Playing chicken

Since it strikes me that I only posted once from our last trip in Europe/Africa, the following anecdote comes from our travels in Morocco.

The white walls of Rabat’s medina, or inner city, are quintessentially Mediterranean, with sea air (albeit, from the Atlantic Ocean) meshing with a million different smells, not always good. Unlike many counterparts, Rabat’s centreville is laid out in a grid pattern. Above it sits the Kasbah, which, with its blue and white walls is undoubtedly one of the finest sites in Morocco. But it’s empty. Below, in the medina, people are are crowded but generally friendly and the prices are good. It was there that we came across a series of quaint little stores, where locals could buy everything, from toilet paper to meat.

And some of the meat was quite fresh. Really fresh.

You know that joke you tell when you’re in a restaurant and your food is taking a while? “Are they killing the chicken?” you might ask. That’s not a joke you would tell in Rabat. Because it might be true. As we passed one butcher shop as the sun set in Rabat we looked to our left to see a man holding a fully-feathered chicken on a digital scale for a woman customer. And the chicken, which lay on its head in what was very clearly not a comfortable position, was squawking.

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Later, after the aforementioned Tangine dinner (boiled chicken and potatoes in a painted clay dish with a round bottom and pointed roof, like a party hat), we walked down the main drag where street sellers were hawking various counterfeit CDs, sunglasses and T-shirts. As we walked we heard a yell.

“Agent!” the cry went out. (It being in French, it sounded more like “eh-Zhawnt.”) Immediately the street sellers swept their goods, which sat on various sheets of cloth, up from the sidewalk as a stern looking policeman walked down the narrow road, which was barely wide enough to accommodate an occasional motorcyclist). He pointed and gave off your general police-officer air of authority but as soon as he passed, and before he was out of sight or even smell, for that matter, the vendors were already throwing their goods back down on the street.

For 15 seconds, counterfeit peddling was disrupted. Then everything returned to normal.

Yes we Zapiekanka

Sometimes the best food is not sauteed at precisely 342 degrees over a Maltese butter in a $500 frying pan using only the very best meat from the tip of the Falkland Islands. Sometimes it can be picked up at a roadside stall for less than two bucks, eaten in less than three minutes and forgotten in less than four.

Poland’s most popular roadside dish is ridiculously simple yet deliciously good. The Zapiekanka (which sounds suspiciously like the mountain tourist town of Zakopane) is simply mushrooms topped with cheese on a baguette of varying sizes, then toasted in an oven. Ketchup, then, is usually smothered over the entire thing, although I’ve found that the cold ketchup often prematurely cools the still melting cheese.

Zapiekankas taste basically like grilled-cheese sandwiches, the difference being that you can buy zapiekankas cheaply on the side of the road to sate the appetite while in Canada you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who has ever bought a grilled-cheese sandwich, despite their deliciousness.

Two other points of merit for the lovable Zapiekanka.

1) They are great food for the on-the-go pedestrian who knows he can go home to make a cheap meal.

2) Once you wrap your mouth around the word, zapiekankas are easy for the Polish-impaired speaker to order. There are no requests for paticular toppings or the like, just occasionally a decision to be made between duzy (large) and maly (small)

Something fishy…

After hunting, during which the sun or at least the radiation it is said the sun emits, slowly brought cover to the now somewhat white Mazurian landscape, I headed back to bed to catch up on my unemployment-mandated 10 hours of sleep. Then I ate.

On Christmas Eve, that’s basically all that happens. You eat, you decorate a bit, you eat, you sit in front of the fireplace, you eat, you converse in a language filled with sh’s and ch’s, you eat, you go to church at midnight, you eat (maybe, now that it is Christmas day, some actual meat) and now drink.

But because you don’t eat red meat on Christmas, your diet is limited to an assortment of fish, fish and more fish. Generally the same type of fish is served about a million different ways. I believe there is a rule that there must be 900,000 different dishes. That sentence will make Poles laugh because there actually is something of a rule that designates some slightly smaller number of different fish dishes. The fish is served cold and in some tomato-y type of sauce, with onions, in some white type of sauce, in some garlicy sauce, in an apple and onion sauce and wrapped around pickles. I’m missing 800,000 other types of preperation.

And on this, my second Polish Christmas, I again tried every single piece of fish. I think. This will impress my mother, who is convinced I’m a picky eater.

Thus Christmas Eve took place. With fish, fish, fish, and fish. Fortunately, it ended before midnight, with us heading to bed and missing out on the very Catholic tradition of midnight mass. Joy to the world, church is skipped.

Tomorrow. Some more interesting tidbits I’ll think up at the time

McWorld?

If McDonalds is a symbol of globalization and the Americanization of other cultures, then what do the kebab shops that flourish in downtown Europe mean?

Kebab shops, for the unacquainted, sell a tasty type ofTurkish/Egyptian fast food. A large, sometime huge, slab of meat (I’m told lamb) rotates on a vertical stick, cooked slowly, probably, at some places, for days and is served in a pita shell or on a panini bun.

There are far more places where one can grab a kebab than a hamburger in Europe and while there are certainly Arab immigrants here, the main clientele are ethnic Europeans.

And the wiener is…

I’ve come to the conclusion that every single country has their own take on hot dog sausages, otherwise known as wieners.

Among my conclusions: every wiener is gross, some more than others.

Polish wieners rank near the top of the pile. You see, the skin in which they come, or at least the skin of those we have purchased, is plastic, meaning you peel out the gooey insides. Hot dogs you buy on the street seem to be different, but the ones you cook at home, because they have nothing holding them together take on the consistency of, well, an indistinguishable meat-y substance.

Fire in the stove

The kitchen is no longer a safe and friendly place. In Canada, the kithcen was the place where I went to quench my never ending hunger. Here, I don’t use the stove so readily. You see, like all other stoves I’ve encountered in Poland, our stove runs on gas. And like many gas stoves here, the handy button that lights a spark to ignite said gas is busted. The solution is simple but terrifying, even now, when, after burning one or two finger hairs, I think I’ve got the trick mastered.

Oh, and yes, I’m looking for one of those long barbecue lighters.

You turn on the gas with your left hand while, immediately after, flicking a lighter at the little hole out of which the gas starts to flow. Each time you flick the lighter you jerk your hand away like it just touched a bucket of eyeballs. But the gas never catches the first time so you have to quickly repeat this process, usually twice, before the gas flames to life and you can breathe a sigh of relief. If you’re using one of the smaller stove places, it’s terrifying but usually you can’t even feel the heat. If, however, dinner requires you to use the largest burner, well, good luck. It won’t catch fire the first time you flick the lighter but when you flick it the second time, there will be enough gas nearby to shoot a flame three or four inches up, directly towards your hand, which, by that time will be in a race to get the heck out of the way.

It sounds bad, but another problem is our internet only works right next to the stove. So even when I’m not the one lighting the stove, if I happen to be typing at the computer and Magda comes in to make something, well, I start ducking for cover. Oh, the good old days of electric stoves.

Breasts!

When you don’t have a job or a TV you notice the weather a lot more. It rained for most of today, confining our Okanagan butts to our apartment. We meant to buy an umbrella. We really did. But we didn’t. We were blessed for the first two weeks of our European adventure with sun and general good weather. I joked that I slaughtered a lamb to buy off the weather gods. By the second week I had upgraded to a sheep. Now though, we’re waiting for the rain to turn to snow – which CNN is promising us this Sunday. In the meantime we’re cooped up in our relatively small apartment with a couple books and one computer between us.

So the first time I left the apartment today to go buy chicken at the local meat store, I got to the bottom of the stairs, poked my head out the door, and quickly retreated back to the apartment. An hour or so later, around 3:30, the clouds finally exhausted themselves I walked a block and a half to the store where I bought two well-portioned chicken breasts. For three bucks.

Which brings us to my point. The corner stores here, which abound and sell everything from booze to sauces to meat, are not more expensive than your big supermarkets. I am guessing that they manage because they can sell relatively healthy quantities of food and snacks – even at low profit margins – because of the density of the population. And the low prices likely help finance the economies of scale by keeping local shoppers in the neighbourhood. Of course in less dense cities like those in Canada that poses more of a problem. Still, as a consumer, it would be nice if I didn’t have to drive to Safeway everytime I wanted some decently-priced quality cheese.

Chilly manilly

Today was the coldest day yet – we saw our first sign of frost this morning. It wasn’t too much of a surprise. The blue skies this morning opened the air up to a cold winter breeze just like one expects in Canada. And now, tonight, it’s trying to snow with mixed results. Whatever the case, though, the weather in Warsaw has so far been pretty much the same as one would expect back home. For better or for worse. Still, I can’t wait for the first real snowfall. I’ll be grabbing my camera and heading over to the big fake palm tree in the middle of town.

In other news, we bought our first monthly metro passes: 78 zloty gets you a full month of travel on Warsaw’s efficient transit system. That’s less than $35 Canadian. A little better than I was paying back home for gas, insurance and repairs on my car. But deal of the week is at the grocery store, where 10 zloty gets you a kilo of Gouda cheese. That’s like $4.30. Safeway’s been ripping me off….

Over n’ out

Awww shooks

So we have just decided that we will not, tonight, go to a Lodz restaurant everybody here pronounces SH-ooks. Apparantly they serve western food and their waiters dress up like cowboys and Native Americans (with whom Europeans’ fascination is worth a longer post). Anyways, SH-oooks, I just learned, is spelled Sioux which, obviously, is a band native to the Great Plains of the United States and the Canadian Prairies.

We’re not going to the restaurant (tonight at least, because I’m not up for their Mexican fare. The restaurant’s founder must have had a faulty atlas on hand.

A Brac attack

I seem to be writing too much about things going wrong – especially considering how smoothly this vacation has run so far and the lack of real problems encountered. So I won’t write later about us missing the ferry to Hvar (thereby preventing me from titling this post ‘Hvar matey’) because a new ferry schedule took effect Oct. 1.

I’ll rather settle for a brief note that today we journeyed to the island of Brac and the town of Supetar for a low key afternoon of walking along the beach and eating pizza at a harbour-side cafe.

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Croatia, at least the Dalmatian and Istrian coast where we have been for the last week, is heavily influenced by Italy. If it’s not apparent by the number of Italian tourists or the ferries that go back and forth between coastal communities, it is overwhelmingly obvious by the number of pizza places and gelaterias. The pizzas, it bears noting, are just like those in Italy, with thin crusts and huge portions. Eat a full one (which will run around $9 or $10 and you’ll be full for hours.