#extra points if hes anything outside of western european

[snekdood]

woah you made the "swarthy" looking fellow in your story a creepy pervert who crosses peoples boundaries? ground breaking.

[lianabrooks]

'tis spooky season in North America and that means it is time for another All I Want For Christmas book, your horror for the holidays!

Pack your bags and come with Iris Muhly to stunning Seoul! She's an American ingenue way out of place and about to lose her job. Can the resident villain save the day? Maybe!

Watch this space for pre-order links and news!

https://www.lianabrooks.com/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-a-gargoyle/

Opening pages below the break...

Need a book to read right now? All I Want For Christmas Is A Werewolf All I Want For Christmas Is A Reaper

Opening pages from the unproofed ARC (because my editor is still fixing things and I wanted to share today!).

Everi1/ShatteredEndings: Longtime lurker, first time poster, I’m really torn on how to vote for Shattered 5. I’m a Z-wysh shipper, but I don’t know if I can forgive Iris for dumping Jihun! - @ValL0vesM3 @MaxIsBae53 – You can’t come back from that. @xxUwUxx23 – SAME @EveriReader – Jihun would tell you to follow your heart. Until Our Darling says he wants Iris gone, don’t believe the gossip. The eighth reel is the one set up by the original author, and that means keeping Iris.

A decade or two ago my dark, chocolate brown hair might have drawn some attention as I got off the bus near Gongdeok Station in Seoul. My skin was a little too pink to be native, my height still a few centimeters taller than the average Korean woman's, my eyes double-lidded and noticeably western European. Today, no one seemed to notice. A few teens glanced at the bedraggled black and purple wig in my hand and the water-damaged fan sign for the hit TV show Shattered, but if they thought anything it was probably that I was a fan who'd gone to see the cast in their final appearance of the penultimate season four.

Absolutely no one shouted out "Wysha!" as I passed, even though that was the name of the purple-haired, mortal-turned-immortal I'd played since the season three finale. Even fans would have struggled to remember my legal name - Iris Muhly - simply because I was, as they said in Hollywood, an ingenue.

Unknown.

A random extra who wound up playing a major character for one season and was destined for a gruesome on-screen death if I didn't get things fixed.

Bitter cold winds rushed ruffled overhead holiday banners lining the alley as I hurried to my Yeonnam-dong apartment. It had been another very long day, with a four am call time so the principles of the cast could do a six am morning show followed by the teaser trailer for the upcoming fan vote. I'd escaped that at ten and rushed to the salon to get my poor, bleached hair treated, re-colored back its natural brown, and then headed home as the sky turned dark. It was only a little after five in the evening, but it was a bitingly cold December day and the sun was setting.

Somewhere over the sound of rushing cars I could hear someone learning that sound doesn’t carry well when it’s -20C outside. No, not even for cheery Christmas carols or romantic pop ballads about first kisses stolen between snowflakes. The winter weather this year consisted of a freezing drought, brutal winds, and none of the romantic snow the Koreans were all expecting.

"Fine by me," I muttered as I eyed the frozen blue sky. I had a plane ticket for a red-eye out of Incheon airport heading straight back to the good 'ol US of A. Home sweet... spawn point?

It was less about going home to somewhere good or safe and more about being in a place where my work visa wouldn't expire as soon as I was fired. Because my first acting gig was rapidly going from Going To Get Fired to Going To Get Fired And Blacklisted.

Hugging my black coat around myself against the cold I glanced both ways along a narrow street and dashed across the street in a way most likely to 1) get me hit by a passing car and 2) get me fined if any of the CCTV cams were working. Which, they weren't. The agency I'd signed a twelve-month contract with was paying for the apartment here in Seoul and they weren't springing for a luxury penthouse for someone who wasn't an actual star.

I ducked past the shops lining the ground floor - convenience stores, noodle shops, and pharmacies - fighting the wind with each step. Plastering myself to the side of the building I tugged off a thin gray glove long enough to punch in the six-digit door code.

The tinted glass door slid open with a soft whoosh of warmer air.

For the first time all day I could almost breathe easy. Granted, there were fourteen CCTV cams pointed along the entry way for the apartment building and two more doors to get through to get to the communal mail hall, but at least I was safe-ish when the doors locked behind me with a click.

It sounded delusional, but for the past week or more I'd felt like someone was watching me.

I'd pushed it off as a delayed response to eighteen-hour work days on set in front of cameras. Compared to the last fourteen months of filming and promotions this past week had been comparatively easy. The cast had split the interviews and appearances, I'd only been in six of the fourteen live things, done four signings, and only been physically threatened, oh, maybe a few thousand times.

With a glance at the heavily tinted windows I went through the next set of doors to the common area where a bank of TVs displayed everything from the local weather channel and the stock exchange to the celebrity news.

The same picture was on half the TVs: a Korean man so handsome my breath caught even though I’d spent the past fourteen months in close proximity with him. “Michyeosseo,” the word slipped past my lips in an angry huff and I wasn’t sure who was crazier, me or the fans on screen screaming  "J'aime Max!" and "Max Kang, je suis délicieux! Épouse-moi!" and the old stand-by, “Sauve-moi, roi des gargouille!”

I wouldn’t stand out in the cold to wave purple and black dragons at a camera for an anyone. Not even in Paris where all the rosy-cheeked teens were. Not even for pay.

Okay, well, that was a lie. Because I could unreservedly cheer for Max Kang for pay and absolutely had during at least one alternate-universe scene this season.

Shattered, the multinational television show that let viewers write the ending to the universally acclaimed series that started with the novel All These Broken Seasons, was all about merging alternate universe and looking at what could have been. The whole premise was two realities collided and the death of some fey[1] princess meant the people in normal Earth suddenly were confronting the people from a magical Earth.

Max Kang, easily one of the hottest men on the planet, played the big, bad villain: Zjarr Aabo. On the screen of the lobby TV Max was seated right next to the breathlessly hungry host who was eyeing his thin, black silk shirt with the undone buttons as if she could make the others fall off by wishing alone. He probably wasn’t currently sporting the chiseled Abs of Treason he flashed at least once a season, because getting that definition involved extreme dieting and dehydration that wasn’t healthy to maintain, but most of the audience didn’t know that.

Not that Max needed chiseled muscle to make him delicious.

He was a man who’d built his fame playing classic bad guys, and one of the highest grossing Korean actors. Black hair that somehow always looked sexily tousled, wide set black eyes, heavy eyebrows, a broad and expressive face, and the muscles of a man who spent every spare hour in the gym or with the show’s fight trainer. The fact that he could dance and sing was just icing on the slice of Hallyu Wave perfection that was Max Kang.

Light loved him.

There was a glow, and a natural presence that survived even the camera’s harsh glare. When Max stepped into a room every head turned. His dramatic baritone voice was rich and low enough to send a shiver up anyone’s spine.

The evil demon of a man certainly didn't need to look directly into the camera with his ridiculously incomparable dark eyes and wink as his lips curled into a perfect come hither smile that all but melted everyone in his line of sight. 

No, he didn't need to do any of that. 

But he did.

I rolled my eyes as I pushed the button and waited for the elevator. All of this was to sway the vote. No, make it The Vote. With sparkly letters and fancy fonts and everything.

All These Broken Seasons was the best selling fantasy series of the mid-21st century but it had a little problem... the ending didn’t exist.   

Years ago the author had rudely died, or run away, or been kidnapped by Bigfoot. Something like that. One day they were in full contact and posting daily teasers for the untitled final fifth novel, and then they vanished. The jury was still out on what really happened.

Shattered was the answer.

Some studio had the rights, the author’s sudden disappearance gave them an opening, and they ran with it. Four, big budget seasons followed the books with a gratifying amount of accuracy[2] and now the fans got to vote on which ending we would shoot.

Since most the fans currently wanted to shoot me, the ending that promised my brutal death on screen was winning with eighty percent of the votes. Angel Xi, Shattered’s leading lady and the primary love interest of the hero, had oh-so-not-kindly told me that in Cantonese the word Four sounds like the word Death. Angel’s a sweetie like that.

The elevator opened and was empty, thank goodness. I stepped in and stabbed the close button before anyone could hop on.

Most of the building’s residents were polite enough to pretend they didn’t know me. Koreans weren’t fans of small talk as a rule, especially in Seoul, but things had been tense since the tabloids snapped pictures of Kim Jihun crying.

Tears weren’t the problem. Men could cry, and Jihun often did as the tortured, lovelorn hero of Shattered. The problem was that the tabloids had been snapping pics of me and Jihun hanging out for the past year and the world was convinced we were dating. If Jihun was smiling, I’d done something to make him happy. If Jihun was angry, it was my fault. If he was crying, I ought to die for hurting The World’s Darling.

Despite all the tabloid rumors, Jihun and I had never shared more than heartfelt glances on screen. He was my type, but I wasn’t his, and I was smart enough not to chase a man who didn’t want me.

[1] Fae? Fairy? Whatever. She was the typical All Powerful Magic Girl and she died at the end of the first book.

[2] I hadn’t read the books until after I’d been cast, and I really didn’t appreciate how much work went into adapting a book into a screenplay until I met some of the script writers. Suffice it to say, they deserved all the awards they kept winning and the full adoration of the fandom. Other fandoms wish they were this lucky.

[sosthemortalcoil]

Is there a list of all of the RO's and their descriptions?

There are several, but I’m compiling them here to help.

1. Sabriel (pansexual, she/her) is another angel of Guardian rank. She’s the Guardian Angel Overseer for the area where you will be living and is technically responsible for making sure you don’t do anything that would influence the state of the world unduly. She enjoys human culture (particularly Star Wars) and has a fondness for tea. She has a lot of walls up that prevent her from easily trusting anything from Heaven, especially figures in power. Having fun is often put on the back-burner when she’s overworked (which is a common state for her). She tries to put duty above all else, though she’s too compassionate to always succeed in this. Being honest with herself is something she values, but that doesn’t mean she’ll be straightforward or honest with others.

Her preferred form stands at 5′9″/175 cm. She has a mess of frizzy brown hair that constantly escapes into her oval face. Her grey-blue eyes are usually underscored by bags, and she wears rectangular, black-frame glasses. Her nose is thin with flared nostrils, her lips curve up naturally but are drawn down by the faint lines on her features. Roughly same age as Ramiel. Her body looks soft, without much definition, but she’s iron and steel at her core.

2. Alice Hudson (bisexual, she/her) is a human and one potential partner for Gabriel. She’s the only child of a powerful medium and is well aware of the supernatural world even though she herself has no gifts. She’s a believer of order though she also believes that there are exceptions and that you have to take things on a case by case basis. She loves to tease coworkers and is fond of practical jokes but perfectly capable of being serious. Commitment makes her skittish in personal relationships. She is also a little afraid of children. She’s a person who will bend the rules if need be–the end justifies the means in some cases. She likes tinkering with her motorcycle(s), rebuilding them when she finishes one.

She stands 5′11″/180 cm with brown shoulder length hair that is mostly straight and usually pulled back in a ponytail. Her skin is fair, touched by sun. Her most noticeable feature is her piercing, light grey eyes that see more than people think. At the start of the story she’s 26 years old. She has lips that border on the thin side, but are quick to smile. Her eyebrows are round, above straight eyes. Her nose is on the short side in overall length, with a deviation from where she once got it broken. The tip is round but drawn out from her face, her nostrils small. She has a runner’s body, muscles built for endurance and speed rather than raw strength. She keeps her nails short, and rarely wears any sort of make-up. She is a predominantly Caucasian mix.

3. Tadea Guerrero (lesbian, she/her) is a werepanther. By the time you meet her she’s the second-in-command of her pride. Prickly on the outside, she sees official authorities (the police) as something to be leery of at best. The pressures of the former leadership of her pack, which emphasized cruelty, leaves her bitter and mistrustful of others. Aggressive and fierce, she supports Leo’s new leadership style though thinks he is too naive to hold it on his own without her assistance. She favors practicality and is cutthroat in making decisions.

She respects strength and will exploit any weaknesses she can find in almost anyone to further her agenda or that of her pack--because she doesn’t believe in the innate goodness of most people, Leo being an exception. In a romantic relationship she can be shy due to inexperience with a proper relationship. She likes flowers, and pink, and things she feels are super girly and don’t fit with the rough-and-tough image she projects. Being with Gabriel would allow her to relax a little, exposing more of her soft side.

She stands at 5′8″/173 cm. Her skin is a rich brown. Short-cropped black hair is styled into a miniature mohawk most of the time, accenting her square jaw and chin. Her cheeks are the softest part of her, her body muscular and lean with little of what might be called feminine softness. Her straight brows sit over large darkbrown, almost black, eyes. Her nose is of medium length with a broad bridge and solid point, resting above chapped lips. Her eyelashes are startling long against her cheeks. She has barbed-wire tattoos on both of her arms, wrapped around roses on the left arm.

4. Karyn Brown (straightish, she/her) is a female werewolf, with some human bloodline, who’s adept at dodging pack responsibilities. She loyal to her pack but has a wild streak. She is of the opinion that life is too short to be serious and tends to be seen as vain and flighty. She is intelligent and a skilled hacker.  She enjoys kickboxing and zumba, can’t cook for the life of her and is very spontaneous. She works as a barista at the local coffee shop, in addition to some of her computer-related odd-jobs. She enjoys dubsteb, flirting, and living life to the fullest.

She is 5′6:/168 cm, of Western European descent. Her hair is mid-back and wavy, golden blonde. She usually wears it in ponytail or loose, and often has a chunk died various colors. Her narrow amber eyes frame a button nose and lips almost perpetually curved in a smirk. Freckles span the bridge of her nose and fan out across her cheeks. She’s fit, but her body appears more soft than toned. Her face is heart-shaped, her hairline low on her brow. Two thin eyebrows curve slightly, following the shape of her eyes. Her cheeks are rosy and full. Her wolf form seems too small for its paws and has a russet coat.

5. Stephanie Xinxin Lee (straight, she/her) is a witch who works at the police department as a beat cop. She specializes in charms and trinkets not having much magical power at her disposal. She’s a little sensitive about her size and hates speaking to large groups of people. Generally mild mannered she enjoys strange tea blends and can talk for hours about the magical properties of herbs but is dismal at pop culture references. She likes learning new things, and has no qualms about taking down people twice her size. While she loves her family, she’s excited to be on her own, away from much of the expectations and pressures of her family.

She’s the shortest RO at 5′2″/157 cm and is ethnically Chinese. She has dark brown eyes that slant upwards slightly, underneath thin black brows. Her long, mid-back length black hair is usually kept pinned up in a tight bun. Her features are generally on the round side, small and delicate. Her lips are narrow, the bridge of her nose flat and the tip of her nose round. Her olive skin is clear apart from a beauty mark at the corner of her left eye. She might be described as petite.

6, Iro Nyx (aromantic, pansexual, she/her) is a succubus dating from Hellenistic Greece. She’s a RO option only for darker Gabriels (though you can have a fling with her as a lighter Gabriel, she just won’t be interested in a relationship of any kind). As a succubus she has mid-level shape-shifting abilities which she predominantly uses to change her physical appearance. Iro likes drinks and toying with humans, though she is not a fan of blood and gore. She tries to rely on her wiles and ability to wheel and deal to maintain a comfy lifestyle free of being controlled. Iro is comfortable with who she is; she doesn’t want to change. She does want more control and power over her life, and will join a Gabriel whom she believes can deliver these things.

Her appearance depends on the day and whatever form she feels likewearing. Her original form had curly light brown hair that she would pin up, exposing the nape of her elegant neck. She was fine-boned and small, with large hazel eyes set above pouty lips. Her nose was small with a pointed tip, her face round. She is roughly 2300 years old.

7. Iain O’Brien (straightish, he/him) is the other option for your partner on the police force. He’s from an Irish Catholic family though he finds himself unable to commit to the same level of faith as his stringent mother. He likes to play the white knight and is always willing to help when asked. He’s very good with his niece and nephew, adores kids, but tends to be clueless when it comes to picking up on hints in relationships. He says drinking is as necessary as water to an Irish-man (even though he wasn’t born in Ireland). He laughs a lot, even when its not appropriate and sometimes speaks before thinking. His work is his passion and sometimes he neglects to take care of himself subsequently. He wasn’t the perfect son, a contrast to his ‘perfect’ sister. He grew up practicing martial arts, and decided to become a cop after a chance encounter with an officer who also went to his dojo.

He stands at 6′4″/193 cm with pale skin that burns easily and freckles spanning his broad back. His red hair, showcasing his Irish blood, is kept on the short side, just barely curling around his ears. When it gets too long the entire mass becomes curly. His eyes are a vivid green, crinkled at the edges with laugh lines. He has a square chin but a softer edge to his jawline than he likes. At the start of the story he’s 25. He has a semi-prominent brow ridge, with thick eyebrows. He has a Roman nose, long and straight. His upper lip has a neat bow to it, and his lower lip is full. 100% human. He works on core and toning, and carries some extra weight around his hips from his penchant for alcohol. On occasion he gets some red fuzz and scruff on, but never lets it get to a full beard.

8. Aelius Roman (pansexual, he/him) works ‘with’ Iro. He’s the incubus to her succubus. Technically they have a competition to see who can gain the most contracts and acquire the most power but he tends to be less ruthless than Iro. He still remembers being mortal and often includes loopholes in his contracts that the clever can get out of–though sometimes these ‘loopholes’ require a greater sacrifice than the original contract. He has a morbid sense of humor and lacks a sense of what humans judge as common decency. He is also possessive of whatever he views as his and sees lying as the key to any good relationship. He enjoys causing verbal disagreements and breaking up ‘happy-couples.’ Most of the time he wears a smile but can become maudlin, which is when he acts the most callous. He prefers to be on the outside looking in; while Iro likes to feed directly, Aelius likes to skim along the top, feeding in proximity. Unlike most incubi or succubi, Aelius isn’t that interested in the act of sex. He enjoys physical intimacy, but small touches and being close are more important to him than intercourse.

His appearance depends on the day and his form, though he typicallyprefers heights ranging from 5′6/168 cm to 5′ 10″/178 cm. He’s Roman via Gaul. Nospoilers on his original look. He is an incubus demon, formerly human. He’s roughly 2100 years old.

9. Ramiel (pansexual, he/him) is a Fallen who has many regrets about his past. He is excellent at putting on masks and getting his job done but takes no pleasure in working for Hell. It’s a necessary evil to him. He’s leery of getting close to Gabriel given their past, not wishing to endanger them but unable to stay away either. He used to be a prankster with little grasp on responsibility, prone to rash decisions. Since his Fall he’s learned a lot about himself, having grown into someone who is more mature and aware of who he is. Much of his humor is buried underneath his regret, but it’s not impossible to see.

Ramiel’s walking form stands at 6′6″/198 cmand has dark brown hair, wavy and shoulder-length that he usually pulls back in a tie at the nape of his neck. He usually has five-o-clock shadow. His eyes are a warm honey-brown, but they look tired. His skin is tan and weathered, more suited to someone who works outside than the lawyer he masquerades at. If it weren’t for the expensive tailored suit, custom Italian leather shoes and briefcase, he could be mistaken for one of his clients being held overnight. He has a long straight nose, a thin upper lip and a full lower lip.

He rarely stands straight-backed anymore, his shoulders often curving with the weight of his failures. Still, he cuts a handsome figure, a quiet intensity to him and a warmth in his smile that draws people in, despite the slightly haggard look to him at times. The oldest of the nestmates by a bit.  

10. Charleston Sawyer (formerly Valois) (gay, he/him) is another cop at the precinct and a werewolf. His orientation and refusal to continue the family bloodline led to him splitting with the pack he was born in. After a few years he was recruited by the alpha of the Jericho City pack as an Enforcer. He is relatively laid-back and easygoing at work, quicker with a smile. That extends only to his co-workers that he trusts. He quite astute and reads people well, but comes across as a pushover to most cops because of his more reserved nature. In the pack he becomes second because of his martial skills (he’s a Beta second while a second appointed for their ability to deal with emotions and politics is usually an Omega second). At home he tends to be withdrawn and cold, quicker to snarl than help--at least at first. The exception to his attitude at home is his alpha, Tom, and Tom’s daughter, Josie. He expects rejection and awkwardness from most of the pack, and it takes him time to open up and trust them.

He is 5′6″/168 cm and French. He has thick dark brown hair, swept back from his face. He has a neatly trimmed covering of hair one could call a beard, highlighting his rectangular jaw. He has mesmerizing hazel eyes situated beneath dark brows that are often drawn low. His skin is tanned, though whether from sun or natural coloring it’s impossible to tell. He’s 29 at the start of the story. He is pureblood werewolf, and his wolf form is a dark grey that borders on black. He’s stocky and solidly built, with the heaviest musculature of all the ROs, but remains flexible.

11. Tom Garrow (straight, he/him) is the leader of the local werewolf pack and recently widowed. Newly a single-father, he struggles between balancing his daughter and his pack. Well-traveled and educated, he tends to have lofty ideas that sometimes need a dose of practicality. He is not a fan of his wolf nature and tends to try to cover any of his ‘innate savagery’ with an excess of culture in his day-to-day life. He runs an upscale bar for his ‘day’ job and is a shrewd business man. He deliberately appointed Charleston in spite of the majority of the pack’s feelings--wondering if an Enforcer was really the best fit for second--informing them that he was selecting the best person for the job, feelings be damned.

He cares for Charleston as a close friend but often finds himself unable to help with his friend’s issues without making them worse. Respected for his leadership because he puts the safety of the pack first, he can struggle with relationships outside of the pack. He does want to create a more international and cooperative pack that has other supernatural allies but has yet to persuade the pack to his point of view, especially after the death of his wife where they want to close ranks. When in a relationship, he likes to indulge in more of his wolf nature, allowing for some of that freedom that he tries to keep out of his professional life.

Tom is 30 years old at the start of the story and stands at 6′5″/196 cm. Ethnically he’s of Western European descent, mixed. He was born a werewolf, but has human blood in his bloodline. His dark brown hairis of medium-short length just brushing his collar and swept away from his widow’s peak. It’s already starting to silver. His warm brown eyes, which take on a golden hue, are evenly spaced on his oval face, cut by a slightly hooked, Romanesque nose. He has strong bones, though his cheeks run a little towards gaunt. His face remains unlined. His skin is a warm peach. His wolf form is entirely silver, lean and long-legged. His shoulders are broad, but he leans towards slim elegance, a graceful dancer’s build with some definition.

12. Leo Soto (pansexual, he/him) is the werepanther Alpha. Young for an Alpha, he succeeded by killing the previous Alpha as is custom with werepanthers (or so it seems). He is attempting to change the way the pride behaves but meets resistance. A bit of an idealist he is often frustrated by what he calls outdated moralities but lacking little in the way of different life experiences tends to exert the authority of his position when challenged. He often appeals to higher powers for guidance, especially when trying to remain calm. He is eager to work with Gabriel, and is nervous and a little naive when it comes to relationships. He views forgiveness and compassion as priorities, despite little in his life showing him the advantages of those qualities.

He stands at 6′1″/185 cm. He is Hispanic, with sienna skin and broad cheekbones. His solid black hair is usually kept in a long,single braid running down his back. Deep golden-brown eyes are set beneath dark, prominent brows. He has a sharp jawline, softened by the remnants of his youth. His body is honed, ready for fight or flight, sinewy and graceful. His white teeth flash often in smiles from behind soft lips. He has a single tattoo, a pair of angel wings on the nape of his neck, usually concealed by his hair.

13. Ryder (Eljas) Alsvartrson (bisexual, he/him): Warlock, born Eljas but renamed himself Ryder as the centuries passed to blend better. He has a brother named Nate who is a perpetually high necromancer.

Warlocks are territorial due to the nature of their power (demonic bargains) so he is the sole warlock in the city. (Warlocks are a type of magic user, and the term is gender neutral.) He has a soft spot for his brother even though he’s usually found yelling at him. Hates werewolves. Likes to use hellfire to burn things.

He has an intense hatred of weakness and is of the opinion that if you can’t hold onto power then you never deserved it. He has no qualms about killing and isn’t particularly good at relationships. Vain, he likes to enforce stereotypes of what a warlock looks like (according to him) so he goes around dressed in a black leather duster, black boots, black cargo pants, a (you guessed it) black shirt.

He is flattered by people giving him power. He is attracted to power, regardless of gender. Ryder finds ruthlessness and manipulating others a turn on. He can actually be protective of the MC if the relationship is approached carefully, but generally he prefers to be part of a power couple. (The tag #evil bean is his.)

His natural height is 5′5″/165cm, but he wears boots with lifts whenever he’s in public, bumping up his height by two inches. He’s Norse, and has straight, knee-length,white-blonde hair that pours over his thin body. His pale, almost white eyes peer out from beneath almost invisible eyebrows, his thin and humorless lips rest below his hawk nose, the tip of which is just slightly upturned. He has high cheekbones, and a long face, a rectangular jaw line but soft chin. He appears to be about 23 years old. He runs skinny, almost unhealthily so, lanky and lean. Natural physical strength isn’t something he concerns himself with, and one can tell.

14. Zaria Wangari (pansexual, she/her) is half-human, on her father’s side. Her mother is a Sauti ya hila (a species unique to the SoS world). Because of her heritage, she is incapable of hearing normal human vocal ranges, so for most intents and purposes she is deaf. She works as the Medical Examiner for Jericho City Police Department.

Because of her deafness, she typically won’t initiate conversations with unknown people or in large groups as she gets nervous about how she sounds. She is fluent in ASL, and the rest of the precinct has various levels of fluency in it as well.

She tends to respond logically to situations first, always being careful to consider things before speaking. She dislikes being rushed or pressed for quick decisions, and isn’t shy about letting you know so. Questioning her knowledge is a good way to offend her. She’s reserved until she knows you, and then is prone to slipping in teasing remarks when visited in her home domain (that being her office and lab). Outside of work, she enjoys spending time outside with Rolo, her Komondor (aka large mop dog). She is a wine aficionado.

Looking sharp and well-presented is important to her, and she is meticulous about the aesthetic feel of her office and home. Going to crime scenes can stress her out because of the potential for crowds and unexpected people; she likes being in control, and places with a lot of people tend to put her on the defensive and she shuts down. Going out in groups with friends that she knows is usually the way she counters for the lack of control in new environments, but in general she prefers to be a creature of habit.

Her natural eye-color is violet, so she wearsamber-contacts most of the time. Zaria’s hair is a wavy cascade of mahogany that she usually wears pulled back in a bun. Her natural eye-color is violet, so she wears amber-colored contacts. She often wears high-heeled boots that bump her height up to 6’ 2"/188cm (she’s actually 6’0"/183cm). She is 29 years old at the start of the story, but is often mistaken for being a decade younger. Luckily her height stops most people from attempting to card her or question if she’s truly old enough to have obtained her Doctorate in Forensic Pathology. She has prominent, high cheekbones and full lips. Her nose is broad, and her eyebrows arched. She has long legs and long, elegant fingers. She’s lean, but has broad shoulders, and knows how to flatter her assets.

15. Michael (pansexual, he/him) is an archangel and nestmate of Gabriel. Young Michael was eager to please and desperate to belong. Older Michael has become jaded and is a source of nearly constant conflict. His version of being overprotective comes across as controlling and stifling. Somewhere along the way something changed him, and the new Michael is often angry and upset, no real cause required.

In angel form, Michael stands at 6′2″/188 cm. Michael wears his long blond hair in a neat, single braid down his back. It falls to midback.There’s nothing in particular that stands out about his looks–standard black eyes, golden skin, large gold wings, lean and muscular build. His nose is on the small size, some might say more button-nose than not, his lips are thin, and his chin has a stubborn jut to it. In human form, Michael’s form is 5′10″/178 cm. His hair is cropped short and blonde, about an inch-and-a-half in length. He has wide whiskey brown eyes. He has a stubborn chin, a short face, and a button-nose. His shoulders are narrow and his frame lean. His lips are thin and usually turned down to mirror the slant of his thick, light blonde eyebrows. His skin is an almost unhealthy shade of white. Slightly older than Gabriel.

[whileiamdying]

Africa State of Mind

Ekow Eshun’s project offers a kaleidoscopic view of Africa, highlighting over 50 contemporary photographers from the continent and its diaspora.

“In the last 10 years there has been a real increase in exceptional photographers either based on the continent or of African origin. It’s incredibly interesting to see them exploring what it feels and looks like to live in Africa today.” Ekow Eshun (b. 1968) is a British writer, journalist, broadcaster and former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. His most recent project, Africa State of Mind, is a large, ambitious book.

The publication collects a wide range of images as a platform for expression and exchange around the continent, boasting over 50 exciting names. These next generation artists are providing unique insights into Africa, or, rather, they each offer one of many perspectives. As Eshun points out, there can be no monolithic view. “In the past there were attempts to corral Africans. It’s important to take a broader, much more kaleidoscopic approach. The book presents an overview of recent photographic practice – all the works included were shot in the 21st century, mostly in the last decade. It is an exploration of how contemporary artists of African origin are interrogating ideas of “Africanness” by highly subjective renderings of place, belonging, memory and identity that reveal the continent to be a psychological space – a state of mind – as much as a physical territory.”

That psychological state is complex. Eshun looks back – to the distinguished history of Malick Sidibé (1935-2016) and Seydou Keïta (1921-2001), and even further back to pioneers such as Francis W. Joaque (1845-1900), but also back to the much less illustrious history of photography as practised in Africa by European colonisers. Carving up Africa at the same time photography was being invented, these invaders used images to take stock of what they had seized – via dubious ethnographic studies – and also to create a picture of a “dark continent” that “lent rationale to the apparently civilising mission of Empire.”

Untitled, 2012. © Nobukho Nqaba.

That rationale still contributes to the 21st century image of Africa, says Eshun, from white adventurer movies like Congo (1995), Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) to “the footage of famine-swollen bellies and fly-covered faces that punctuates charity telethons.” This colonial history and resulting hangover of public perception is something with which photographers must engage. “Every time you pick up the camera you are dealing with the legacy of the African figure,” argues Eshun. “That context and history mean that the images aren’t passive. If you’re photographing someone in Africa, you have to ask yourself ‘How is it I think about what it is to do that?’ because you are now in some sort of dialogue with those earlier images.”

However, this extra layer of thought also points to the finesse and refinement in these pictures, he adds – concepts which have always been part of the African experience, though reductive western conceptions have attempted to deny it. There’s often an assumption that these image-makers are somehow catching up with the west, he points out: in fact, Africa has always been “fundamentally cosmopolitan.”

“The west hasn’t historically acknowledged that when you live in Africa, you grow up with this real sense of sophistication, not isolation,” he says. “The art world is opening up, belatedly, to the quality of artists outside the west. Take Zanele Muholi (b. 1972) – the first African photographer to have a major solo show at Tate Modern – something that has nothing to do with anything other than the calibre of the work. Muholi’s practice explores issues of identity, of how individuals can choose to self-identify. Hassan Hajjaj (b. 1961) is a similar example but from a very different place [he’s from Morocco, Muholi from South Africa]. He also uses dynamic portraits as a way of looking at cosmopolitanism and globalisation, gender, identity, masculinity – many different things.”

Mutjope Kavari, Kunene Region, Namibia, 2015. © Kyle Weeks.

Eshun traces similar themes in other photographers’ work. He points to Sethembile Msezane (b. 1991), who uses self-portraiture to address the lack of positive representation of black women in South Africa, and recognition for their part in the country’s liberation. A Zulu woman, Msezane photographed herself dressed as the Zimbabwe Bird in front of a statue of Cecil Rhodes – the Victorian businessman and mining magnate who once ruled South Africa (and elsewhere). This image works in the context of the Rhodes Must Fall protests of 2015, Eshun adds, in which statues of the colonial ruler were removed. “She is inherently very interested in dynamics of power and representation – how we recognise history, point of view and power.”  

He also picks out Nobukho Nqaba (b. 1992), another South African who works with self-portraiture, but whose images are most recognisable because of their adornment of cheap, checked bags. “One of her points is that these bags are associated with migration and people on low income, and they are global,” points out Eshun. “They’re made in China, and in South Africa they’re known as ‘China bags,’ but in the USA they’re associated with Mexicans and in Germany with Turkish people. Ultimately, she’s using them as a totemic symbol, using them not just in terms of the relationship that she, as an African woman, has to them, but as how some of these dialogues recur around the world with different sets of people. “These items are a marker of marginalisation, and these images therefore have an implication of the globalisation of capital, or production taking place around the world – there’s a much bigger picture that she’s trying to speak to and interrogate.”

Zakaria Wakrim (b. 1988) is from Morocco. Eshun picks up on a similar sense of “cosmopolitanism” in his work, and in particular an image showing a red-robed individual looking out over the North African coast. The photograph hints at the paths of migration – and forced migration – but also evokes western art history, in its similarity to Casper David Friedrich’s Romantic painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). In fact, other images in Wakrim’s series depict the same figure looking over the Atlas Mountains and Sahara Desert. The artist has another westerner in mind – Antoine de Saint Exupéry, the aviator and author who drew on his own experience of crash-landing in the Sahara when writing The Little Prince (1943). “We come back to the decision to shoot an image,” comments Eshun. “These photographers are weighing up their portfolios and placing them within a broader political, cultural and social context.”

Untitled, 2012. © Nobukho Nqaba.

Kyle Weeks’ (b. 1992) practice, meanwhile, engages with what it means be a white Namibian taking pictures of young, black Himba men. Africa State of Mind includes pieces from the series Palm Wine, which shows men following the ancient practice of tapping palm trees for sap; it follows another project with Himba men, in which Weeks set up a portrait studio which allowed them to take photographs of themselves “to give agency to the people in the photographs, and acknowledge his own complicated position … His work highlights the complicated notion of a visual representation of African people,” comments Eshun. “There’s no passive relationship between photographer and subject and context.”

Thinking through these complex ideas, Eshun noticed four themes that seemed to crop up repeatedly. These then became the key chapters of the publication – Hybrid Cities; Zones of Freedom; Myth and Memory; and Inner Landscapes. Hybrid Cities looks at the idea of the metropolis, on a continent that includes three megacities – Lagos, Cairo and Kinshasa – and includes artists such as Thabiso Sekgala, George Osodi, Emeka Okereke and Guy Tillim.

Zones of Freedom considers sexual freedom and identity, and features work by Eric Gyamfi, Hassan Hajjaj, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi and Ruth Ossai. Myth and Memory looks at work that draws on and subverts existing aesthetic traditions, and includes pieces by Omar Victor Diop, Lalla Essaydi, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Pieter Hugo, Namsa Leuba, Sethembile Msezane and Lina Iris Viktor. Inner Landscape focuses in on pictures of people that emphasise the personal and subjective, and highlights names such as Leila Alaoui, Atong Atem, Lebohang Kganye, Youssef Nabil, Nobukho Nqaba, Zakaria Wakrim and Kyle Weeks.

Untitled, 2014. © Zakaria Wakrim.

This decision to organise the book by theme rather than geography is interesting, for at least a couple of reasons. First, it raises the idea that these artists are important because of what they have to say, not because of where they come from. As Eshun puts it, whilst he’s “not averse” to exhibitions and books that focus on particular locations (after all, he has just created one), he doesn’t want it to be the only place to see their work. Instead, he hopes that by throwing the spotlight on under-represented names, this project will help them take their rightful place in the wider canon – as has already happened with Muholi, and with Kiluanji Kia Henda (b. 1979), whose work is currently on show at the Barbican’s, London, Masculinities show, until 17 May.

The second reason for the book’s order hints at Eshun’s own position within this project. He is a London-based man of Ghanaian heritage. Eshun was nominated for the Orwell Prize for the memoir Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa(2005) – which deals with a return trip to Ghana, Ghanaian history and issues of identity and race. He isn’t based in Africa, but says that’s not the point. “There is no singular, authentic version of the continent; there are multiple, individual perspectives,” he expands. “Africa encompasses 54 countries! My perspective comes from being of African origin and living in London. I have an inevitably diasporic point of view, but I think it’s valid. I’m not claiming to take a singular fixed view, and I don’t claim to come from some singular version of truth.”

“I want to get away from the idea that ‘This is Africa.’” he continues. “I want to give as much room to the photographers as possible, putting together a book and a show that sees from their point of view. I’m interested in how individual artists, or how I, as a writer, can explore notions and ideas. The photographers are world-present – most of them travel quite often, or, if they don’t, they have an artistic approach and reach that allows them to expand out internationally. It’s not necessarily accurate to think of it as ‘me here, them there’ – it’s more about the flow and exchange of ideas, images and influences.”

— Diane Smyth

[yeonchi]

Dub Logistics Part 27: Working Together

“If game publishers, localisers and voice acting studios worked with anime licencing companies like Funimation, then more games would likely be dubbed.”

This is an extension of Parts 3 and 5 of Dub Logistics, which in turn is an extension of Part 54 of the Koei Warriors Rant Series.

Before I start, I’d just like to quickly address a comment I found. So a fan shared the previous instalment in a Facebook group for dub fans and someone commented, “Didn't the Tumblr website say it's close to dying soon? So therefore, Tumblr is no longer relevant. No longer reliable.” Well, since I haven’t heard any news about Tumblr actually dying, so I can presume he was talking about me.

First of all, I’m not “close to dying”, but I am ending this series (and hopefully, my English dub rants) at the end of this year, which is something that he would have known if he had at least read Part 22. I’m not sure about the second half of the comment, but I can guess that he was playing on the stereotypically generalised cliché that Tumblr is a cesspool of intolerance, SJWs, fanboys and fangirls. I’ll come back to this point in Part 30, but what I’ll say for now is that I don’t consider myself to be in any one of these groups and that the commenter shouldn’t have generalised me that way.

Now, I’m not entirely versed in the ways of localisation and voice acting, but through the research I’ve done for these posts in the past few years, I’ve got a bit of an idea about how it happens. Of course, like many other things I’ve suggested, there isn’t much of a chance that they will be actually implemented for various reasons. Anyway, here goes.

Some time after I started my English dub rants, I thought that Japanese gaming companies should work more closely with their Western divisions so that more games can be dubbed. Recently, I realised either it might not be enough or I may have missed the point. So I thought, “What if Japanese gaming companies actually worked with companies and/or studios like Funimation?”

Think about it; games adapted from dubbed animes (such as Attack on Titan) could have been dubbed as well, but their publishers never thought about reaching out to them. Really makes you think, doesn’t it? This idea could be expanded to accommodate collaborations between different voice acting studios, but I imagine the workload and difficulty of the project would increase.

Anime licencing studios working with gaming companies can also help their merchandising portfolio as well, even if at base value, it only equates to one extra product (the game) being available for purchase.

Now, what if the scenario was reversed so that companies like Funimation actually reached out to game companies to help dub a new anime for Western audiences? Since there is less work involved with dubbing an anime than localising a game (I’m not saying that one is easier than the other since I probably imagine that they’re just as difficult), this would be a more likely scenario. If the game is dubbed, then getting the English voice cast back would mean not having to cast new actors (provided the localisation was released before the anime’s release in Japan). If the game isn’t dubbed, then that’s a different story.

See, I believe that if an anime or game is dubbed, then any spinoffs and adaptations made (including anime and game adaptations) should be dubbed as well, preferably with the same voice cast from the original work (if it is the case in the original Japanese audio, then it should be the case in the English dub). If the original work is subbed, then I don’t really have an opinion on it, although I think that dubbing spinoffs or adaptations in this case would make the franchise’s dubbing record seem inconsistent.

One example that comes to mind is the Senran Kagura game series. While the games are localised with subtitles, an anime adaptation premiered in 2013 and was dubbed for a DVD and Blu-ray release in 2014. Judging from a few comments I’ve seen on Reddit, the dub wasn’t that good, but that’s beside the point. If the dub was successful, however, then I don’t see why the cast can’t be carried over into localisations of future games in the series.

However, given the SJWs’ obsession with feminism and “rape culture”, I feel like I have to go on a tangent and make this counterpoint about how such a scenario would actually turn out. At face value, I think the series would be praised because the characters are predominately female, but then I realise that it would be severely criticised for the amount of fanservice shown. I think fans of this series already know about this problem, because the creators have been praised for stating that they would not tone down the content of the games in response to these concerns. Honestly, I think the fans of the series should be lucky that Marvelous, Tamsoft and Xseed still get to keep doing what they are doing, because God knows what will happen if they cave in to the SJW bandwagon, but I digress.

This is where I expand the scope of this instalment’s statement to cover this lingering issue. When it comes to games such as the Koei Warriors series that have at least a hundred characters to be voiced (and that’s not just the main character roster, either), one must wonder how the original Japanese version can be fully voiced while Western localisations can get away with skimping on lines or not dubbing the game at all. Here are my thoughts on this debacle.

In Japan, voice acting is such a prevalent aspect in their media due to the prevalence of anime and video games, while in the West, licencing and localisation are, in a way, feeding off of this in an attempt to emulate that prevalence. It’s no surprise that the voice recording process, whether the original or the dub, is different in Japan than it is in the West. I’ve been unable to find a lot of significant information on the Japanese side of things, but my theory is that there are more voice acting studios in Japan, centred around Tokyo and Osaka, than there are in North America, the main ones being in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston.

I’ve touched on the location theory in an earlier instalment of Dub Logistics and I got to wondering, “Is it possible for voice acting studios to collaborate with each other?” I thought it was a bad idea since it would be too complicated for the different studios to coordinate their work (particularly if it is a video game), but then again, how else were Koei Tecmo Japan able to voice over a hundred characters in a crossover game and/or with as little double-up roles as possible? I believe that studio collaborations are a way that voice actors can do roles that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, particularly due to location issues.

I haven’t followed anime for years so as I said at the start of this, I’m not exactly someone who has a decent grasp on the topic. However, I am interested in hearing your thoughts on this, so feel free to do that if you want.

UPDATE - 14 September 2018: A fan on the English Dubbed Game News page asked, “Don't they have to collaborate with the companies anyway to make sure the material in the game is consistent with the anime?” and pointed out that the Funimation logo is on the box of the One Piece Romance Dawn game for the 3DS, which is voiced in Japanese. After briefly checking, I can confirm that to be true for the US version, but I still don’t think Funimation had a part in localising this game, putting aside the fact that this is a 3DS game and not a PS4 game.

First of all, the credit on the back of the box says “Licence coordinated by Funimation”. That doesn’t really say anything to me about them having any contribution to the localisation, particularly given the fact that their logo doesn’t appear on the European or Australian boxes.

Secondly, yes, there would obviously have to be some collaboration with the publishers, but you would think that they would have reached out to the original creators rather than localisation or licencing companies. Inevitably, with a dubbed anime, there may be some terms which are different to the original release, but any translator working on the game would probably have seen the dub already and took care to take any localised terms into account. This is not exactly “dubtitling” per se as long as the subtitles are not heavily localised to the point where it might as well have been dubbed. I’ll be touching on this in the next instalment.

Thirdly, even if Funimation actually had some part to play in the localisation of this game, then the point that I was trying to get across in this instalment was that they could have done more on their part in regards to providing a dub for the game. That’s assuming that this is actually true, which is unconfirmed and likely not the case.

In summary, this doesn’t really change any of what I said in this instalment. Yes, I still agree that game companies collaborating with companies like Funimation could help with the funding and production of a dub. If Funimation are already helping in the other aspects of localisation, then they could certainly do more to help.

The Dub Logistics series is reaching its end and I’m pretty much done with my usual way of writing English dub rants (mostly involving research and observation). Parts 29 and 30 will be dedicated to my retirement speech (which mostly involves reflecting on the past), so the next instalment (Part 28) will be dedicated to discussing any remaining statements I have, given that I have had no special requests from my fans over the past 6 months. Although I am open to discussing this topic outside of this series, this will be your last chance to have your question or topic answered or rather, featured, so if you have something you would like me to cover, don’t hesitate to send it to me.

[denmarkduringthefall-blog]

Long Study Tour With DIS

 An important part of the DIS program is that students really take advantage of studying in a different country; they want us to “use Europe as our classroom”. To fulfill this goal, DIS takes students on two trips throughout the semester. For my first trip, I spent three days in western Denmark. You can read about that trip if you click here. This post is about my week-long study trip through Germany and Switzerland. If you are extra curious about any of the sites I visited, you can click their name, I have linked most of them to their respective websites. 

Sunday, Oct 29: Zurich

I overslept but managed to make it through the airport about half an hour before my flight boarded. Due to some issues with our plane, we ended up taking off almost two hours late anyway. When we finally landed in Zurich, we were too late to go to our first scheduled tour. Instead, we took a bus to our hotel. I always enjoy that first ride from the airport through a city, and this trip was no exception. Autumn is in full swing here and the orange and red trees looked lovely against Zurich’s old architecture. After dropping our stuff off at the hotel (probably the nicest place I’ll stay during all of my time in Europe) we went to the Swiss National Museum, which was designed to fit in with the medieval buildings in Zurich but was actually built in the late nineties.  Some of the exhibits were interesting, but they were all about Swiss history so, to be honest, I tired of them pretty quickly. The museum got a really cool modern extension in 2016. I really liked it. It was all concrete, set at odd angles and every once in a while there would be a perfectly circular window, reminiscent of a porthole, framing something nice outside of the museum. Here: the river, there: a stately old building. Again, I was wowed by all of the autumn leaves outside the windows, they made for some fantastic contrast against the dark, gray interior of the museum.

After that, I went for a stroll along the canal with some friends from my architecture studio. We walked through the city center, full of old architecture and narrow winding streets, until we stumbled upon Lindenhofplatz which is a park set up on a hill. It offers a really nice view of Zurich.

At that point we were getting pretty cold, so we managed to find a pub where we hung out and had a beer while we waited to meet the rest of our group for dinner at a traditional German restaurant.

Monday, Oct 30: Zurich

We had a breakfast buffet at our hotel where I drank probably five cups of coffee (and was still sleepy) then headed out at 7:30 for the Letzigrund Stadium. On our way there we stopped by MFO-Park. The park is a large plaza with almost no vegetation on ground level. No grass? Kinda strange for a park. Instead of a grassy area, the designers (Burkhardt+Partner and a landscape architect called Raderschallpartner) made a metal frame which looks a lot like the skeleton of a building. Then they added a bunch of different species of vines which will (eventually, hopefully) grow to cover the whole structure. There are also little "plazas" on the various different levels of the structure with wooden benches. There's even one on the top of the building, about four stories up. From this one, you can look across the top of the park/structure out and at the surrounding city. It was a really cool and unique design. I don't think I have seen anything like it on such a large scale.

Letizigrund is a new, multi-use soccer stadium in district 4 of Zurich. Apparently, district 4 used to be very industrial and was cut off from the rest of the city by the many many sets of train tracks. Now, like so many warehouse districts, it is becoming the hip area full of art galleries, concert venues, and new bars. The stadium was kinda cool but I think I may have been a little too tired to really appreciate it at the time. Our tour guide was a funny guy, he did not hesitate to tell us about some of the problems with the stadium.

Next, we went to Toni-Areal which was a milk factory before it was refurbished and transformed into a university for the arts. I loved the building. Designers retained much of the industrial feeling but added tons of big windows and garden terraces.

After the art school, we walked to the ImViadukt which is an elevated train track, that is still in use today but has been adapted for a few more uses besides travel at this point. One of the two tracks has been changed into an elevated walkway, and all of the spaces underneath the track have been walled up to create storefronts for shops and restaurants. Its pretty neat, and a great re-use (double use?) of a space most people might not think to utilize. I got lunch under the train tracks. There was a small market hall and I found a Japanese restaurant. I got a really tasty veggie steamed bun and some miso soup which was great to warm me up! We were really lucky to get lots of clear, sunny weather during this trip, but it was still October in Germany so it was pretty chilly anytime we went outside. 

After lunch, my little group walked along the top of the train tracks for a  bit. We went to the Freitag Flagship store which was cool. It was built by stacking shipping containers on top of each other, there is an observation deck at the top.

We wandered around that area a little more, then managed to figure out how to take the train back into the city center ( there are SO MANY different train lines in Zurich). 

We spent another couple hours walking around the old part of the city, along the edge of the canal, sketching a little and freezing our butts off. We went into Das Grossmünster, a large cathedral which had really cool "stained glass" windows made of thinly sliced agate. 

Eventually, we made our way to meet our group for dinner. We ate at a vegetarian buffet, which was super tasty. (Even the non-vegetarians enjoyed it). After dinner, we went to some thermal baths. This spa had a rooftop pool, which was fantastic. We got to look out at all of the city lights while relaxing in warm mountain spring water.

On our last night in Switzerland, our tour leaders asked us to make a drawing that illustrates our current understanding of Switzerland. The drawing above is sort of a response to that prompt in an abstract style. It includes the hills, train tracks, the canal, old buildings, and winding streets of Zurich. 

Tuesday, October 31: Ronchap, France and Weil am Rhein, Switzerland

We left our hotel by chartered bus bright and early Tuesday morning. Our first stop was the Chappelle du Ronchomp which is very famous among architects. Designed by Le Corbusier, the chapel is super site-specific and really beautiful. Le Corbusier was enchanted by the natural beauty of the mountainous landscape and wanted to work with it, rather than distract from it. He worked with light in some really fantastic ways, using lots of stained glass and soft building materials like wood and white-washed sprayed concrete. 

After the chapel, our bus took us to Vitra Campus. Vitra is a high-end furniture and lighting design company, Vitra campus includes their production halls, two design museums, and a showroom. Here is a link to the presentation that I made about it.  In 1981, there was a fire on the campus that destroyed practically every building on the campus. After that, Vitra decided to hire up-and-coming architects to design interesting buildings on their campus. They ended up with a Frank Gehry, a Zaha Hadid and lots of other works from now world-renowned architects.

The campus was awesome, especially the showroom  "Vitrahaus" and the enormous (like 4 stories tall) corkscrew slide. We had a lot of fun working our way through the showroom, testing out each of the different chair designs. It was also fun to be in Vitrahaus because the campus sits in this special spot right on the borders of Germany, Switzerland, and France. This means that you can see all three countries from the floor-to-ceiling windows of Vitrahaus. 

After Vitra, we headed to our hotel in Freiberg, Germany. This was a college town so my friends and I decided that we would try to go out for Halloween.

We found an Irish pub and spent most of the night there. We had bought wigs and other disguises the night before. I'm glad that I found some friends who appreciate Halloween as much as I do, even if most Europeans don’t. 

Wednesday, Nov 1: Basel

 Our first stop on Wednesday was the Beyeler Foundation, which had some fantastic art. I saw one performance art piece which I really liked. Maybe “saw” isn’t really the right word, because it took place in a very dark room. I think “experienced” is probably a more appropriate verb. Below I’m going to try (and probably fail) to recreate the experience for you from some notes I made in my journal afterwards. 

“After working your way through a small exhibition of dark, inky drawings, you turn a corner, then another, only to be confronted by a dark hallway. “Am I supposed to be here?” you think--but there are no signs that indicate you shouldn’t be. You work your way along the dark hallway, one hand on the wall to make sure you don’t lose your way. It just keeps getting darker, but you can hear music coming from the end of the hall so you push on. In time the wall you have been following falls away and you are forced to turn the corner. The room you enter is also very dark but its lit by a few barely-glowing lightbulbs, You can sense that there are other people in the room, but until your eyes adjust you can’t actually see any of them. Eventually, you realize that these people are performers. Each of them is making sounds which individually wouldn’t qualify as singing, but collectively form an acapella piece with no words. You walk into the center of the room and the music is coming from all around you, slowly building. Its beautiful, and when they finally fall silent you aren’t sure if you want to break the magic by applauding. You decide not to. You float out of the room and back down the hallway into the now overy-bright white museum.”

The piece was choreographed by a German artist called Tino Sehgal, who specializes in “constructed situations” (which feels like a pretty accurate label for the pice I saw). I was not the only member of my tour group who really liked this piece. If you ever get a chance to see one of his pieces, I absolutely recommend that you go for it. 

Afte the Beyeler Foundation, we took a train to the Kunstmuseum Basel, which houses the largest art collection in Switzerland. It recently got a modern addition, which is why we were there. The addition was cool, full of soft concrete and crisscrossing staircases. 

After the Kunstmuseum (Kunst means “art”) We headed back to Freiburg for one last site visit. We went to the Vauban neighborhood. I really liked Vauban because it is a neighborhood which was designed with environmental and social sustainability as top priorities. Vauban is full of greenery and is very walkable. There are almost as many parks as there are apartment buildings. All of the buildings produce some form of renewable energy and have some kind of rainwater-catchment system. On one edge of the neighborhood, an area which had been set aside for extra parking spaces has been turned into a huge community-run farm. It was seriously awesome to see a project like this succeeding. These are the kinds of areas I hope to see springing up in many more locations. 

Thursday, November 2: Cologne

The next morning we took a train from Freiburg to Cologne, Germany. We stayed right next to the central station and the Cologne Cathedral. Cologne had the most modern feel of all of the European cities I have visited so far (because most of the old buildings were bombed in WWII). After dropping our stuff off at our hostel, we walked over to the Kolumba Museum, which was designed by Peter Zumthor to fit into the ruins of a gothic church. There is a really cool area (open to the public) in which you can walk over some of these ruins on an elevated walkway. It was hard to get a good picture of this, but Zumthor played with natural light and the indoor-outdoor boundary by leaving some of the bricks out in the construction of the new walls. 

This museum was small, but I was okay with that. It had a nice mix of contemporary works and historical roman-catholic art. 

After the museum, we visited the Cologne Cathedral, which was nothing short of astounding (especially considering that the enormous building was built before cranes were a thing). It’s HUGE but still very intricate. It was built in the gothic style and though it was originally made out of light colored stone, it is now almost black with soot and pollution from the industrial era (we all agreed that it looks better black, anyway).

Thursday evening, my friends and I strolled along the Rhine River, which was especially lovely at sunset. We stumbled upon a fair where we ate kettle corn and played silly games. Good clean fun. 

Friday, November 3: Essen

We squeezed in two last site visits before our flight back to Copenhagen. The first of these was Brother Klaus Filed Chapel which was built as a sacred space for the farmers who live in Mechernich-Wachendorf, Germany. It is a small and simple structure which you can only reach by walking through some farm fields. Zumthor, the designer, paid a lot of attention to the materials he used. He had local farmers help him with the construction. 112 tree trunks from the surrounding countryside were set up in a teepee formation before having 24 layers of concrete poured over them. The trees were then set ablaze and slow-burned for almost two weeks. This fired the concrete and left a charred space inside the structure which is textured like tree bark. Some light comes through glass orbs embedded in the walls, but most of it comes from a large opening in the top of the chapel. This opening references the story of Brother Klaus (a 15th-century mystic who is special to German farmers) who, so his story goes, saw a starburst while in the womb.  I really liked this chapel. It was nice to see what a uniquely beautiful structure can be created using simple, local materials. 

Above: Photos of the field chapel

Below: A serial vision (drawing exercise) of views approaching the chapel

After the chapel, we went to the Ruhr Museum and the Red Dot Design Museum in Essen. The buildings used to be a coal washing plant, but now they have been repurposed. The Ruhr Museum is dedicated to the natural and cultural history of the area and the Red Dot Design Museum showcases products which have won the prestigious Red Dot design award. I really liked the Red Dot Museum. As a big fan of clever design, it was fun to take a look at the various objects, but I also thought that curators did a really good job in redesigning the space to display these products. The building is a World Heritage Site, so designers could not remove most of the machinery in the building. Instead of letting this space go to waste, designers built elevated walkways which wind through the machinery. They use the machinery itself as a place to display the Red Dot products. I thought that this was cool because instead of trying to hide or ignore the machinery, it encourages visitors to investigate the site as well as the exhibition. 

[bigyack-com]

A Look at Davos Through the Years

1971

The first meeting of the World Economic Forum, then called the European Management Symposium, convened in Davos, Switzerland, organized by Klaus Schwab, in collaboration with Hilde Stoll. (They married shortly afterward.)

1973

Aureilo Peccei, an Italian industrialist, delivered a speech calling for balancing economic goals with environmental concerns.

1974

Political leaders were invited for the first time, and the European Energy Commissioner asked the United States to cut fuel consumption by 5 to 10 percent.

1976

In an effort to engage with society at large, the conference began inviting a wider slate of speakers, including Ralph Nader, the consumer rights advocate.

1980

Henry A. Kissinger, a former secretary of state, warned that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed a fundamental challenge to the United States.The Economist wrote: “Europe’s industrialists are never happier than arguing with such folk what is wrong and what is right with free enterprise. After all, any economic system that gives you a tax-deductible week in Davos at the height of the ski season must have something to recommend it, mustn’t it?”

1981

In a harbinger of the Iran-contra affair, the Austrian chancellor warned that the United States’ support of dictatorships in Latin America could harm its relations with European powers.Lt. Col. Oliver North before a hearing on the Iran-contra affair in the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1986.Credit...Chris Wilkins/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

1982

A Saudi prince, Saud ibn Faisal, said the United States and Europe should address the wrongs done to the Arab world, including brokering the establishment of a Palestinian homeland.

1984

China announced a $1 billion plan to import Western technology. The New York Times reported, “Diplomats at the meeting here said China’s growing demands for modern Western technology raised strategic problems for the Western countries.”

1985

“The key word you hear at the Davos sessions is disintervention,” The Financial Post reported. “What that means is downsizing government, selling off public-sector companies, reducing government regulations, lowering tax burdens, and encouraging success rather than subsidizing failure.”

1986

The Greek prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, and Prime Minister Turgut Ozal of Turkey averted war with a face-to-face meeting.

1987

Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of West Germany, urged the West to be receptive to the perestroika and glasnost initiatives begun by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.

1988

Asher Edelman, the managing general partner of Plaza Securities Co., gave a blistering speech, decrying business leaders “who are not only unethical but immoral,” and was met with loud booing.

1989

Carlo Rubbia, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984, said the consumption of fossil fuels was a significant threat to life on earth and urged investing in nuclear fusion reactors to counteract the greenhouse effect.

1990

The East German prime minister, Hans Modrow, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany met just two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.The Guardian reported: “A spiritual breakfast with Mother Teresa, a contact lunch with Ted Heath, dinner with the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, and a fiesta mexicana paid for by one of the most indebted countries, were among the delights available here yesterday as some of the most important people in the world (some might say self-important) assembled for an annual bout of networking.”

1992

Nelson Mandela, the head of the African National Congress, and South Africa’s president, F.W. de Klerk, shook hands, in their first meeting outside their country.

1994

Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, and Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, reached a tentative agreement on settlements in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

1995

Russia assured world leaders that it was committed to a market economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. “The course of reform won’t turn back,” said the first deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais.

1996

Bill Gates addressed Microsoft’s competitive landscape, saying: “There’s still a chance for Apple. It’s tough, though. It will take a great leader to stop the downward spiral.”

1997

The Swiss president, Arnold Koller, expressed regret for his country’s role in the Holocaust to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “We’re serious when we say we want the full truth also about the troubling time of our history,” Mr. Koller said.

1998

The gathering that later became known as the Group of 20 was assembled for the first time at Davos.

2000

In the wake of protests in Seattle the previous fall, Mike Moore, director general of the World Trade Organization, said as he went to Davos, “For the first few months of this year, the W.T.O. will adopt the posture of the swan serene on top of the water and paddling furiously under the water.”

2002

In a show of solidarity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the World Economic Forum was held in New York, at the Waldorf Astoria, the first time outside Davos.

2003

As the United States laid the groundwork for war in Iraq, world leaders were harshly critical at Davos, saying the case for war had not been fully made.” I think the evidence is there, and I think the evidence is clear,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said.

2004

The economist Samuel Huntington coined the term “Davos Man.”

2005

Bono, Angelina Jolie and Sharon Stone were among the celebrity attendees.During a panel discussion on the relative success of the Iraq war, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst leading the Washington office of the RAND Corporation, said: “In terms of perception, we’ve already lost the war. I believe that a cult of the insurgent has emerged from Iraq.”The British prime minister, Tony Blair, voiced support for the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States had declined to sign on to. “There are differences that need to be reconciled,” he said. “And if they could be reconciled or at least moved forward, it would make a huge difference to the prospects of international unity, as well as to people’s lives and our future survival.”

2006

A report on avian flu published at Davos stated that the disease’s “impact on society might be as profound as that which followed the Black Death in Europe in 1348. That plague caused a fundamental transformation of socio-economic relations in Europe.”

2007

Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics, warned at a panel of the increased use of derivatives as financial instruments. “The amount of leverage in the system is growing at rates that are scary,” he said. “We don’t know if derivatives are diffusing risk or concentrating it. The risk of something systemic happening is rising.”Thomas Russo, chief legal officer of Lehman Brothers, disagreed, saying, “Risk is spread out in the financial services industry now much greater than ever before.”

2008

George Soros said that systemic failure might already be upon us, and that the current state was “not a normal crisis but the end of an era.” Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, nevertheless said a global recession was “inconceivable.”

2009

After the global credit-market meltdown and the failure of several major banks in the United States, the mood at Davos was described in news reports as “subdued,” “shaken,” “resigned” and “a little humbled.”During a debate over fighting in Gaza with the Israeli president Shimon Peres, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, stormed off the stage and vowed never to return to Davos.

2010

The director James Cameron said in a speech: “I always used to turn down invitations to Davos, since I know plenty about making movies, but nothing about economics. This year, I changed my mind — after all, we’ve seen from the last year that it turns out no one here knew anything about economics either.”The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said the company would stop censoring its search results in China. “We love what China is doing as a country and its growth,” he said. “We just don’t like the censorship. We hope to apply some negotiation or pressure to make things better for the Chinese people.”

2011

The Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, said inequality could lead to long-term social unrest. “Politically, I believe we are at a turning point,” he said. “There are signs in Europe of more nationalism, more racism, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitism, fundamentalisms of all types.”

2012

In a speech, Klaus Schwab said that capitalists “have sinned” and that “people feel it’s a difficult time. They are irritated.”Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, was the event’s only female co-chair.

2013

The World Economic Forum offered a free extra spot to any company bringing a female delegate, but as one veteran female attendee told The Observer, “Lots of firms just don’t have a woman senior enough to send.”Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said that pay for executives and bankers must be cut to avoid another crash. “Excessive inequality is corrosive to growth; it is corrosive to society,” she said. “I believe that the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long.”

2014

Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, promised not to evacuate the West Bank settlements.Delegates participated in a “Refugee Run,” meant to simulate the conditions of being a displaced person. Orders like “Get down on the ground, heads down!” “Get up, into the tent, go to sleep!” were yelled at them.

2015

More than 100 attendees observed 10 minutes of silence in a conference room, as part of a presentation on mindfulness. “Even Goldman Sachs is doing it,” Bill George, a member of that company’s board, said of meditation. He added, “Here we are in this beautiful country, and has anyone bothered to look up at the mountains?”

2016

Leonardo DiCaprio accepted the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award for his environmentalism, saying in his acceptance speech: “We simply cannot afford to allow the corporate greed of the coal, oil and gas industries to determine the future of humanity. Those entities with a financial interest in preserving this destructive system have denied, and even covered up, the evidence of our changing climate.”Leonardo DiCaprio at Davos in 2016.Credit...Remy Steinegger/World Economic Forum

2017

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, said “no country would emerge the winner from a trade war.”

2018

President Trump delivered a speech, declaring the United States “open for business.” He said: “The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America. I’m here to deliver a simple message. There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the United States.”

2019

Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish environmental activist, delivered a speech beginning: “Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.” She added: “At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed.” Read the full article

[topfygad]

Is It Harmless to Travel to Egypt in 2019?

I was startled awake in the center of the evening by a strange Egyptian male shouting loudly at me in Arabic.

He seemed indignant, but I couldn’t determine out what was going on. Why was he yelling at me? I stared back with baffled eyes, only discovering the power to mumble a single phrase.

“Huh?”

A lot more screaming. More pointing and flailing of arms. A small pack of Egyptian gentlemen had surrounded my seat on the bus and, even with the reality that I obviously couldn’t speak their language, they appeared to assume that shouting even louder would make me recognize.

“Is there a issue?” a regional lady across the aisle asked in English. “I was sleeping,” I explained to her, “and these guys just commenced yelling at me.”

She pointed at my ticket, indicated that I experienced been sitting down in the erroneous seat, and enable me know that this was incredibly much towards the policies. Seemingly, bus-goers are extremely really serious about seat assignments below.

The Egyptian mentality will take some getting utilized to. And immediately after only a single week of traveling there, I definitely can’t say that I comprehend it.

The tomato person of Giza.

The chicken gentleman of Giza.

On the nearby bus in Cairo a single working day, I struck up a conversation with a beautiful youthful Egyptian girl. Her English was approximately perfect and, following the standard pleasantries about exactly where we ended up from, her next question was, “What do you assume about the folks right here?”

I believed for a 2nd, and I advised her I experienced achieved some people who acted really intense in the direction of me, but that I had also fulfilled some of the kindest, most genuine people of all.

She nodded slowly but surely in considered, and then, immediately after a couple of times, she seemed back again at me and mentioned, “Good. Several don’t get to see the two sides. That’s the serious Egypt.”

Is Egypt Secure? This is the Actuality of Touring to Egypt

While Egypt is a widespread travel spot for Europeans, Egypt is not the initial place most Americans feel of when they’re getting ready to travel. And to be sincere, there’s great rationale for it. Not only is it a bizarre put, considerably from the reaches of knowing for most Westerners, but tourism in Egypt has dwindled to just about absolutely nothing right after turning into a conflict zone in the latest several years. Thankfully, that conflict has lessened and, in 2018, there is quite very little to panic.

Sunset from the roof of my hostel in Dahab, Egypt

Lantern Shop in Dahab, Egypt.

It is legitimate that there is terrorist exercise in Egypt. Our bus was checked for bombs. Officials questioned every single overseas passenger. Guys with huge guns and riot gear stood guard driving personal barricades on the aspect of the highway. Big police shields with bullet holes lay on the ground future to them.

In Dahab, I viewed as a drunk Arabic person was overwhelmed by law enforcement for resulting in a scene in community.

In Cairo, I encountered the most aggressive taxi drivers I have ever come throughout. At the Pyramids of Giza, the touts are a lot more than hawkish, and they are pretty, pretty clever. You’re going to want some thick pores and skin if you want to travel below. But belief me, it is truly worth it.

Outside the El-Hussein Mosque in Cairo, Egypt.

If you are thinking of touring to Egypt, this is the fact. There is conflict here, and you will face it in several kinds. But which is not to say you should not visit—I satisfied several other tourists in Egypt from all more than the earth. I fulfilled solo woman vacationers, scuba fanatics, and other basic ol’ typical people.

No, Egypt is not your standard getaway. If you want to journey to Egypt and take a look at the Pyramids of Giza, you ought to be prepared for what is waiting for you. It’s an within seem at a very distinct location of the earth, and an inside appear at what is actually going on in the Middle East.

But is it secure to journey to Egypt ideal now? The answer is relatively difficult to make clear.

Inside of Al-Hussein Mosque, Cairo, Egypt.

Is it Harmless to Vacation to Egypt?

Once on a time, the triangular Sinai Peninsula in Egypt was a popular vacationer destination for individuals from all around the Center East and even Russia. They would arrive from Israel and Moscow to scuba dive, drink beer, smoke weed, and social gathering on the seashore.

Having said that, these days, federal government web-sites mark the overall northern half of Sinai in blatant crimson. A lot of terrorist groups have been lively in Egypt, and each and every vacation warning for northern Sinai reads basically: “DO NOT Travel.”

Though I think many journey advisories to be over-exaggerated, the types in Egypt should not be ignored. Place blank, northern Sinai need to be avoided and southern Sinai really should be traveled working with warning. The moment on the mainland, just about anything east of the Nile River is frequently safe, whilst anything west must be traveled with prudence.

Cheeky banana person in Giza. He was all smiles

But I really do not imply to scaremonger. There are some locations which are not risk-free, but there are also areas in which are perfectly great. Search past the warnings.

What you really should be concentrated on is in which it is protected to journey, not exactly where it is not harmless to travel.

In accordance to GOV.Uk, “previous assaults have pretty much solely qualified the stability forces, their services and other governing administration properties.” As a tourist in these regions, it is not likely that you’ll have any difficulties. But the warnings are apparent, and any individual touring in Egypt should really at least be cautious.

Can I explain to you it’s definitely safe and sound to go to Egypt? No, I simply cannot, for the reason that if you go there and die, it would be my fault. But I can explain to you that I went there and I did not die. So, I guess you can make your decision primarily based on that!

For far more facts on no matter whether or not it is safe and sound to journey to Egypt, consult your community embassy. (USA / United kingdom)

If you are organizing on touring to Egypt—or everywhere in the globe for that matter—travel insurance policies is your number one safeguard against just about anything that may well go completely wrong. I generally use Entire world Nomads for ease of use, price and breadth of protection.

If you’re preparing to travel to Egypt, read our comprehensive Environment Nomads evaluate or use the type below to get a quotation.

Assembly Rami Elshaer

The 1st fifty percent of my travels in Sinai ended up performed on my own. I had just 1 7 days in Egypt, but I was identified to make the most of it. In Dahab, for four times, I relaxed in beachfront hookah bars and went scuba diving at the well-known Blue Gap.

This dive website, notoriously regarded as the most perilous dive web page in the environment, has taken hundreds of lives around the yrs.

One extremely awkward right away bus journey later (screaming Arabic adult men incorporated), and I observed myself in the business of Rami Elshaer, a member of a Bedouin tribe who now lives in the town just 100 meters from the Pyramids of Giza.

It was an early morning in Cairo and we sat down at a local cafe for introductions, breakfast, and a Turkish coffee.

Rami Elshaer and his son, Loai.

“When you are with me, you are my relatives, do you comprehend?”

Rami was explaining how his hospitality was likely to get the job done.

“Never consider revenue out of your pocket. If you try out to fork out as a tourist, you will fork out vacationer rates. When I pay out, I pay back local price ranges. At the end of the day, you will spend me back again. This is how it will perform. Do you have an understanding of?”

I nodded.

“And I will do all of the talking. If you have to have anything, just tell me, and I will make it materialize. Do you have an understanding of?”

Rami was stern but fair. He cared. He understood how factors worked and needed to make absolutely sure I would get the most out of my time in Egypt.

In 3 shorter times, Rami turned my Bedouin brother.

Thumbs up at the Wonderful Pyramids of Giza!

The Bedouins are a tribe of men and women who have been roaming the Center Japanese desert for thousands of a long time. Actually translating to “desert dweller,” they are a hugely highly regarded group of persons who are identified for protecting their conventional values and solid loved ones bonds.

Rami did not like to notify men and women he was an Elshaer unless of course he had to. He just wanted to reside out his lifetime. But, as he discussed, whenever he desired a authorities official to look the other way, 1 flash of his ID was all it took.

Camel on the edge of the desert at the Pyramids of Giza.

Rami’s father came from Libya and his mother from north Sudan and then Sinai. The Elshaer’s had been among the initial to settle by the Pyramids of Giza countless numbers of yrs ago, directing traffic and trade along the Silk Street, and they have remained below at any time considering the fact that.

It’s humorous because everywhere I went with Rami, I met a lot more cousins. Extra Elshaer’s. In Giza by yourself, I’m explained to his family members numbers between 2,000-3,000.

Pyramid selfie!

Rami paid for my Turkish coffee, took me to his house, offered me with a bed, and allowed me to dine with his loved ones for 3 days straight.

When I observed out that he would be sleeping on the floor, I insisted that he take his mattress back again and permit me to rest there rather. He demanded not, and refused to permit me to snooze any place apart from the significant bed in his tiny home, which was normally reserved for him and his youthful son, Loai.

The Pyramids of Giza, Egypt.

You see, as travelers them selves, the Bedouins are no stranger to supplying hospitality. When I asked Rami why he hosted people today from Couchsurfing, he informed me of his worldwide travels. He instructed me that the hospitality he been given overseas was existence-switching and that he preferred to devote substantially of his everyday living to returning the identical hospitality he experienced located.

These days, Rami spends his time raising his son, getting ready barbecues for his family members, and displaying vacationers the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Rami now goes again and forth concerning Egypt and Switzerland as he works to present a improved existence for his son. If you desire to make contact with Rami, electronic mail him at [email protected]. However he may not personally be equipped to meet you in Egypt (dependent on his program), his family—all of whom I met—are happy to demonstrate you all over and are some of the nicest people I have ever achieved!

Examine Much more:

source http://cheaprtravels.com/is-it-harmless-to-travel-to-egypt-in-2019/

[notstatschat]

Haere mai, statistical computing folks.

Later this year, Auckland is hosting the Asian regional meeting of the International Association for Statistical Computing.  For the benefit of conference-goers, here’s a brief introduction to the locale. 

Nomenclature:

The Owen G. Glenn Building (OGGB, or building 260, in university abbreviations) is named after Owen G. Glenn. He’s a New Zealand businessman and philanthropist. 

Auckland is named after George Eden.  The subantarctic Auckland Islands were not named after George but after his father William Eden.

New Zealand is named after the Dutch province of Zeeland; the lack of resemblance is quite striking.

Formally,(Actually It’s more complicated) the country is Aotearoa New Zealand, with Māori and English names of equal status. The city has a Māori name, Tāmaki Makaurau, but its primary name is the English one.

The Māori language (te reo Māori) is fairly easy to pronounce roughly right. The consonants are the same as in Western European languages (or pinyin), except that ‘wh’ is pronounced /f/. The vowels are pure, as in Spanish or German or Italian. The bars above vowels mean they are about twice as long. There isn’t strong stress on any syllable.

People over 30 who grew up in a place with a Māori name may well use an older, anglicised pronounciation for it, but there’s been a trend away from that. In particular, weather forecasts and airport announcements will typically use something relatively close to the Māori pronounciation.

Mountains

Auckland is full of little pointy hills that look like baby volcanoes. They are baby volcanoes. One of them, Maungawhau/Mt Eden is data(volcano) in R. Every few thousand years, a new one pops up at some unpredictable location in the Auckland area, erupts briefly, and then stops. There’s only a few of these volcano fields around the world — another is the (extinct) Boring Volcano Field in Portland, Oregon. The Auckland one is still active and so is less boring.

The most recent and largest volcano, Rangitoto, is just outside the Waitemata Harbour. There are ferry rides a few times a day, and it’s a nice walk to the top. Parts of Rangitoto are still bare rock, parts are pohutukawa forest, and there’s some areas on the south side that have developed proper soil and a variety of plants.

Auckland Domain, just across the motorway from the conference, is the crater of the closest volcano; Mt Eden is a short bus ride away.

Peoples

New Zealand was the last worthwhile land mass to be settled — about 800 years ago, by Polynesians in big ocean-going canoes. You occasionally see people raising alt-theories of earlier settlement by, eg, Celts, but there’s scientific consensus and fairly wide social endorsement for the view that these people are probably racist whackjobs.

The British arrived in increasing numbers in the early nineteenth century, with the usual consequences — though the Treaty of Waitangi was somewhat more successful than most attempts to negotiate with the British. Recently, the NZ government has settled treaty claims with many iwi (tribes, clans).

At the start of the twentieth century, about one in four residents of New Zealand was an immigrant. The proportion decreased to a minimum of about one in six in the 1940s and has been slowly increasing again. What’s different this time is where the immigrants are from: many are from the Pacific Islands and from Asia.  Auckland, in particular, has about 40%  immigrant proportion,  similar to New York and London. The increase in diversity has gone reasonably well by international standards, but there are certainly some people who aren’t happy with things being different from fifty years ago.  

Plants

The trees with dense, gray-green leaves are pohutukawa. Some of them might be flowering by the time of the conference.  Stylised versions of the red spiky puffs of flowers are starting to displace winter-based symbols for Christmas in Auckland. You’ll probably hear people worrying about myrtle rust, a South American fungus that has recently arrived; no-one knows how much damage it will do.

Many of the conifers you see are native: rīmu, tōtara, kauri, kahikatea (native plants are typically known by their Māori names). The things like enormous fake Christmas trees are Araucarias; not native but regional — A. heterophylla, ‘Norfolk Pine’ from Norfolk Island and A. columnaris, ‘Cook Pine’, from New Caledonia.  There are also two conifers from the Monterey area of California: “radiata” (Pinus radiata) and “macrocarpa” (Cupressus macrocarpa). They grow much more vigorously here.

The Dr Seuss trees looking like bunches of grass on top of tall trunks are Cabbage Trees (Cordyline australis). The name comes from the edibility of the new stem and the roots, rather than their appearance.

Tree ferns are native; the Waitakere hills to the west of Auckland are packed full of them. They’re culturally important: the major women’s professional sports teams are named after them, and the unfolding fern frond (the ‘koru’) is a widely-used symbol of growth.

Kauri are massively huge living-fossil conifers that used to be common in Auckland and points north. Sadly, a lot of the nearby ones were turned into houses, and they grow slowly. Some of the ones on the west side of Northland (day-trip distance) are almost as big as redwoods (Sequoiadendron).

New Zealand Flax is known and loved and/or hated by gardeners around the warm temperate world. It was a traditional fibre source, and the nectar was used as a sweetener.  It’s not related to the `true’ flax of the northern hemisphere; it’s a lily.

Birds

New Zealand is famous for its weird native birds. The ones you see around you in Auckland mostly aren’t them.  You can easily see a lot of stupidly-introduced English birds: sparrow, starling, pigeon, blackbird, thrush, chaffinch, goldfinch. The cute urban parrots are Australian, as are the magpies and the tiny green silvereyes. The leggy blue and black pūkeko are ‘courtesy natives’ — they arrived before Europeans but after Māori — but they are the same species as the ones all over Europe and Asia. The large black gulls actually are a native species, but the differences would only matter to another gull.

You might, in the parks near the University, see the kererū, the big native pigeon. It’s about twice the size of the feral pigeons, and colored purple, green, and white.  There’s a few fantails (pīwakawaka) around, which are very cute.

There’s one common, distinctive, native bird. If you walk past a tree that sounds as if it’s full of old 28k dial-up modems, you have met the tūī. They’re about the size of a blackbird, with a puff of white feathers at the throat, and they’re boisterous, musical, and give the impression of being slightly drunk.

If you want to see more native birds, the day trip to Tiritiri Maitangi Island is highly recommended. You still won’t see kiwi (they are brown, shy, and nocturnal, so are essentially unobservable) but you will likely see saddlebacks and kākāriki and black robins and hihi and bellbirds and kēreru and maybe kōkako and takahē.

Death Rays from Space (update) 

Auckland has a relatively mild climate, since it’s surrounded by water, but we’re the same distance from the equator as Las Vegas or the Greek islands.  There’s also less continental dust in the atmosphere here than a lot of places. It is surprisingly easy to get badly sunburned. 

Foods

The best-value inexpensive food in central Auckland is in Asian restaurants, and particularly in Asian food courts. Non-foodcourt examples especially worth mentioning are Selera (Malaysian, in Newmarket) and Chom Na (Thai, downtown). Another inexpensive option is fish and chips, which is as good here as anywhere in the world: it’s worth paying extra for snapper if it’s fresh. A lot of pubs also have reasonable food.

The best Indian food is in Sandringham, about 6km south, but there are some good places at the top of the hill, along K Rd (Satya, in particular)

Mexican food is not recommended: it tends to be either bad or expensive. Pizza mostly isn’t great (with a few exceptions). Otherwise, any restaurant that can survive in Auckland is unlikely to be terrible.

At the higher priced end of the market, there are a number of good restaurants on Fort St. Ima does family-style Israeli food very well. Indochine Kitchen is Vietnamese, a bit noisy but good flavours.  Beirut is posh Lebanese. Cassia is modern Indian food and was the Restaurant of the Year last year. There are lots of well-regarded places in Ponsonby that I don’t know much about.  

At the top: for high-end French-style food, The Grove is really excellent; I’ve heard good things about The French Café, but have never been there; Grand Harbour does Hong Kong-style seafood and is by acclaim the best Chinese restaurant in the country, but I’m not really qualified to judge whether it’s worth it. The revolving restaurant on the SkyTower is expensive because it revolves; unlike some revolving restaurants it does actually have good food.

Finally, Giapo, on Fort St, does absolutely over-the-top decorated locavore gelato. You have never seen anything like it.

[tl-notes]

Gabriel Dropout Episode 3 Notes

Note the melon bread.

虫刺され, mushisasare, is being stung/bitten by bugs, so there’s that extra bit of info in the title.

Politeness is a big deal in Japan, and few places is this so apparent as the service industry. Walk into basically any store and you’re bound to hear an “irasshaimase!”, a combination of the respectful verb for “to go/come/be(it’s very versatile)” (irassharu) and a doubly polite way saying please/making a request (-mase). It’s ritualized to the point of almost absurdity in some cases; you’ll hear it not just when you come in, but every time an employee walks by (in say a grocery store or clothing store).

However, in less formal types of stores, like a ramen shop or the neighborhood vegetable store, people will sometimes use it without the -mase and/or with a hai in front. Commonly, with a somewhat slurred/looser pronunciation (hai, irasshai → hei rasshai)—which is what Gab does here.

Basically all that goes to say that here:

He actually says “is she a (vegetable) grocer…?” referring to people like this:

As you can probably tell, she starts speaking in an accent here. It’s not a specific language’s accent or anything, it’s generic “katakoto,” the equivalent of broken English. It’s the go-to way of portraying “foreigner-speak.”

Except then she drops a pretty obscure Japanese proverb, that not even shopkeep man seems to have recognized (the joke of course being “lol she actually speaks the language super fluently”). The proverb is about how it takes a long time and a lot of effort to acquire proficiency in something. Specifically, it refers to being able to properly use the rudder (3 years) and the oar (8 years) on small old-school Japanese fishing boats like this:

You may have seen these terms, tsukkomi (straight man) and boke (dunce), come up in other shows before. The terms come from a traditional (and still widely practiced, it’s a common form of stand-up) style of comedy. It’s basically a rapid dialogue between two performers, one who constantly says dumb stuff (the boke) and one who interjects, in a hopefully hilarious fashion, to correct them (the tsukkomi). It’s especially associated with a Kansai accent for various reasons, though that’s a more modern convention.

The tsukkomi and boke dynamic forms the basis of a huge amount of Japanese comedy, and comes up fairly frequently in day to day life. Characters in media are often defined to some degree by whether they are a tsukkomi or a boke; it’s one of those “there are two kinds of people…” sort of distinctions.

Japanese subs for Hollywood movies are infamously bad. It’s especially mind-boggling when you consider most movies tend to come out in Japan several months after the rest of the world gets them. Ironically dubs tend to be a lot better.

These horror shows, where they basically tell ghost stories and examine “ghost photos,” are pretty common on Japanese TV, especially in the summer. There’s a general idea in the culture that horror is a good genre for hot weather, because it makes you feel colder (sends “chills” down your spine, etc.).

It’s sort of common at certain types of restaurants in Japan (particularly drinking establishments aimed at groups, like izakaya) to offer this sort of thing, “Russian Roulette” food. It’s a popular-ish thing to order as a group, often as part of a drinking game. Another thing people will do is play a game where everyone has to try to guess who got the spicy one.

Takoyaki and cream puffs are two common vehicles for it, since they have a filling you can’t usually see.

The アメリキャンコーヒー (lit. “American Coffee”) is actually not referring to an Americano, that’s a different thing. “American” is the word in Japan for a style of coffee that’s thin/weak and lightly roasted, like American coffee (cue rage). This comes from how European coffee was represented by stuff like espressos, which are pretty strong, while American coffee was represented by “cup of joe” style stuff you can drink several cups of without having a heart attack. The terminology originated in the 60s, back before Starbucks was a thing and dinosaurs walked the earth.

The other options you can see there are seen as pretty high quality (“Blue Mountain”, from Jamaica, for instance has a protected name along the lines of Champagne for wine).

Here’s another example of the service industry politeness thing. In the Japanese she doesn’t say “drink it and get out,” it’s more just like “here, I brought it for you” using a grammar form that implies it was something Stan should be thankful for. Stan’s reaction is “hey use keigo (polite/respectful language) with me, I’m a customer!”

The translation does a fine job of conveying the idea here, I just wanted to bring it up as an example that ties into the earlier point.

You may have noticed that there are constant god/hell/devil/etc. idioms and puns and such in the subs for this show. I just want to point out that almost literally all of them are added by the translator(/editor?), there is basically none of that in the Japanese (i.e. it’s not a Squid Girl situation where they’re trying to deal with her squid puns/"-degeso" or anything). It’s a good example of how a translation can potentially improve the experience imo. Conversational English is steeped in Abrahamic theological terminology, something Japanese lacks almost entirely, so it’s neat to see they’re taking advantage.

“Stepped on a mine” is a common idiom in Japanese for “brought up a subject/said something that caused somebody (emotional) pain,” usually by stabbing at some trauma or insecurity of theirs.

Central heating/cooling is not really a thing in Japanese homes/apartments; you’re generally going to be using a wall mounted unit like seen here, controlled by a remote like this. This usually means only certain areas of the house (/apartment) are kept warm/cool, and that you’d better keep the doors to those rooms shut tight to keep the heat out/in.

Her shirt says “Karuizawa,” a place that's a short ways outside Tokyo and famous as vacation spot, where lots of rich people keep vacation homes. The shirt design is also pretty reminiscent of the “you work you lose” NEET shirt.

Japan has a similar thing to how in the US (and other places?) Jehova’s Witnesses will knock on doors to try and get you to join their religion. It’s often even Christians (which is a very small minority religion in Japan), though sometimes it’s weird cults. Sometimes you’ll see proselytizers on the street/outside train stations trying to get people as well. Oddly(?), they seem to especially aim for people who are obviously not Japanese, I guess because they figure they’ll be more receptive to a Western religion than the average Japanese person? Or maybe it’s just because they stand out in a crowd. Or maybe because they’re excited to use their English skills.

I’m not sure what "dumb Dora” is shooting for, but the Japanese is just “bakatare,” which isn’t particularly strange or archaic, though perhaps a little more associated with older men and not so much high school girls. It’s mostly just a different/stronger form of “baka”—aho→ahotare is a similar thing. It’s more common in some areas of the country than others (not so popular in Kansai I think?), but it’s not a dialect phrase like gojappe or something.

It's true!

[melodymgill49801]

When It Comes to a Recipe, What’s in a Name?

Back in May, the response was swift when Milk Bar's Christina Tosi uploaded a video of what she called her "flaky bread." Instagram commenters quickly pointed out that the unleavened rounds were essentially South Asia's paratha by another name, while Tosi's recommendation to add scallions might also call to mind a riff on Chinese scallion pancakes. With neither mentioned in Tosi's description, critics on social media saw the dish as another food industry whitewashing gaffe. But this wasn't the first time "flaky bread" caused problems online.

In 2014, Bon Appétit posted a similar dish. Developed by Alison Roman, that "flaky bread" recipe was simple, accompanied by no context besides a quick prep tip in the headnote. As with Tosi's recipe, keen observers homed in on its similarity to paratha, and by May 2020, readers had begun weighing in with comments like: "Not a single mention of where this food comes from or the people that have been making it forever? This is literally just paratha." By June 2020, BA had changed the recipe's name to "Flaky Bread (Malawah)" and expanded its headnote to state that it was based on a Yemeni dish.

All over the world, different cultures have developed flaky rounds of dough—from paratha, to malawah, to cong you bing, and certainly more. That's something you'd never know from a name like "flaky bread," as accurate as it may be. Flaky bread can come from many cultures rich in culinary history; "flaky bread," meanwhile, suggests no culture in particular.

As the online recipe space grows more competitive, the names of a world's worth of dishes morph. Avgolemono becomes the New York Times' "egg lemon soup," "lemony egg soup with escarole," or "slow cooker creamy chicken soup with lemon, rice, and dill." Roti gains new life as "whole wheat balloon bread" or "Asian flat croissant," and "Korean rice bowls" are a longer, more Westernized way of saying bibimbap. "Spicy chocolate milk simmered chicken" becomes a new phrase for mole, and chana masala is revised as Alison Roman's "spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric," which internet colloquialism transforms into just "The Stew." What's to be gained by changing a dish's name? But also, what's lost?

What we call a dish can either ground it in a particular culinary history, or it can remove a dish from that culture entirely. With translation comes a level of separation, as the idea of a dish's audience is shifted; calling roti a "balloon bread" or bibimbap a "rice bowl" is a choice to appeal to a specific sensibility. As platforms diversify their selection of recipes, each one is trying to sell you on dishes it assumes you don't already know how to make, and every online recipe aims to make an argument for why you should rely on it above all others. To make that case, food is packaged for "mainstream" consumption: Ideally, anyone should want to click on it.

As Eric Kim—the recipe developer and writer behind the "Table for One" column at Food52—works on his debut cookbook about Korean American food, he's been thinking about recipe names. Kim's book, currently scheduled for release in spring 2022, will be informed by his Korean background, Georgia upbringing, and his approach to pantry cooking. Writing through its recipes, some of which lean conventional and others that are entirely new, Kim finds himself repeatedly changing their names.

"It's such an interesting question because a lot of these dishes are traditional—traditional bulgogi, for instance, or traditional kalbi—and I almost don't want to call them that, but calling them 'soy-marinated short ribs' feels flattening or disregarding their inspiration. I feel like this is something I've grappled with as recipe author, but also as a food editor, for years," Kim told VICE. He's found welcome inspiration in Priya Krishna's Indian-ish, which uses names like "spinach and feta, cooked like saag paneer" to find the middle ground between innovation and tradition.

Writing recipes for the internet poses a particular challenge: Like every piece of content in the digital world, recipes must pull in readers through the quickest glance. Terms or names that are assumed to be unfamiliar might be replaced with something more widely recognizable and immediately comprehensible, and trending phrases get thrown in for the sake of appealing to what people are searching (think "bread without yeast" during the baking-crazed days of the pandemic). More and more, algorithms shape how content is presented online, and search engine optimization (SEO) dictates the best practices for giving a website a chance at ranking high in a Google search for a specific keyword. As UCLA professor Safiya Noble has explored in the book Algorithms of Oppression, even search engines can be subject to cultural bias in ways that privilege whiteness.

Casey Markee is the founder of Media Wyse and an SEO consultant who works exclusively in the food, DIY, and lifestyle space. Acknowledging that unconscious bias can play out in everything, he thinks that the renaming of recipes might be done to gain an advantage in the crowded food space. Anglicized names might have more visibility online due to less competition and more search interest for that particular term, he suggested. People creating recipes online may think: "My audience might not understand what this original name is, but maybe they understand the more English or Anglicized version here, and that's what I'm gonna focus on," he said. The idea of accessibility, however, should also prompt the question: accessible to whom?

On The Sofrito Project, blogger Reina Gascon-Lopez takes a different approach to food media's usual centering as she presents recipes for Puerto Rican dishes as well as what she grew up eating in Charleston. Puerto Rican dishes are named in Spanish, with English left in parentheses: "berenjena guisada (stewed eggplant)" or "asopao de gandules (pigeon pea rice stew)," for example. "I honestly try to stick with the traditional name for the recipes, particularly the Puerto Rican dishes," she told VICE, "because honestly... naming them something that would be more palatable for white mainstream media, I feel like that kind of takes away from the dish, at least in my opinion."

Anglicizing a recipe's name can be done out of a sense of making it "neutral" and therefore "mainstream," but as we know from the recent conversations around race in media and other industries, that version of objective neutrality is actually a stance centered on whiteness. The idea that a dish can be rendered culturally neutral still relies on the construction of a culture: one for whom "flaky bread" is assumed as more appealing and recognizable than its alternatives.

White, vaguely European-influenced food is positioned as such a default in modern American culture that it exists without being explicitly stated, as Navneet Alang deconstructed for Eater. "Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed," he wrote. With this guiding food media, figures like Alison Roman—who at the peak of Stew fame once described herself as coming from "no culture"—can then pick and profit from global culinary traditions without ever tying herself to one.

While white food culture can weave in and out of global inspirations and not lose anything, the reverse isn't true. Dishes from cultures outside the white American norm and the people who make them are made less visible, told they don't draw as many views, relegated to trend pieces, and subjected to quotas.

The appeasement of translation can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: If people aren't given the word "bibimbap," if it's called a "Korean rice bowl" instead, will the original term ever enter "mainstream" parlance? Food publications have the power to steer the conversation for readers and home cooks; suggesting that a dish's traditional name is too complicated or unfamiliar to include is a cop-out for platforms that dictate these trends.

"It all goes back to the othering of food, and readers are only as smart as the information they're given," said Rebecca Firkser, a freelance food writer and recipe developer. Since her official start in food media five years ago as an intern at PopSugar, which led to becoming culinary editor of the now-defunct Extra Crispy, Firkser thinks people have overall become more knowledgeable about food and cooking. "I do feel like readers are smarter; they're interested in the real dishes, and so, why do we bother dumbing it down for them?"

In their staff roles at large food publications, Firkser and Kim—who have worked together on recipes at Food52—told VICE that SEO has been a consideration in the recipe process. But according to Kim, Google is "a lot smarter than people realize," and its algorithm changes all the time. "You don't have to have to bludgeon the title with some straightforward whitewashed title just to get it to show up on Google," he said. Whether it's putting keyword phrases in different parts of the page or in the URL, "there are ways to do it without disintegrating the integrity of the actual title."

But naming a dish the way it's historically known and loved isn't a panacea, either, as tradition creates a tight box of expectations. As Gascon-Lopez pointed out, her Puerto Rican dishes have at times garnered responses that her recipe isn't how a commenter's family made it, or how they make the dish. She clarifies that even traditional recipes are her version, as dictated by the ingredients available to her in South Carolina. "I do find that there is a little bit of a line to walk when I call something by the traditional name, and I don't have something that's been in that dish for years," she said.

Thankfully, Gascon-Lopez's blog gives her flexibility. While she said it sounds "crazy" as a food blogger, she doesn't consider SEO very much. "I try to stay aware of how I need the recipe [to be] from the aspect of accessibility on the blog, and I try to keep it short and keep the title tight. But other than that, if it's in Spanish, it's going to be in Spanish," Gascon-Lopez said. "That's something that I'm willing to sacrifice to stay true to my style of cooking."

So what's the answer to fixing all of this? Multiple recipe developers told VICE that presenting a recipe online comes with a responsibility to do ample research. With constant cooking comes the ability to riff in the kitchen, but even still, said Firkser, a recipe developer should go the extra step, even if it seems like a dish just popped up in your head. The act of putting a recipe on a public platform implies authority, and while there's leeway for modification in individual cooking, the recipe itself is perceived as objective—the standard from which one can then diverge.

"Even if I independently was thinking like, What would be yummy to eat? A white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta," Firkser said, "I would search the internet, search cookbooks, and see: Have other people have done this—white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta? Oh, wow, looks like there is a dish, and it's called pasta fagioli and I'm going to acknowledge that."

At Food52, Kim takes a generalist approach, creating dishes like "beef short rib bourguignon with garlicky panko gremolata" and "chicken-fried steak katsu with milk gravy." When he cooks from cuisines outside his culture, Kim tries to be "as responsible as possible," he said, by citing inspirations and adding context in the headnote as to how he learned the techniques. "Coming from an academic perspective is a way to make sure you close the loops and honor every possible inspiration for a dish," he said, "and that's one way to make sure that you're avoiding any semblance of tokenization or appropriation."

With the racial inequity in food media, we frequently return to the question of who gets to profit from other cultures' foods; it is still often the case that globally inspired dishes are presented by white recipe developers. Following Bon Appétit's organizational reckoning over these exact issues, the publication has announced plans to not only address its pay disparities and lack of staffers of color, but also to re-envision its content to better address cultural biases. As part of this push into the future, the magazine's research director Joseph Hernandez announced in a newsletter last month that he would be working with Test Kitchen editors to "address many of these problems of authorship, appropriation, the white gaze, and erasure."

Referencing its past controversies regarding flaky bread, "white guy" kimchi, pho, and Filipino halo-halo, Hernandez wrote that BA "has been called out for appropriation, for decontextualizing recipes from non-white cultures, and for knighting 'experts' without considering if that person should, in fact, claim mastery of a cuisine that isn’t theirs." In response, "our team will be auditing previously published recipes and articles that may not have been thoroughly fact-checked or read for cultural sensitivity when originally authored," he announced. Addressing the most popular recipes first, the publication will add context and address past problems in editors' notes: "Do we give credit where it’s due? Did we properly credit our inspirations, or did we shoehorn in a trendy ingredient with no explanation?"

There's no clear-cut answer on how to handle recipe names, as each recipe developer has their own perspective. As tidy as it may seem for recipes to exclusively come from authors of that specific cultural background, no one person can stand-in for an entire culture's culinary history, and that approach is unrealistic in a media landscape in which there are many, many more writers than there are jobs. Further, that set of rules also ignores the ways culinary traditions meld both naturally and by force. Despite those constraints, we can at least push for more thoughtful and contextual approaches to recipe development—ones that respect the interplay between cultures, instead of stripping foods from their histories.

As recipe developers broaden the context they provide with dishes, home cooks can in turn become more conscious consumers if they choose to engage with that added knowledge. "I absolutely think it's the responsibility of the recipe developer to do that extra research, because it's only gonna help someone," Firkser said. "I don't think anyone's ever been bitten in the ass for doing the homework, right?"

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - undefined US VICE US - undefined US via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

[carolinechanson97838]

When It Comes to a Recipe, What’s in a Name?

Back in May, the response was swift when Milk Bar's Christina Tosi uploaded a video of what she called her "flaky bread." Instagram commenters quickly pointed out that the unleavened rounds were essentially South Asia's paratha by another name, while Tosi's recommendation to add scallions might also call to mind a riff on Chinese scallion pancakes. With neither mentioned in Tosi's description, critics on social media saw the dish as another food industry whitewashing gaffe. But this wasn't the first time "flaky bread" caused problems online.

In 2014, Bon Appétit posted a similar dish. Developed by Alison Roman, that "flaky bread" recipe was simple, accompanied by no context besides a quick prep tip in the headnote. As with Tosi's recipe, keen observers homed in on its similarity to paratha, and by May 2020, readers had begun weighing in with comments like: "Not a single mention of where this food comes from or the people that have been making it forever? This is literally just paratha." By June 2020, BA had changed the recipe's name to "Flaky Bread (Malawah)" and expanded its headnote to state that it was based on a Yemeni dish.

All over the world, different cultures have developed flaky rounds of dough—from paratha, to malawah, to cong you bing, and certainly more. That's something you'd never know from a name like "flaky bread," as accurate as it may be. Flaky bread can come from many cultures rich in culinary history; "flaky bread," meanwhile, suggests no culture in particular.

As the online recipe space grows more competitive, the names of a world's worth of dishes morph. Avgolemono becomes the New York Times' "egg lemon soup," "lemony egg soup with escarole," or "slow cooker creamy chicken soup with lemon, rice, and dill." Roti gains new life as "whole wheat balloon bread" or "Asian flat croissant," and "Korean rice bowls" are a longer, more Westernized way of saying bibimbap. "Spicy chocolate milk simmered chicken" becomes a new phrase for mole, and chana masala is revised as Alison Roman's "spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric," which internet colloquialism transforms into just "The Stew." What's to be gained by changing a dish's name? But also, what's lost?

What we call a dish can either ground it in a particular culinary history, or it can remove a dish from that culture entirely. With translation comes a level of separation, as the idea of a dish's audience is shifted; calling roti a "balloon bread" or bibimbap a "rice bowl" is a choice to appeal to a specific sensibility. As platforms diversify their selection of recipes, each one is trying to sell you on dishes it assumes you don't already know how to make, and every online recipe aims to make an argument for why you should rely on it above all others. To make that case, food is packaged for "mainstream" consumption: Ideally, anyone should want to click on it.

As Eric Kim—the recipe developer and writer behind the "Table for One" column at Food52—works on his debut cookbook about Korean American food, he's been thinking about recipe names. Kim's book, currently scheduled for release in spring 2022, will be informed by his Korean background, Georgia upbringing, and his approach to pantry cooking. Writing through its recipes, some of which lean conventional and others that are entirely new, Kim finds himself repeatedly changing their names.

"It's such an interesting question because a lot of these dishes are traditional—traditional bulgogi, for instance, or traditional kalbi—and I almost don't want to call them that, but calling them 'soy-marinated short ribs' feels flattening or disregarding their inspiration. I feel like this is something I've grappled with as recipe author, but also as a food editor, for years," Kim told VICE. He's found welcome inspiration in Priya Krishna's Indian-ish, which uses names like "spinach and feta, cooked like saag paneer" to find the middle ground between innovation and tradition.

Writing recipes for the internet poses a particular challenge: Like every piece of content in the digital world, recipes must pull in readers through the quickest glance. Terms or names that are assumed to be unfamiliar might be replaced with something more widely recognizable and immediately comprehensible, and trending phrases get thrown in for the sake of appealing to what people are searching (think "bread without yeast" during the baking-crazed days of the pandemic). More and more, algorithms shape how content is presented online, and search engine optimization (SEO) dictates the best practices for giving a website a chance at ranking high in a Google search for a specific keyword. As UCLA professor Safiya Noble has explored in the book Algorithms of Oppression, even search engines can be subject to cultural bias in ways that privilege whiteness.

Casey Markee is the founder of Media Wyse and an SEO consultant who works exclusively in the food, DIY, and lifestyle space. Acknowledging that unconscious bias can play out in everything, he thinks that the renaming of recipes might be done to gain an advantage in the crowded food space. Anglicized names might have more visibility online due to less competition and more search interest for that particular term, he suggested. People creating recipes online may think: "My audience might not understand what this original name is, but maybe they understand the more English or Anglicized version here, and that's what I'm gonna focus on," he said. The idea of accessibility, however, should also prompt the question: accessible to whom?

On The Sofrito Project, blogger Reina Gascon-Lopez takes a different approach to food media's usual centering as she presents recipes for Puerto Rican dishes as well as what she grew up eating in Charleston. Puerto Rican dishes are named in Spanish, with English left in parentheses: "berenjena guisada (stewed eggplant)" or "asopao de gandules (pigeon pea rice stew)," for example. "I honestly try to stick with the traditional name for the recipes, particularly the Puerto Rican dishes," she told VICE, "because honestly... naming them something that would be more palatable for white mainstream media, I feel like that kind of takes away from the dish, at least in my opinion."

Anglicizing a recipe's name can be done out of a sense of making it "neutral" and therefore "mainstream," but as we know from the recent conversations around race in media and other industries, that version of objective neutrality is actually a stance centered on whiteness. The idea that a dish can be rendered culturally neutral still relies on the construction of a culture: one for whom "flaky bread" is assumed as more appealing and recognizable than its alternatives.

White, vaguely European-influenced food is positioned as such a default in modern American culture that it exists without being explicitly stated, as Navneet Alang deconstructed for Eater. "Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed," he wrote. With this guiding food media, figures like Alison Roman—who at the peak of Stew fame once described herself as coming from "no culture"—can then pick and profit from global culinary traditions without ever tying herself to one.

While white food culture can weave in and out of global inspirations and not lose anything, the reverse isn't true. Dishes from cultures outside the white American norm and the people who make them are made less visible, told they don't draw as many views, relegated to trend pieces, and subjected to quotas.

The appeasement of translation can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: If people aren't given the word "bibimbap," if it's called a "Korean rice bowl" instead, will the original term ever enter "mainstream" parlance? Food publications have the power to steer the conversation for readers and home cooks; suggesting that a dish's traditional name is too complicated or unfamiliar to include is a cop-out for platforms that dictate these trends.

"It all goes back to the othering of food, and readers are only as smart as the information they're given," said Rebecca Firkser, a freelance food writer and recipe developer. Since her official start in food media five years ago as an intern at PopSugar, which led to becoming culinary editor of the now-defunct Extra Crispy, Firkser thinks people have overall become more knowledgeable about food and cooking. "I do feel like readers are smarter; they're interested in the real dishes, and so, why do we bother dumbing it down for them?"

In their staff roles at large food publications, Firkser and Kim—who have worked together on recipes at Food52—told VICE that SEO has been a consideration in the recipe process. But according to Kim, Google is "a lot smarter than people realize," and its algorithm changes all the time. "You don't have to have to bludgeon the title with some straightforward whitewashed title just to get it to show up on Google," he said. Whether it's putting keyword phrases in different parts of the page or in the URL, "there are ways to do it without disintegrating the integrity of the actual title."

But naming a dish the way it's historically known and loved isn't a panacea, either, as tradition creates a tight box of expectations. As Gascon-Lopez pointed out, her Puerto Rican dishes have at times garnered responses that her recipe isn't how a commenter's family made it, or how they make the dish. She clarifies that even traditional recipes are her version, as dictated by the ingredients available to her in South Carolina. "I do find that there is a little bit of a line to walk when I call something by the traditional name, and I don't have something that's been in that dish for years," she said.

Thankfully, Gascon-Lopez's blog gives her flexibility. While she said it sounds "crazy" as a food blogger, she doesn't consider SEO very much. "I try to stay aware of how I need the recipe [to be] from the aspect of accessibility on the blog, and I try to keep it short and keep the title tight. But other than that, if it's in Spanish, it's going to be in Spanish," Gascon-Lopez said. "That's something that I'm willing to sacrifice to stay true to my style of cooking."

So what's the answer to fixing all of this? Multiple recipe developers told VICE that presenting a recipe online comes with a responsibility to do ample research. With constant cooking comes the ability to riff in the kitchen, but even still, said Firkser, a recipe developer should go the extra step, even if it seems like a dish just popped up in your head. The act of putting a recipe on a public platform implies authority, and while there's leeway for modification in individual cooking, the recipe itself is perceived as objective—the standard from which one can then diverge.

"Even if I independently was thinking like, What would be yummy to eat? A white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta," Firkser said, "I would search the internet, search cookbooks, and see: Have other people have done this—white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta? Oh, wow, looks like there is a dish, and it's called pasta fagioli and I'm going to acknowledge that."

At Food52, Kim takes a generalist approach, creating dishes like "beef short rib bourguignon with garlicky panko gremolata" and "chicken-fried steak katsu with milk gravy." When he cooks from cuisines outside his culture, Kim tries to be "as responsible as possible," he said, by citing inspirations and adding context in the headnote as to how he learned the techniques. "Coming from an academic perspective is a way to make sure you close the loops and honor every possible inspiration for a dish," he said, "and that's one way to make sure that you're avoiding any semblance of tokenization or appropriation."

With the racial inequity in food media, we frequently return to the question of who gets to profit from other cultures' foods; it is still often the case that globally inspired dishes are presented by white recipe developers. Following Bon Appétit's organizational reckoning over these exact issues, the publication has announced plans to not only address its pay disparities and lack of staffers of color, but also to re-envision its content to better address cultural biases. As part of this push into the future, the magazine's research director Joseph Hernandez announced in a newsletter last month that he would be working with Test Kitchen editors to "address many of these problems of authorship, appropriation, the white gaze, and erasure."

Referencing its past controversies regarding flaky bread, "white guy" kimchi, pho, and Filipino halo-halo, Hernandez wrote that BA "has been called out for appropriation, for decontextualizing recipes from non-white cultures, and for knighting 'experts' without considering if that person should, in fact, claim mastery of a cuisine that isn’t theirs." In response, "our team will be auditing previously published recipes and articles that may not have been thoroughly fact-checked or read for cultural sensitivity when originally authored," he announced. Addressing the most popular recipes first, the publication will add context and address past problems in editors' notes: "Do we give credit where it’s due? Did we properly credit our inspirations, or did we shoehorn in a trendy ingredient with no explanation?"

There's no clear-cut answer on how to handle recipe names, as each recipe developer has their own perspective. As tidy as it may seem for recipes to exclusively come from authors of that specific cultural background, no one person can stand-in for an entire culture's culinary history, and that approach is unrealistic in a media landscape in which there are many, many more writers than there are jobs. Further, that set of rules also ignores the ways culinary traditions meld both naturally and by force. Despite those constraints, we can at least push for more thoughtful and contextual approaches to recipe development—ones that respect the interplay between cultures, instead of stripping foods from their histories.

As recipe developers broaden the context they provide with dishes, home cooks can in turn become more conscious consumers if they choose to engage with that added knowledge. "I absolutely think it's the responsibility of the recipe developer to do that extra research, because it's only gonna help someone," Firkser said. "I don't think anyone's ever been bitten in the ass for doing the homework, right?"

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - undefined US VICE US - undefined US via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

[latoyajkelson70506]

When It Comes to a Recipe, What’s in a Name?

Back in May, the response was swift when Milk Bar's Christina Tosi uploaded a video of what she called her "flaky bread." Instagram commenters quickly pointed out that the unleavened rounds were essentially South Asia's paratha by another name, while Tosi's recommendation to add scallions might also call to mind a riff on Chinese scallion pancakes. With neither mentioned in Tosi's description, critics on social media saw the dish as another food industry whitewashing gaffe. But this wasn't the first time "flaky bread" caused problems online.

In 2014, Bon Appétit posted a similar dish. Developed by Alison Roman, that "flaky bread" recipe was simple, accompanied by no context besides a quick prep tip in the headnote. As with Tosi's recipe, keen observers homed in on its similarity to paratha, and by May 2020, readers had begun weighing in with comments like: "Not a single mention of where this food comes from or the people that have been making it forever? This is literally just paratha." By June 2020, BA had changed the recipe's name to "Flaky Bread (Malawah)" and expanded its headnote to state that it was based on a Yemeni dish.

All over the world, different cultures have developed flaky rounds of dough—from paratha, to malawah, to cong you bing, and certainly more. That's something you'd never know from a name like "flaky bread," as accurate as it may be. Flaky bread can come from many cultures rich in culinary history; "flaky bread," meanwhile, suggests no culture in particular.

As the online recipe space grows more competitive, the names of a world's worth of dishes morph. Avgolemono becomes the New York Times' "egg lemon soup," "lemony egg soup with escarole," or "slow cooker creamy chicken soup with lemon, rice, and dill." Roti gains new life as "whole wheat balloon bread" or "Asian flat croissant," and "Korean rice bowls" are a longer, more Westernized way of saying bibimbap. "Spicy chocolate milk simmered chicken" becomes a new phrase for mole, and chana masala is revised as Alison Roman's "spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric," which internet colloquialism transforms into just "The Stew." What's to be gained by changing a dish's name? But also, what's lost?

What we call a dish can either ground it in a particular culinary history, or it can remove a dish from that culture entirely. With translation comes a level of separation, as the idea of a dish's audience is shifted; calling roti a "balloon bread" or bibimbap a "rice bowl" is a choice to appeal to a specific sensibility. As platforms diversify their selection of recipes, each one is trying to sell you on dishes it assumes you don't already know how to make, and every online recipe aims to make an argument for why you should rely on it above all others. To make that case, food is packaged for "mainstream" consumption: Ideally, anyone should want to click on it.

As Eric Kim—the recipe developer and writer behind the "Table for One" column at Food52—works on his debut cookbook about Korean American food, he's been thinking about recipe names. Kim's book, currently scheduled for release in spring 2022, will be informed by his Korean background, Georgia upbringing, and his approach to pantry cooking. Writing through its recipes, some of which lean conventional and others that are entirely new, Kim finds himself repeatedly changing their names.

"It's such an interesting question because a lot of these dishes are traditional—traditional bulgogi, for instance, or traditional kalbi—and I almost don't want to call them that, but calling them 'soy-marinated short ribs' feels flattening or disregarding their inspiration. I feel like this is something I've grappled with as recipe author, but also as a food editor, for years," Kim told VICE. He's found welcome inspiration in Priya Krishna's Indian-ish, which uses names like "spinach and feta, cooked like saag paneer" to find the middle ground between innovation and tradition.

Writing recipes for the internet poses a particular challenge: Like every piece of content in the digital world, recipes must pull in readers through the quickest glance. Terms or names that are assumed to be unfamiliar might be replaced with something more widely recognizable and immediately comprehensible, and trending phrases get thrown in for the sake of appealing to what people are searching (think "bread without yeast" during the baking-crazed days of the pandemic). More and more, algorithms shape how content is presented online, and search engine optimization (SEO) dictates the best practices for giving a website a chance at ranking high in a Google search for a specific keyword. As UCLA professor Safiya Noble has explored in the book Algorithms of Oppression, even search engines can be subject to cultural bias in ways that privilege whiteness.

Casey Markee is the founder of Media Wyse and an SEO consultant who works exclusively in the food, DIY, and lifestyle space. Acknowledging that unconscious bias can play out in everything, he thinks that the renaming of recipes might be done to gain an advantage in the crowded food space. Anglicized names might have more visibility online due to less competition and more search interest for that particular term, he suggested. People creating recipes online may think: "My audience might not understand what this original name is, but maybe they understand the more English or Anglicized version here, and that's what I'm gonna focus on," he said. The idea of accessibility, however, should also prompt the question: accessible to whom?

On The Sofrito Project, blogger Reina Gascon-Lopez takes a different approach to food media's usual centering as she presents recipes for Puerto Rican dishes as well as what she grew up eating in Charleston. Puerto Rican dishes are named in Spanish, with English left in parentheses: "berenjena guisada (stewed eggplant)" or "asopao de gandules (pigeon pea rice stew)," for example. "I honestly try to stick with the traditional name for the recipes, particularly the Puerto Rican dishes," she told VICE, "because honestly... naming them something that would be more palatable for white mainstream media, I feel like that kind of takes away from the dish, at least in my opinion."

Anglicizing a recipe's name can be done out of a sense of making it "neutral" and therefore "mainstream," but as we know from the recent conversations around race in media and other industries, that version of objective neutrality is actually a stance centered on whiteness. The idea that a dish can be rendered culturally neutral still relies on the construction of a culture: one for whom "flaky bread" is assumed as more appealing and recognizable than its alternatives.

White, vaguely European-influenced food is positioned as such a default in modern American culture that it exists without being explicitly stated, as Navneet Alang deconstructed for Eater. "Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed," he wrote. With this guiding food media, figures like Alison Roman—who at the peak of Stew fame once described herself as coming from "no culture"—can then pick and profit from global culinary traditions without ever tying herself to one.

While white food culture can weave in and out of global inspirations and not lose anything, the reverse isn't true. Dishes from cultures outside the white American norm and the people who make them are made less visible, told they don't draw as many views, relegated to trend pieces, and subjected to quotas.

The appeasement of translation can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: If people aren't given the word "bibimbap," if it's called a "Korean rice bowl" instead, will the original term ever enter "mainstream" parlance? Food publications have the power to steer the conversation for readers and home cooks; suggesting that a dish's traditional name is too complicated or unfamiliar to include is a cop-out for platforms that dictate these trends.

"It all goes back to the othering of food, and readers are only as smart as the information they're given," said Rebecca Firkser, a freelance food writer and recipe developer. Since her official start in food media five years ago as an intern at PopSugar, which led to becoming culinary editor of the now-defunct Extra Crispy, Firkser thinks people have overall become more knowledgeable about food and cooking. "I do feel like readers are smarter; they're interested in the real dishes, and so, why do we bother dumbing it down for them?"

In their staff roles at large food publications, Firkser and Kim—who have worked together on recipes at Food52—told VICE that SEO has been a consideration in the recipe process. But according to Kim, Google is "a lot smarter than people realize," and its algorithm changes all the time. "You don't have to have to bludgeon the title with some straightforward whitewashed title just to get it to show up on Google," he said. Whether it's putting keyword phrases in different parts of the page or in the URL, "there are ways to do it without disintegrating the integrity of the actual title."

But naming a dish the way it's historically known and loved isn't a panacea, either, as tradition creates a tight box of expectations. As Gascon-Lopez pointed out, her Puerto Rican dishes have at times garnered responses that her recipe isn't how a commenter's family made it, or how they make the dish. She clarifies that even traditional recipes are her version, as dictated by the ingredients available to her in South Carolina. "I do find that there is a little bit of a line to walk when I call something by the traditional name, and I don't have something that's been in that dish for years," she said.

Thankfully, Gascon-Lopez's blog gives her flexibility. While she said it sounds "crazy" as a food blogger, she doesn't consider SEO very much. "I try to stay aware of how I need the recipe [to be] from the aspect of accessibility on the blog, and I try to keep it short and keep the title tight. But other than that, if it's in Spanish, it's going to be in Spanish," Gascon-Lopez said. "That's something that I'm willing to sacrifice to stay true to my style of cooking."

So what's the answer to fixing all of this? Multiple recipe developers told VICE that presenting a recipe online comes with a responsibility to do ample research. With constant cooking comes the ability to riff in the kitchen, but even still, said Firkser, a recipe developer should go the extra step, even if it seems like a dish just popped up in your head. The act of putting a recipe on a public platform implies authority, and while there's leeway for modification in individual cooking, the recipe itself is perceived as objective—the standard from which one can then diverge.

"Even if I independently was thinking like, What would be yummy to eat? A white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta," Firkser said, "I would search the internet, search cookbooks, and see: Have other people have done this—white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta? Oh, wow, looks like there is a dish, and it's called pasta fagioli and I'm going to acknowledge that."

At Food52, Kim takes a generalist approach, creating dishes like "beef short rib bourguignon with garlicky panko gremolata" and "chicken-fried steak katsu with milk gravy." When he cooks from cuisines outside his culture, Kim tries to be "as responsible as possible," he said, by citing inspirations and adding context in the headnote as to how he learned the techniques. "Coming from an academic perspective is a way to make sure you close the loops and honor every possible inspiration for a dish," he said, "and that's one way to make sure that you're avoiding any semblance of tokenization or appropriation."

With the racial inequity in food media, we frequently return to the question of who gets to profit from other cultures' foods; it is still often the case that globally inspired dishes are presented by white recipe developers. Following Bon Appétit's organizational reckoning over these exact issues, the publication has announced plans to not only address its pay disparities and lack of staffers of color, but also to re-envision its content to better address cultural biases. As part of this push into the future, the magazine's research director Joseph Hernandez announced in a newsletter last month that he would be working with Test Kitchen editors to "address many of these problems of authorship, appropriation, the white gaze, and erasure."

Referencing its past controversies regarding flaky bread, "white guy" kimchi, pho, and Filipino halo-halo, Hernandez wrote that BA "has been called out for appropriation, for decontextualizing recipes from non-white cultures, and for knighting 'experts' without considering if that person should, in fact, claim mastery of a cuisine that isn’t theirs." In response, "our team will be auditing previously published recipes and articles that may not have been thoroughly fact-checked or read for cultural sensitivity when originally authored," he announced. Addressing the most popular recipes first, the publication will add context and address past problems in editors' notes: "Do we give credit where it’s due? Did we properly credit our inspirations, or did we shoehorn in a trendy ingredient with no explanation?"

There's no clear-cut answer on how to handle recipe names, as each recipe developer has their own perspective. As tidy as it may seem for recipes to exclusively come from authors of that specific cultural background, no one person can stand-in for an entire culture's culinary history, and that approach is unrealistic in a media landscape in which there are many, many more writers than there are jobs. Further, that set of rules also ignores the ways culinary traditions meld both naturally and by force. Despite those constraints, we can at least push for more thoughtful and contextual approaches to recipe development—ones that respect the interplay between cultures, instead of stripping foods from their histories.

As recipe developers broaden the context they provide with dishes, home cooks can in turn become more conscious consumers if they choose to engage with that added knowledge. "I absolutely think it's the responsibility of the recipe developer to do that extra research, because it's only gonna help someone," Firkser said. "I don't think anyone's ever been bitten in the ass for doing the homework, right?"

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - undefined US VICE US - undefined US via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

[deborahaphillips54303]

When It Comes to a Recipe, What’s in a Name?

Back in May, the response was swift when Milk Bar's Christina Tosi uploaded a video of what she called her "flaky bread." Instagram commenters quickly pointed out that the unleavened rounds were essentially South Asia's paratha by another name, while Tosi's recommendation to add scallions might also call to mind a riff on Chinese scallion pancakes. With neither mentioned in Tosi's description, critics on social media saw the dish as another food industry whitewashing gaffe. But this wasn't the first time "flaky bread" caused problems online.

In 2014, Bon Appétit posted a similar dish. Developed by Alison Roman, that "flaky bread" recipe was simple, accompanied by no context besides a quick prep tip in the headnote. As with Tosi's recipe, keen observers homed in on its similarity to paratha, and by May 2020, readers had begun weighing in with comments like: "Not a single mention of where this food comes from or the people that have been making it forever? This is literally just paratha." By June 2020, BA had changed the recipe's name to "Flaky Bread (Malawah)" and expanded its headnote to state that it was based on a Yemeni dish.

All over the world, different cultures have developed flaky rounds of dough—from paratha, to malawah, to cong you bing, and certainly more. That's something you'd never know from a name like "flaky bread," as accurate as it may be. Flaky bread can come from many cultures rich in culinary history; "flaky bread," meanwhile, suggests no culture in particular.

As the online recipe space grows more competitive, the names of a world's worth of dishes morph. Avgolemono becomes the New York Times' "egg lemon soup," "lemony egg soup with escarole," or "slow cooker creamy chicken soup with lemon, rice, and dill." Roti gains new life as "whole wheat balloon bread" or "Asian flat croissant," and "Korean rice bowls" are a longer, more Westernized way of saying bibimbap. "Spicy chocolate milk simmered chicken" becomes a new phrase for mole, and chana masala is revised as Alison Roman's "spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric," which internet colloquialism transforms into just "The Stew." What's to be gained by changing a dish's name? But also, what's lost?

What we call a dish can either ground it in a particular culinary history, or it can remove a dish from that culture entirely. With translation comes a level of separation, as the idea of a dish's audience is shifted; calling roti a "balloon bread" or bibimbap a "rice bowl" is a choice to appeal to a specific sensibility. As platforms diversify their selection of recipes, each one is trying to sell you on dishes it assumes you don't already know how to make, and every online recipe aims to make an argument for why you should rely on it above all others. To make that case, food is packaged for "mainstream" consumption: Ideally, anyone should want to click on it.

As Eric Kim—the recipe developer and writer behind the "Table for One" column at Food52—works on his debut cookbook about Korean American food, he's been thinking about recipe names. Kim's book, currently scheduled for release in spring 2022, will be informed by his Korean background, Georgia upbringing, and his approach to pantry cooking. Writing through its recipes, some of which lean conventional and others that are entirely new, Kim finds himself repeatedly changing their names.

"It's such an interesting question because a lot of these dishes are traditional—traditional bulgogi, for instance, or traditional kalbi—and I almost don't want to call them that, but calling them 'soy-marinated short ribs' feels flattening or disregarding their inspiration. I feel like this is something I've grappled with as recipe author, but also as a food editor, for years," Kim told VICE. He's found welcome inspiration in Priya Krishna's Indian-ish, which uses names like "spinach and feta, cooked like saag paneer" to find the middle ground between innovation and tradition.

Writing recipes for the internet poses a particular challenge: Like every piece of content in the digital world, recipes must pull in readers through the quickest glance. Terms or names that are assumed to be unfamiliar might be replaced with something more widely recognizable and immediately comprehensible, and trending phrases get thrown in for the sake of appealing to what people are searching (think "bread without yeast" during the baking-crazed days of the pandemic). More and more, algorithms shape how content is presented online, and search engine optimization (SEO) dictates the best practices for giving a website a chance at ranking high in a Google search for a specific keyword. As UCLA professor Safiya Noble has explored in the book Algorithms of Oppression, even search engines can be subject to cultural bias in ways that privilege whiteness.

Casey Markee is the founder of Media Wyse and an SEO consultant who works exclusively in the food, DIY, and lifestyle space. Acknowledging that unconscious bias can play out in everything, he thinks that the renaming of recipes might be done to gain an advantage in the crowded food space. Anglicized names might have more visibility online due to less competition and more search interest for that particular term, he suggested. People creating recipes online may think: "My audience might not understand what this original name is, but maybe they understand the more English or Anglicized version here, and that's what I'm gonna focus on," he said. The idea of accessibility, however, should also prompt the question: accessible to whom?

On The Sofrito Project, blogger Reina Gascon-Lopez takes a different approach to food media's usual centering as she presents recipes for Puerto Rican dishes as well as what she grew up eating in Charleston. Puerto Rican dishes are named in Spanish, with English left in parentheses: "berenjena guisada (stewed eggplant)" or "asopao de gandules (pigeon pea rice stew)," for example. "I honestly try to stick with the traditional name for the recipes, particularly the Puerto Rican dishes," she told VICE, "because honestly... naming them something that would be more palatable for white mainstream media, I feel like that kind of takes away from the dish, at least in my opinion."

Anglicizing a recipe's name can be done out of a sense of making it "neutral" and therefore "mainstream," but as we know from the recent conversations around race in media and other industries, that version of objective neutrality is actually a stance centered on whiteness. The idea that a dish can be rendered culturally neutral still relies on the construction of a culture: one for whom "flaky bread" is assumed as more appealing and recognizable than its alternatives.

White, vaguely European-influenced food is positioned as such a default in modern American culture that it exists without being explicitly stated, as Navneet Alang deconstructed for Eater. "Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed," he wrote. With this guiding food media, figures like Alison Roman—who at the peak of Stew fame once described herself as coming from "no culture"—can then pick and profit from global culinary traditions without ever tying herself to one.

While white food culture can weave in and out of global inspirations and not lose anything, the reverse isn't true. Dishes from cultures outside the white American norm and the people who make them are made less visible, told they don't draw as many views, relegated to trend pieces, and subjected to quotas.

The appeasement of translation can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: If people aren't given the word "bibimbap," if it's called a "Korean rice bowl" instead, will the original term ever enter "mainstream" parlance? Food publications have the power to steer the conversation for readers and home cooks; suggesting that a dish's traditional name is too complicated or unfamiliar to include is a cop-out for platforms that dictate these trends.

"It all goes back to the othering of food, and readers are only as smart as the information they're given," said Rebecca Firkser, a freelance food writer and recipe developer. Since her official start in food media five years ago as an intern at PopSugar, which led to becoming culinary editor of the now-defunct Extra Crispy, Firkser thinks people have overall become more knowledgeable about food and cooking. "I do feel like readers are smarter; they're interested in the real dishes, and so, why do we bother dumbing it down for them?"

In their staff roles at large food publications, Firkser and Kim—who have worked together on recipes at Food52—told VICE that SEO has been a consideration in the recipe process. But according to Kim, Google is "a lot smarter than people realize," and its algorithm changes all the time. "You don't have to have to bludgeon the title with some straightforward whitewashed title just to get it to show up on Google," he said. Whether it's putting keyword phrases in different parts of the page or in the URL, "there are ways to do it without disintegrating the integrity of the actual title."

But naming a dish the way it's historically known and loved isn't a panacea, either, as tradition creates a tight box of expectations. As Gascon-Lopez pointed out, her Puerto Rican dishes have at times garnered responses that her recipe isn't how a commenter's family made it, or how they make the dish. She clarifies that even traditional recipes are her version, as dictated by the ingredients available to her in South Carolina. "I do find that there is a little bit of a line to walk when I call something by the traditional name, and I don't have something that's been in that dish for years," she said.

Thankfully, Gascon-Lopez's blog gives her flexibility. While she said it sounds "crazy" as a food blogger, she doesn't consider SEO very much. "I try to stay aware of how I need the recipe [to be] from the aspect of accessibility on the blog, and I try to keep it short and keep the title tight. But other than that, if it's in Spanish, it's going to be in Spanish," Gascon-Lopez said. "That's something that I'm willing to sacrifice to stay true to my style of cooking."

So what's the answer to fixing all of this? Multiple recipe developers told VICE that presenting a recipe online comes with a responsibility to do ample research. With constant cooking comes the ability to riff in the kitchen, but even still, said Firkser, a recipe developer should go the extra step, even if it seems like a dish just popped up in your head. The act of putting a recipe on a public platform implies authority, and while there's leeway for modification in individual cooking, the recipe itself is perceived as objective—the standard from which one can then diverge.

"Even if I independently was thinking like, What would be yummy to eat? A white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta," Firkser said, "I would search the internet, search cookbooks, and see: Have other people have done this—white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta? Oh, wow, looks like there is a dish, and it's called pasta fagioli and I'm going to acknowledge that."

At Food52, Kim takes a generalist approach, creating dishes like "beef short rib bourguignon with garlicky panko gremolata" and "chicken-fried steak katsu with milk gravy." When he cooks from cuisines outside his culture, Kim tries to be "as responsible as possible," he said, by citing inspirations and adding context in the headnote as to how he learned the techniques. "Coming from an academic perspective is a way to make sure you close the loops and honor every possible inspiration for a dish," he said, "and that's one way to make sure that you're avoiding any semblance of tokenization or appropriation."

With the racial inequity in food media, we frequently return to the question of who gets to profit from other cultures' foods; it is still often the case that globally inspired dishes are presented by white recipe developers. Following Bon Appétit's organizational reckoning over these exact issues, the publication has announced plans to not only address its pay disparities and lack of staffers of color, but also to re-envision its content to better address cultural biases. As part of this push into the future, the magazine's research director Joseph Hernandez announced in a newsletter last month that he would be working with Test Kitchen editors to "address many of these problems of authorship, appropriation, the white gaze, and erasure."

Referencing its past controversies regarding flaky bread, "white guy" kimchi, pho, and Filipino halo-halo, Hernandez wrote that BA "has been called out for appropriation, for decontextualizing recipes from non-white cultures, and for knighting 'experts' without considering if that person should, in fact, claim mastery of a cuisine that isn’t theirs." In response, "our team will be auditing previously published recipes and articles that may not have been thoroughly fact-checked or read for cultural sensitivity when originally authored," he announced. Addressing the most popular recipes first, the publication will add context and address past problems in editors' notes: "Do we give credit where it’s due? Did we properly credit our inspirations, or did we shoehorn in a trendy ingredient with no explanation?"

There's no clear-cut answer on how to handle recipe names, as each recipe developer has their own perspective. As tidy as it may seem for recipes to exclusively come from authors of that specific cultural background, no one person can stand-in for an entire culture's culinary history, and that approach is unrealistic in a media landscape in which there are many, many more writers than there are jobs. Further, that set of rules also ignores the ways culinary traditions meld both naturally and by force. Despite those constraints, we can at least push for more thoughtful and contextual approaches to recipe development—ones that respect the interplay between cultures, instead of stripping foods from their histories.

As recipe developers broaden the context they provide with dishes, home cooks can in turn become more conscious consumers if they choose to engage with that added knowledge. "I absolutely think it's the responsibility of the recipe developer to do that extra research, because it's only gonna help someone," Firkser said. "I don't think anyone's ever been bitten in the ass for doing the homework, right?"

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - undefined US VICE US - undefined US via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

[cyberpoetryballoon]

When It Comes to a Recipe, What’s in a Name?

Back in May, the response was swift when Milk Bar's Christina Tosi uploaded a video of what she called her "flaky bread." Instagram commenters quickly pointed out that the unleavened rounds were essentially South Asia's paratha by another name, while Tosi's recommendation to add scallions might also call to mind a riff on Chinese scallion pancakes. With neither mentioned in Tosi's description, critics on social media saw the dish as another food industry whitewashing gaffe. But this wasn't the first time "flaky bread" caused problems online.

In 2014, Bon Appétit posted a similar dish. Developed by Alison Roman, that "flaky bread" recipe was simple, accompanied by no context besides a quick prep tip in the headnote. As with Tosi's recipe, keen observers homed in on its similarity to paratha, and by May 2020, readers had begun weighing in with comments like: "Not a single mention of where this food comes from or the people that have been making it forever? This is literally just paratha." By June 2020, BA had changed the recipe's name to "Flaky Bread (Malawah)" and expanded its headnote to state that it was based on a Yemeni dish.

All over the world, different cultures have developed flaky rounds of dough—from paratha, to malawah, to cong you bing, and certainly more. That's something you'd never know from a name like "flaky bread," as accurate as it may be. Flaky bread can come from many cultures rich in culinary history; "flaky bread," meanwhile, suggests no culture in particular.

As the online recipe space grows more competitive, the names of a world's worth of dishes morph. Avgolemono becomes the New York Times' "egg lemon soup," "lemony egg soup with escarole," or "slow cooker creamy chicken soup with lemon, rice, and dill." Roti gains new life as "whole wheat balloon bread" or "Asian flat croissant," and "Korean rice bowls" are a longer, more Westernized way of saying bibimbap. "Spicy chocolate milk simmered chicken" becomes a new phrase for mole, and chana masala is revised as Alison Roman's "spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric," which internet colloquialism transforms into just "The Stew." What's to be gained by changing a dish's name? But also, what's lost?

What we call a dish can either ground it in a particular culinary history, or it can remove a dish from that culture entirely. With translation comes a level of separation, as the idea of a dish's audience is shifted; calling roti a "balloon bread" or bibimbap a "rice bowl" is a choice to appeal to a specific sensibility. As platforms diversify their selection of recipes, each one is trying to sell you on dishes it assumes you don't already know how to make, and every online recipe aims to make an argument for why you should rely on it above all others. To make that case, food is packaged for "mainstream" consumption: Ideally, anyone should want to click on it.

As Eric Kim—the recipe developer and writer behind the "Table for One" column at Food52—works on his debut cookbook about Korean American food, he's been thinking about recipe names. Kim's book, currently scheduled for release in spring 2022, will be informed by his Korean background, Georgia upbringing, and his approach to pantry cooking. Writing through its recipes, some of which lean conventional and others that are entirely new, Kim finds himself repeatedly changing their names.

"It's such an interesting question because a lot of these dishes are traditional—traditional bulgogi, for instance, or traditional kalbi—and I almost don't want to call them that, but calling them 'soy-marinated short ribs' feels flattening or disregarding their inspiration. I feel like this is something I've grappled with as recipe author, but also as a food editor, for years," Kim told VICE. He's found welcome inspiration in Priya Krishna's Indian-ish, which uses names like "spinach and feta, cooked like saag paneer" to find the middle ground between innovation and tradition.

Writing recipes for the internet poses a particular challenge: Like every piece of content in the digital world, recipes must pull in readers through the quickest glance. Terms or names that are assumed to be unfamiliar might be replaced with something more widely recognizable and immediately comprehensible, and trending phrases get thrown in for the sake of appealing to what people are searching (think "bread without yeast" during the baking-crazed days of the pandemic). More and more, algorithms shape how content is presented online, and search engine optimization (SEO) dictates the best practices for giving a website a chance at ranking high in a Google search for a specific keyword. As UCLA professor Safiya Noble has explored in the book Algorithms of Oppression, even search engines can be subject to cultural bias in ways that privilege whiteness.

Casey Markee is the founder of Media Wyse and an SEO consultant who works exclusively in the food, DIY, and lifestyle space. Acknowledging that unconscious bias can play out in everything, he thinks that the renaming of recipes might be done to gain an advantage in the crowded food space. Anglicized names might have more visibility online due to less competition and more search interest for that particular term, he suggested. People creating recipes online may think: "My audience might not understand what this original name is, but maybe they understand the more English or Anglicized version here, and that's what I'm gonna focus on," he said. The idea of accessibility, however, should also prompt the question: accessible to whom?

On The Sofrito Project, blogger Reina Gascon-Lopez takes a different approach to food media's usual centering as she presents recipes for Puerto Rican dishes as well as what she grew up eating in Charleston. Puerto Rican dishes are named in Spanish, with English left in parentheses: "berenjena guisada (stewed eggplant)" or "asopao de gandules (pigeon pea rice stew)," for example. "I honestly try to stick with the traditional name for the recipes, particularly the Puerto Rican dishes," she told VICE, "because honestly... naming them something that would be more palatable for white mainstream media, I feel like that kind of takes away from the dish, at least in my opinion."

Anglicizing a recipe's name can be done out of a sense of making it "neutral" and therefore "mainstream," but as we know from the recent conversations around race in media and other industries, that version of objective neutrality is actually a stance centered on whiteness. The idea that a dish can be rendered culturally neutral still relies on the construction of a culture: one for whom "flaky bread" is assumed as more appealing and recognizable than its alternatives.

White, vaguely European-influenced food is positioned as such a default in modern American culture that it exists without being explicitly stated, as Navneet Alang deconstructed for Eater. "Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed," he wrote. With this guiding food media, figures like Alison Roman—who at the peak of Stew fame once described herself as coming from "no culture"—can then pick and profit from global culinary traditions without ever tying herself to one.

While white food culture can weave in and out of global inspirations and not lose anything, the reverse isn't true. Dishes from cultures outside the white American norm and the people who make them are made less visible, told they don't draw as many views, relegated to trend pieces, and subjected to quotas.

The appeasement of translation can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: If people aren't given the word "bibimbap," if it's called a "Korean rice bowl" instead, will the original term ever enter "mainstream" parlance? Food publications have the power to steer the conversation for readers and home cooks; suggesting that a dish's traditional name is too complicated or unfamiliar to include is a cop-out for platforms that dictate these trends.

"It all goes back to the othering of food, and readers are only as smart as the information they're given," said Rebecca Firkser, a freelance food writer and recipe developer. Since her official start in food media five years ago as an intern at PopSugar, which led to becoming culinary editor of the now-defunct Extra Crispy, Firkser thinks people have overall become more knowledgeable about food and cooking. "I do feel like readers are smarter; they're interested in the real dishes, and so, why do we bother dumbing it down for them?"

In their staff roles at large food publications, Firkser and Kim—who have worked together on recipes at Food52—told VICE that SEO has been a consideration in the recipe process. But according to Kim, Google is "a lot smarter than people realize," and its algorithm changes all the time. "You don't have to have to bludgeon the title with some straightforward whitewashed title just to get it to show up on Google," he said. Whether it's putting keyword phrases in different parts of the page or in the URL, "there are ways to do it without disintegrating the integrity of the actual title."

But naming a dish the way it's historically known and loved isn't a panacea, either, as tradition creates a tight box of expectations. As Gascon-Lopez pointed out, her Puerto Rican dishes have at times garnered responses that her recipe isn't how a commenter's family made it, or how they make the dish. She clarifies that even traditional recipes are her version, as dictated by the ingredients available to her in South Carolina. "I do find that there is a little bit of a line to walk when I call something by the traditional name, and I don't have something that's been in that dish for years," she said.

Thankfully, Gascon-Lopez's blog gives her flexibility. While she said it sounds "crazy" as a food blogger, she doesn't consider SEO very much. "I try to stay aware of how I need the recipe [to be] from the aspect of accessibility on the blog, and I try to keep it short and keep the title tight. But other than that, if it's in Spanish, it's going to be in Spanish," Gascon-Lopez said. "That's something that I'm willing to sacrifice to stay true to my style of cooking."

So what's the answer to fixing all of this? Multiple recipe developers told VICE that presenting a recipe online comes with a responsibility to do ample research. With constant cooking comes the ability to riff in the kitchen, but even still, said Firkser, a recipe developer should go the extra step, even if it seems like a dish just popped up in your head. The act of putting a recipe on a public platform implies authority, and while there's leeway for modification in individual cooking, the recipe itself is perceived as objective—the standard from which one can then diverge.

"Even if I independently was thinking like, What would be yummy to eat? A white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta," Firkser said, "I would search the internet, search cookbooks, and see: Have other people have done this—white bean and tomato soup with tiny pasta? Oh, wow, looks like there is a dish, and it's called pasta fagioli and I'm going to acknowledge that."

At Food52, Kim takes a generalist approach, creating dishes like "beef short rib bourguignon with garlicky panko gremolata" and "chicken-fried steak katsu with milk gravy." When he cooks from cuisines outside his culture, Kim tries to be "as responsible as possible," he said, by citing inspirations and adding context in the headnote as to how he learned the techniques. "Coming from an academic perspective is a way to make sure you close the loops and honor every possible inspiration for a dish," he said, "and that's one way to make sure that you're avoiding any semblance of tokenization or appropriation."

With the racial inequity in food media, we frequently return to the question of who gets to profit from other cultures' foods; it is still often the case that globally inspired dishes are presented by white recipe developers. Following Bon Appétit's organizational reckoning over these exact issues, the publication has announced plans to not only address its pay disparities and lack of staffers of color, but also to re-envision its content to better address cultural biases. As part of this push into the future, the magazine's research director Joseph Hernandez announced in a newsletter last month that he would be working with Test Kitchen editors to "address many of these problems of authorship, appropriation, the white gaze, and erasure."

Referencing its past controversies regarding flaky bread, "white guy" kimchi, pho, and Filipino halo-halo, Hernandez wrote that BA "has been called out for appropriation, for decontextualizing recipes from non-white cultures, and for knighting 'experts' without considering if that person should, in fact, claim mastery of a cuisine that isn’t theirs." In response, "our team will be auditing previously published recipes and articles that may not have been thoroughly fact-checked or read for cultural sensitivity when originally authored," he announced. Addressing the most popular recipes first, the publication will add context and address past problems in editors' notes: "Do we give credit where it’s due? Did we properly credit our inspirations, or did we shoehorn in a trendy ingredient with no explanation?"

There's no clear-cut answer on how to handle recipe names, as each recipe developer has their own perspective. As tidy as it may seem for recipes to exclusively come from authors of that specific cultural background, no one person can stand-in for an entire culture's culinary history, and that approach is unrealistic in a media landscape in which there are many, many more writers than there are jobs. Further, that set of rules also ignores the ways culinary traditions meld both naturally and by force. Despite those constraints, we can at least push for more thoughtful and contextual approaches to recipe development—ones that respect the interplay between cultures, instead of stripping foods from their histories.

As recipe developers broaden the context they provide with dishes, home cooks can in turn become more conscious consumers if they choose to engage with that added knowledge. "I absolutely think it's the responsibility of the recipe developer to do that extra research, because it's only gonna help someone," Firkser said. "I don't think anyone's ever been bitten in the ass for doing the homework, right?"

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - undefined US VICE US - undefined US via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

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Is It Harmless to Travel to Egypt in 2019?

I was startled awake in the center of the evening by a strange Egyptian male shouting loudly at me in Arabic.

He seemed indignant, but I couldn’t determine out what was going on. Why was he yelling at me? I stared back with baffled eyes, only discovering the power to mumble a single phrase.

“Huh?”

A lot more screaming. More pointing and flailing of arms. A small pack of Egyptian gentlemen had surrounded my seat on the bus and, even with the reality that I obviously couldn’t speak their language, they appeared to assume that shouting even louder would make me recognize.

“Is there a issue?” a regional lady across the aisle asked in English. “I was sleeping,” I explained to her, “and these guys just commenced yelling at me.”

She pointed at my ticket, indicated that I experienced been sitting down in the erroneous seat, and enable me know that this was incredibly much towards the policies. Seemingly, bus-goers are extremely really serious about seat assignments below.

The Egyptian mentality will take some getting utilized to. And immediately after only a single week of traveling there, I definitely can’t say that I comprehend it.

The tomato person of Giza.

The chicken gentleman of Giza.

On the nearby bus in Cairo a single working day, I struck up a conversation with a beautiful youthful Egyptian girl. Her English was approximately perfect and, following the standard pleasantries about exactly where we ended up from, her next question was, “What do you assume about the folks right here?”

I believed for a 2nd, and I advised her I experienced achieved some people who acted really intense in the direction of me, but that I had also fulfilled some of the kindest, most genuine people of all.

She nodded slowly but surely in considered, and then, immediately after a couple of times, she seemed back again at me and mentioned, “Good. Several don’t get to see the two sides. That’s the serious Egypt.”

Is Egypt Secure? This is the Actuality of Touring to Egypt

While Egypt is a widespread travel spot for Europeans, Egypt is not the initial place most Americans feel of when they’re getting ready to travel. And to be sincere, there’s great rationale for it. Not only is it a bizarre put, considerably from the reaches of knowing for most Westerners, but tourism in Egypt has dwindled to just about absolutely nothing right after turning into a conflict zone in the latest several years. Thankfully, that conflict has lessened and, in 2018, there is quite very little to panic.

Sunset from the roof of my hostel in Dahab, Egypt

Lantern Shop in Dahab, Egypt.

It is legitimate that there is terrorist exercise in Egypt. Our bus was checked for bombs. Officials questioned every single overseas passenger. Guys with huge guns and riot gear stood guard driving personal barricades on the aspect of the highway. Big police shields with bullet holes lay on the ground future to them.

In Dahab, I viewed as a drunk Arabic person was overwhelmed by law enforcement for resulting in a scene in community.

In Cairo, I encountered the most aggressive taxi drivers I have ever come throughout. At the Pyramids of Giza, the touts are a lot more than hawkish, and they are pretty, pretty clever. You’re going to want some thick pores and skin if you want to travel below. But belief me, it is truly worth it.

Outside the El-Hussein Mosque in Cairo, Egypt.

If you are thinking of touring to Egypt, this is the fact. There is conflict here, and you will face it in several kinds. But which is not to say you should not visit—I satisfied several other tourists in Egypt from all more than the earth. I fulfilled solo woman vacationers, scuba fanatics, and other basic ol’ typical people.

No, Egypt is not your standard getaway. If you want to journey to Egypt and take a look at the Pyramids of Giza, you ought to be prepared for what is waiting for you. It’s an within seem at a very distinct location of the earth, and an inside appear at what is actually going on in the Middle East.

But is it secure to journey to Egypt ideal now? The answer is relatively difficult to make clear.

Inside of Al-Hussein Mosque, Cairo, Egypt.

Is it Harmless to Vacation to Egypt?

Once on a time, the triangular Sinai Peninsula in Egypt was a popular vacationer destination for individuals from all around the Center East and even Russia. They would arrive from Israel and Moscow to scuba dive, drink beer, smoke weed, and social gathering on the seashore.

Having said that, these days, federal government web-sites mark the overall northern half of Sinai in blatant crimson. A lot of terrorist groups have been lively in Egypt, and each and every vacation warning for northern Sinai reads basically: “DO NOT Travel.”

Though I think many journey advisories to be over-exaggerated, the types in Egypt should not be ignored. Place blank, northern Sinai need to be avoided and southern Sinai really should be traveled working with warning. The moment on the mainland, just about anything east of the Nile River is frequently safe, whilst anything west must be traveled with prudence.

Cheeky banana person in Giza. He was all smiles

But I really do not imply to scaremonger. There are some locations which are not risk-free, but there are also areas in which are perfectly great. Search past the warnings.

What you really should be concentrated on is in which it is protected to journey, not exactly where it is not harmless to travel.

In accordance to GOV.Uk, “previous assaults have pretty much solely qualified the stability forces, their services and other governing administration properties.” As a tourist in these regions, it is not likely that you’ll have any difficulties. But the warnings are apparent, and any individual touring in Egypt should really at least be cautious.

Can I explain to you it’s definitely safe and sound to go to Egypt? No, I simply cannot, for the reason that if you go there and die, it would be my fault. But I can explain to you that I went there and I did not die. So, I guess you can make your decision primarily based on that!

For far more facts on no matter whether or not it is safe and sound to journey to Egypt, consult your community embassy. (USA / United kingdom)

If you are organizing on touring to Egypt—or everywhere in the globe for that matter—travel insurance policies is your number one safeguard against just about anything that may well go completely wrong. I generally use Entire world Nomads for ease of use, price and breadth of protection.

If you’re preparing to travel to Egypt, read our comprehensive Environment Nomads evaluate or use the type below to get a quotation.

Assembly Rami Elshaer

The 1st fifty percent of my travels in Sinai ended up performed on my own. I had just 1 7 days in Egypt, but I was identified to make the most of it. In Dahab, for four times, I relaxed in beachfront hookah bars and went scuba diving at the well-known Blue Gap.

This dive website, notoriously regarded as the most perilous dive web page in the environment, has taken hundreds of lives around the yrs.

One extremely awkward right away bus journey later (screaming Arabic adult men incorporated), and I observed myself in the business of Rami Elshaer, a member of a Bedouin tribe who now lives in the town just 100 meters from the Pyramids of Giza.

It was an early morning in Cairo and we sat down at a local cafe for introductions, breakfast, and a Turkish coffee.

Rami Elshaer and his son, Loai.

“When you are with me, you are my relatives, do you comprehend?”

Rami was explaining how his hospitality was likely to get the job done.

“Never consider revenue out of your pocket. If you try out to fork out as a tourist, you will fork out vacationer rates. When I pay out, I pay back local price ranges. At the end of the day, you will spend me back again. This is how it will perform. Do you have an understanding of?”

I nodded.

“And I will do all of the talking. If you have to have anything, just tell me, and I will make it materialize. Do you have an understanding of?”

Rami was stern but fair. He cared. He understood how factors worked and needed to make absolutely sure I would get the most out of my time in Egypt.

In 3 shorter times, Rami turned my Bedouin brother.

Thumbs up at the Wonderful Pyramids of Giza!

The Bedouins are a tribe of men and women who have been roaming the Center Japanese desert for thousands of a long time. Actually translating to “desert dweller,” they are a hugely highly regarded group of persons who are identified for protecting their conventional values and solid loved ones bonds.

Rami did not like to notify men and women he was an Elshaer unless of course he had to. He just wanted to reside out his lifetime. But, as he discussed, whenever he desired a authorities official to look the other way, 1 flash of his ID was all it took.

Camel on the edge of the desert at the Pyramids of Giza.

Rami’s father came from Libya and his mother from north Sudan and then Sinai. The Elshaer’s had been among the initial to settle by the Pyramids of Giza countless numbers of yrs ago, directing traffic and trade along the Silk Street, and they have remained below at any time considering the fact that.

It’s humorous because everywhere I went with Rami, I met a lot more cousins. Extra Elshaer’s. In Giza by yourself, I’m explained to his family members numbers between 2,000-3,000.

Pyramid selfie!

Rami paid for my Turkish coffee, took me to his house, offered me with a bed, and allowed me to dine with his loved ones for 3 days straight.

When I observed out that he would be sleeping on the floor, I insisted that he take his mattress back again and permit me to rest there rather. He demanded not, and refused to permit me to snooze any place apart from the significant bed in his tiny home, which was normally reserved for him and his youthful son, Loai.

The Pyramids of Giza, Egypt.

You see, as travelers them selves, the Bedouins are no stranger to supplying hospitality. When I asked Rami why he hosted people today from Couchsurfing, he informed me of his worldwide travels. He instructed me that the hospitality he been given overseas was existence-switching and that he preferred to devote substantially of his everyday living to returning the identical hospitality he experienced located.

These days, Rami spends his time raising his son, getting ready barbecues for his family members, and displaying vacationers the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Rami now goes again and forth concerning Egypt and Switzerland as he works to present a improved existence for his son. If you desire to make contact with Rami, electronic mail him at [email protected]. However he may not personally be equipped to meet you in Egypt (dependent on his program), his family—all of whom I met—are happy to demonstrate you all over and are some of the nicest people I have ever achieved!

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