainments, dinner menus, as well as the sweet trivia that filled the days at Greenway, which she described as “the loveliest place in the world.”

Dame Agatha’s presence is felt throughout the home, especially when a recording of her voice is played, in which she talks about her career in a matter-of-fact way, saying she made notes on plots as they occurred to her-but then had to find time to do the writing.

Near the end of my tour, I had lunch in Christie’s own kitchen, dining on chicken that was cooked in a vintage Aga, followed by a luscious bread pudding. (Lunch is priced at a modest £15 for two courses.)

Before leaving Greenway, I checked out the section of the house that had been turned into a five-bedroom rental apartment that sleeps 10 (rent is about £2700 a week in high season, much less in winter). The furniture here is from the Christie collection and the kitchen is pure 1950s, making this a dream spot for fans who are also lovers of all things retro.

The most elegant event of the week was the September 15 birthday party held at the Grand Hotel, where Christie honeymooned with first husband Archie. Actress Jane Asher, known also as a celebrity baker, created the recipe for the “Delicious Death” cake from ingredients mentioned in “Appointment with Death.”

The guest of honor at the gala was Julia McKenzie, the newest Miss Marple. McKenzie greeted guests, posed for pictures and spoke of her trepidation at being given an iconic role, particularly after the late Joan Hickson established herself as the one-and-only Miss Marple. “But,” she says, “I like to play the story line, rather than over-thinking it,” depicting Miss Marple as “a person you’d like as a friend, someone you’d trust.”

And then, with a twinkle in her eye and a hint of mischief in her smile, she asks: “But would you invite her anywhere? There’s always a murder wherever she happens to be.”

The party ended with a bang, but there were no murders, just an eye-popping display of fireworks on the beach below the hotel.

Culinary travel tale: exploring Malaysia’s complicated cultural feast

by Karen Pinchin on

Two weeks after I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, it was all over the news: an American fast-food chain had accidentally sold thousands of non-Halal beef burgers to nearly as many Muslim Malaysians. Panic streaked across radio airwaves and through the devout. Religious leaders issued decrees absolving the unsuspecting sinners. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, so my roommate, a beautiful local-born but Canadian-educated environmental researcher, tried to explain. “Food in Malaysia can be… complicated,” she smiled sheepishly.

* * *

My first morning, with the crunch of 12-hour jetlag in my bones, I walked to work alongside a 10-lane highway. Warned about purse-snatchers on motorcycles who had pulled a woman to her death a few days before, I clutched a cloth purse to my right hip. The sun was a low-hanging orb, fuzzy on the edges from smog and dust, and the humidity made moving feel like swimming. In a nondescript concrete office building beside the Eastin Hotel Petaling Jaya, I trudged into the cheap restaurant where I’d been told I could find breakfast.

On a flickering backlit plastic sign, an oversized piece of white bread floated in midair alongside two yellow-yolked eggs, over easy. Of all the pictures that ran along the back of this long, fluorescent-lit eatery, these Western symbols of breakfast were the most familiar. They were also the least appealing. My top lip was coated in a film of perspiration, my pink cotton v-neck already felt heavy in the oppressive early-morning heat. I stared searchingly at lines of text, rows of small black letters, unfamiliar and intimidating in Bahasa Melayu.

To my left, on a small green and white speckled arborite table, a tiny woman in a dark blue hijab and rounded Elton John glasses tore at something that looked like bread and dipped it in something else that looked like gravy. “That,” I pointed to her table. “Please.” The bushy-moustached man behind the counter raised his eyebrows incredulously, but put out a matching tray. “Roti tissu,” he pointed to the bread. “Curry. Fish,” he pointed to the sauce. With a hungry rumble in my stomach, I picked an inward-facing table against the wall, and watched my food as warily as the people behind the counter were watching me. Imitating the small woman’s right-handed scooping technique, I mopped some of the greasy bread, thinner than a crepe and crisp brown on one side, through the lumpy brown-red sauce.

It was sublime.

* * *

As I sat beside a chlorine-blue pool on an orange plastic beach chair, lychee juice dripped down my forearms and onto my thighs. I was completely alone on the large concrete patio beneath my all-Chinese and expat condo building, surrounded by palm trees and razor wire. I licked the fragrant, sticky liquid off my fingers. I wanted to call home, to hear a familiar voice, but it was the middle of the night where everyone I loved lived. The night before, my new roommate, Shaheera, had taken me to a pasar malam (night market) in downtown Kuala Lumpur. The smells and colourful chaos of the busy streets had been paralyzing. Overwhelmed and fearful of drawing attention to myself, I panicked and bought a giant woven basket of lychees at the first stand we passed. The hoary brown fruits had looked only slightly less alien than their similar-tasting Muppet-like rambutan neighbors.

“Are you sure?” shyly asked my wide-eyed companion. “We just got here.” Passing fresh fruit juice stands, rows of bootleg CDs and little old ladies preparing ketayap, a sweet crepe-like pastry filled with palm sugar and grated coconut, I couldn’t buy anything else; my arms were wrapped around a beach ball-sized fruit container. With forced bravado and a sinking heart, I carried the basket all the way home. The next day, surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of brown lychee skins and their oblong pits, covered in fragrant juice and driven by heat, hunger and loneliness, I had finished them all.

* * *

The smoky smell of pork ribs wafted inside from the patio, where platters of fresh exotic fruits (dragon, kiwi, longan and Chinese gooseberries) sat beside a heaping bowl of coleslaw. I had been invited to a barbecue hosted by a woman, trained as a journalist, who had cared for me as a child in Canada many years ago. Disappointed with her career prospects in the West, she had returned to Kuala Lumpur, where she was born. Her new boyfriend, Larry, was still someone else’s husband. His two children, at home with their mother in Louisiana, smiled brightly out of a photograph on a wooden table in their entryway. I was told this situation is common in Malaysia.

Bent over the barbecue, Larry was wearing a light blue apron with an alligator on it, his face shiny and red from the heat. He was making his favourite, long slabs of very non-Halal Cajun-style pork ribs. The crowd was made up entirely of Chinese people, plus me and Larry. The fact that Chinese and Muslim Malaysians rarely associate, something that was incredibly discomfiting when I arrived, didn’t feel quite as strange. It was on this well-appointed garden patio that I first heard a term used to refer to native Muslim Malays: bumiputras. Literally, it means “sons of the soil.” Behind me, someone scoffed. “Worms,” they said, in a low, nasty voice. After that, every time I saw my Malaysian friends and colleagues laughing and chatting, this voice rang in my ears.

* * *

On one of our weekends off, Shaheera took me to an open-air food market in Taman Tun, her hometown neighbourhood. She went to a Canadian university and studied environmental science before she moved back home to “KL,” as she called it. She was one of the few Muslim women I knew who didn’t wear hijab, and she was proud of the strength of her faith. Shoeless, welcomed into her family home for jasmine tea, I admired the pictures she showed me of her mother, raven-haired and stunning, wearing long see-through gauzy sleeves. This is what women used to wear, she said, before the extremists came to power.

We walked up a few steps to the raised market, near her family home, and she explained the system. The platform is lined with stands offering every kind of food you could possibly imagine, and you order from one stand at a time. The owners of the stand deliver the dish to your table. Each family has a specialty; her favorite was char kway teow so I tried it first. It was familiar, tasting like pad thai, but the thick rice noodles and small clams and shrimp were practically burnt in the searing pan in which it had been prepared. The edges of the noodles were caramelized and flecked with chilli sauce, the crisp bean sprouts were crunchy and sweet. And that was only the first course.

Despite the thick humidity of the summer evening, we shared a steaming bowl of asam laksa, a spicy fish gravy soup with chewy shrimp cake, round udon noodles and hunks of tart pineapple, with a dusting of cilantro, peanuts and dried anchovies. We were seated on a raised gray concrete platform at a folding plastic table, eating with flat metal cafeteria cutlery, but we might as well have been at the finest restaurant in the world. There were roast chicken, fresh fruit juices and sweetened pulled tea delivered to the table; and tom yum ayam, a blistering-hot lemongrass soup with chicken, subtly scented with fragrant galangal root and kaffir lime leaves. I ordered the latter in stammering, hesitant Bahasa Melayu. The men at the carts didn’t speak much English; I mustered what I could.

The meal was transcendent. I never wanted it to end. Half a world away from where I was born, in the company of people who had never eaten a single piece of bacon or a pork cutlet, I fell in love with food, and fell hard. As we ate, dish after dish, Shaheera told me long, winding tales of life as a modern Malaysian. She detailed the history and stories of each dish, tales of the coastal Nonya people who introduced flavors of the sea to local cuisine, of poor villagers who sustained themselves with engorged pineapples and stinky durian, pulled from wild jungle plants in times of hardship, and of Chinese spice traders who moored their boats in the southwestern port city of Melaka, fell in love, and decided to make a life for themselves in the hot, complicated country.

* * *

Half a world away from where I was born, in the company of people who had never eaten a single piece of bacon or a pork cutlet, I fell in love with food, and fell hard.

Weeks later, it was midnight and Shaheera and I were prying open dozens of clams and dipping them in dark-tasting bean sauce at a roadside stand. We took short breaks from cracking their tiny gray shells to devour yet another plate of sticky, charred sticks of chicken satay fired by a wizened old man and a small boy over a grill that was nearly in a lane of traffic.

Teenagers and young Muslims, noisy youths in jeans and their gorgeous female companions in rhinestone headscarves, gathered in clumps under strands of large multicolured Christmas lights and a giant gold and green-illuminated palm tree. Drinking sugary pop, they licked the rich, spicy peanut sauce from their fingers. Only 20 feet away, cars zoomed past along an eight-lane highway, separated from us by only a bent chain-link fence. Sitting in comfortable, satiated silence, I was no longer an intruder in their world of noisy color, scent and sound.

* * *

Near the end of my four-month stay, Shaheera, a Danish colleague and I were invited to an exclusive forest estate that belonged to a 60-or-so-year-old prestigious Muslim Malaysian who had worked for the United Nations for decades. Sitting in the front passenger seat, this refined, debonair man told us he had a soft spot for young Western women because we’re spunkier than our Islamic counterparts. We reminded him of New York City. Beside him, our driver eyed our uncovered heads with a mixture of suspicion and lechery. Driving past rice paddies, jungles and mountains, we eventually arrived at a boat launch, where we boarded a long wooden boat amidst a small herd of nearly naked boys, all leaping and diving and dunking each other in the murky water along the shore. Listening and watching for monkeys, we cruised towards the huge, secluded jungle property and its guest cottages. That night we slept in down-stuffed mattresses and fell asleep to the raucous calls of hornbills as fireflies hovered outside our windows. We spent the next morning catching fish with one of our host’s employees in a small metal boat, then watched in awe as his personal chef, under a long, thatched roof, spent an entire day preparing food for a princess.

“A real princess?” we asked with a mixture of adult sarcasm and childlike awe.

That afternoon, she arrived with three bodyguards and a small entourage for an early evening feast that was held on a large patio that hovered over the water. We ate stuffed, grilled fish, at least five of them, alongside metal plates filled with curries, vegetables, and a strangely scented green pod called petai (or, as we found out later, “stinky beans”) that was mixed with the chef’s own belachan. This latter concoction was a blend of chillies and dried shrimp paste that, even today, makes my heart beat faster. Two excellent bottles of red wine, 1994 vintages from Burgundy, sat on the table.

To the happy clattering of cutlery and glassware, we made polite small talk with the princess about her country and the hospitality of our host. “Malaysian food is amazing,” I said. “We eat food this good almost every single night.” Shaheera gasped. The entire table went silent, every head turned towards me and the princess’s eyes blazed with anger. “I mean… this is definitely the best so far… but the food really is… quite…,” I grasped for words as I felt my cozy integration slipping away. Our host smiled a tight smile, and with a gracious turn towards his prestigious guest, took the reins of the conversation and moved it away from what Shaheera later explained had been my almost unforgivable faux pas. While religious edicts banning alcohol didn’t apply that night, it appeared as if rules of wealth still did.

* * *

Gazing out the window as my plane lifted off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, I chided myself for thinking that I could gain a complete understanding of an entire culture in a single well-spent summer. But I suddenly realized that I had learned something else: I hadn’t been able to become part of this complicated country that I now loved, but I had tasted it. With my taste buds as translator, I had been given a chance to understand. And perhaps that was all I could have asked for.

Karen Pinchin has worked as a reporter, editor and freelancer at numerous news organizations, including the CBC, Maclean’s, Newsweek International, The Globe and Mail, The Georgia Straight and The Canadian Press. Her website is www.karenpinchin.com.

[Photos: Flickr | mingthein; avlxyz; mingthein; avlxyz; Laurel Fan]

Galley Gossip: 5 reasons flight attendants don’t serve first class predeparture beverages

by Heather Poole on

You’ve boarded a flight and you’re feeling pretty relaxed sitting in that big comfy first class seat. Sucka, you think to yourself as a couple of passengers check you out on their way to coach. Glancing at your watch, you wonder where the heck the flight attendant is because you’re dying of thirst and shouldn’t she be offering drinks right about now!

Predepartures. That’s what flight attendants call the drinks that are served before takeoff to passengers seated in business and first class. If there’s time flight attendants will walk through the aisle and take individual orders, but time is the keyword here. With so many full flights staffed with minimum crew, there’s usually not enough time to check the emergency equipment, set up the galley, hang all the coats, get passengers situated AND serve predeparture beverages. This is why flight attendants might choose to do a one shot service and offer passengers Champagne (if we have it), orange juice, and water- or nothing at all. Because it’s more important to get flights out on time than it is to serve drinks before takeoff.

What most passengers don’t realize is that it’s against FAA regulations for an agent to shut an aircraft door until all the overhead bins have been closed. If the agent can’t close the aircraft door on time, the flight will be delayed. If the flight is delayed (even by a few minutes) someone will have to take the blame. This means someone will get written up. If an airline employee is written up too many times for causing a delayed departure they might very well lose their job. On time departures are a big deal in the airline industry. So that gin and tonic the passenger in 3A is crying about is not a concern if passenger 23D refuses to sit down and passenger 14E can’t get her suitcase inside an overhead bin and the flight attendant working in the back is calling up front to let someone know there are seven bags on their way up that need to be checked.

Here are a few other reasons flight attendants might not serve you a drink before takeoff….

1. DELAYED BOARDING: Boarding is even more chaotic when a flight is delayed. If passengers are blocking the aisles waiting to get to their seats, flight attendants aren’t going to jump over them in order to serve drinks.

2. NO CATERING: Everyone is seated and the flight attendants don’t look very busy. Why aren’t they serving drinks? If the catering truck hasn’t come to swap out the carts they have nothing to serve.

3. THE GALLEY ISN’T SET UP: The catering carts do not come on board ready to go. Flight attendants have to organize them first. If we don’t do this during boarding, the service during the flight will be delayed. Besides organizing the carts, we also have to break up several bags of ice, count the meals, load the ovens, and make sure we have everything we might need for the service in flight. The one time I didn’t do this we took off without dinner plates and I had to serve first class passengers their entrees on cookie plates.

4. MINIMUM CREW: Nowadays most narrowbody aircraft (one aisle) are staffed with minimum crew. This means if we’re not greeting passengers at the door, we’re busy setting up a galley. In the past we used to have extra flight attendants on board to lend a hand to passengers who might need it during boarding and help serve food and drinks in first class. Not the case anymore.

5. DRY FLIGHTS: Some countries do not allow flight attendants to unlock the liquor carts until after takeoff. There are even a few cities in the U.S. where it’s against the law to serve an adult beverage on Sunday before noon.

Photo courtesy of Kevin H