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May 31, 2008
Toronto, Ontokyo
The Amazing $18 Veggie Burger
Shawn and I are in Toronto, where we are enjoying a beautiful view from our 33rd story view at the Sheraton Toronto Centre Hotel.
What we're not enjoying is the nickle-and-diming. They charge guests an additional CAD $9 to use the pool, hot tub or gym, and a CAD $2 access charge (plus CAD $0.15 per minute) to make toll-free calls. They give you coffee in the room, but apparently they only give you two packages (enough to make two cups total) for your entire STAY (not per day), and if you want more, you can buy it from them.
But what really got us was this CAD $18 veggie burger in the restaurant. Of course, it's $18 for fish and chips too...
Posted by crispy at 03:30 PM | Comments (3)
May 27, 2008
I went to Cleveland and it was closed.
Shawn and I planned three days in Cleveland, as there were several things we wanted to do, like visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
We also thought we'd need considerable time to visit the renowned Cleveland Museum of Art and the Contemporary Museum of Art in Cleveland. Yet as our luck would have it, neither one is open to the public at the moment. The former is closed for renovations; the latter is closed for the installation of their next exhibit. Go figure. That exhibit opens the day we leave town.
The Cleveland Museum of Art closure makes us really mad. It's lame to close the whole musuem at once. Usually places will renovate in sections so they at least have something open at all times. Instead, they suggest that you visit one of their traveling exhibits. That's all well and good...if you're in Nashville!
We will end up going to see the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum at Case-Western University, and that will be cool. We hope to join the leagues of people that claim that they expected the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to be lame (as do we), but were pleasantly surprised to find it both interesting and cool. We have tickets at will-call to see the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, considered one of the top five orchestras in the country.
So we won't be without things to do, but it is a pretty big drag for us that both of the big art museums will be closed while we're here.
Posted by crispy at 10:14 PM | Comments (3)
May 24, 2008
Chicago: Part Two
Friday we moved downtown, to stay in the W Chicago - City Center. I was a bit apprehensive about this hotel, because I'd read some reviews of it that had criticized it as being very dark and having miniscule rooms. In fact, when you make a reservation for the cheapest room rates they have, it even warns you with the text "SMALLER ROOM" in the description.
The person at reception that checked us in upgraded us to a larger room, which is, I believe only the second time that we've really been upgraded at a Starwood property, despite the fact that we've been members of their frequent stay program for a few years. That perhaps tipped our perception of the place toward the positive from the start, but I have to say that this downtown W seems a lot cooler than the Lakeshore. The staff is a lot friendlier, the location is killer, and the hotel itself is dazzling. It was formerly the Midland Hotel, and still retains the vaulted arches in the lobby and the gold, silver and bronze plaster-cast ceiling on the mezzanine. Yeah, it is kind of dark, but in a good W Hotel sexy way, not a dim, seedy, too-cheap-to-buy-decent-light-bulbs kind of way.
That can be fun too, I guess, but after our return flight experience and the Chicago zombie tour of our first 24 hours in town, it is good to be in a cushy spot. In addition to the featherbed and down pillows, this hotel softens the blow of being in a strange land by providing a concierge. In our experience, the W Hotel concierges range from being so well-informed you fear their falling into the wrong hands and being used for evil, to having such a lack of knowledge that might be similarly dangerous, if they actually had any follow-through whatsoever. Luckily, at the W Chicago - City Center, we had the benefit of Li Feng.
Li is the kind of concierge that can tell you the street addresses and hours of operation for a restaurant in town at the mere mention of the name. He pointed us to the incredible experience we had at the Green Zebra, and he sent us to the fabulous Lou Mitchell's diner for breakfast today, after we'd slept through it here at the hotel. He explained that the latter is kind of a greasy spoon kind of diner, although it is really very good. "People actually line up there in the morning to get a table," he told us as he wrote the address out on one of his W business cards. "If you get there and there is a line, just go in through the door to the hostess, give her my card and she'll get you a table right away."
We went to the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture on Saturday, then that night we went to see "The Strangerer" at the Chopin Theater. Sunday we're checking out of the W Chicago - City Center and heading down to Effingham by train, where my father will pick us up and take us to Olney.
Posted by crispy at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2008
Chicago: Green Zebra
Tonight we ate at a restaurant called Green Zebra. It is at 1460 West Chicago Avenue. The phone number is (312) 243-7100.
I cannot begin to relate what an amazing experience it was for me. I have long griped about how vegetarian restaurants are prone to overlooking flavor, taste and artistic merit for other, less interesting criteria. Vegetarian food often gets a bad reputation because those that make it do not approach it as chefs approach regular food. Too often "vegetarian food" means simply "health food," and while it most certainly is not the case that food that is tasty must be unhealthy, it is presumed that if vegetarian dishes are more healthy than your average dish, they will be appealing to vegetarians. This is not true.
Vegetarians appreciate presentation, balance, complimentary flavors, texture, just as much as meat eaters, but rarely do we get the same attention paid to these details by chefs cooking for us as those cooking for omnivores at the finer establishments. Often vegetarian dishes are accomplished by merely omitting the meat from dishes that normally contain it. This upsets the integrity of the dishes, and often leaves such plates thoroughly unsatisfying. Dishes so prepared are about as rewarding for vegetarians as girl-on-girl scenes in heterosexual pornographic films directed by straight men are for real-life lesbians: they may achieve a technical accuracy, but they have no real depth or soul.
Green Zebra does not get overly concerned with being a vegetarian restaurant as much as it just makes great food from products that are not meat. There is no effort to substitute anything to replace "missing" meat. Green Zebra's dishes do not originate from a position of inferiority because they start out already lacking some aspect for which the chef must compensate. They are just well-designed dishes that are made from the wide variety of things that fit into the category of not being meat.
There are plenty of dishes that are vegetarian in the traditional cuisine rosters of various ethnic foods. Italian has lots of pastas and polentas, Greek has salads and spanikopita, and Asian has tofu and tempura vegetables. These are all great, but they are not necessarily exciting. The stuff at Green Zebra made me go, "Wow! That's really brilliant!" Fresh burrata cheese, grilled mango, haricot verts and shaved fennel. Hawaiian heart of palm, cape gooseberries, pasion fruit cream and szechuan peppercorns. Poached Prospera Farms egg, smoked potato puree, served with country sourdough toast. It doesn't all work equally well, but enough comes together in an unexpected way to make it a truly exciting experience of eating vegetarian food. And when was the last time you thought of eating vegetarian food as exciting?
Sure, this is a place for foodies without a doubt. If you can't imagine spending ten bucks on a plate of vegetables, no matter how well they're crafted, this place is not for you. Yet if you are a vegetarian who appreciates culinary artistry, this place is arguably the most important restaurant in the world.
I'm not kidding.
Read the New York Times review.
Posted by crispy at 10:00 PM | Comments (1)
May 22, 2008
Chicago: Part One
Chicago
Given my previous apprehensions about returning to the United States, it was fitting that we got our first taste of just what I was talking about before we even left Mexico.
To get to Chicago from Guadalajara, we had to go through Mexico City. Getting from Guadalajara to Mexico City was uneventful enough. We took off, we were in the air for about 50 minutes, we landed and we walked for what seemed like 5 miles to get from our domestic arrival gate to our international departure gate. We waited for the announced boarding time, and at about five minutes before, the doors to the jet bridge opened and out marched a small army of private security personnel, each armed with a folding table and pair of rubber gloves. In near-perfect synchronization they set up the tables and donned the gloves, while an airline employee rigged the nylon-belted posts around them to restrict entry to one central point.
Shawn and I were confused, since we'd not left the secured area of the airport while switching planes, and we'd already had to go through an additional x-ray of our bags when we crossed from the national terminal to the international one. The gate attendant made the call for the boarding of the flight and people started lining up. We were about to have our carry-on baggage inspected for a third time.
Shawn and I couldn't believe it, and we were discussing amongst ourselves what the possible cause could be for having to go through this yet another time. None of the other passengers boarding flights in our area - one to Frankfurt, another to Buenos Aires - had been subjected to this special treatment. We were trying to figure out why we were so lucky when a voice behind us spoke up in English.
"It's because we're flying into the United States," he explained. "The US requires an extra security check for foreign flights going into the country now."
"What?" I asked. "We've already been through two other checks already, one just 500 meters back. Is this some new thing? We haven't flown into the US for a little over a year, but they didn't make us do this last time."
"Yeah, it's getting worse there every day," he said.
They also made us throw away any bottled water we had before boarding the plane.
We landed at around 1 am at O'Hare airport in Chicago. Clearing immigration and customs was a breeze, and then we got to spend the next four and a half hours in the airport, waiting until the shuttle service started running so we could get downtown and drop off our bags at our hotel.
At the airport, there were two places open. One had such American delights as veggie burgers, onion rings and root beer, all things we can get in Guadalajara but they're hard to find and expensive. Well, scratch that. They cost about as much after being specially trucked in to Mexico as they do here, what with the relatively high prices here.
The other place advertised having drinks like espresso and latte, but it turns out they only offer brewed coffee at night. One has to wait until 6 am to get expresso or latte. They also had a range of nine different sandwiches, including stuff it seemed strange to advertise the way they did, like "corned beef on white." One of these sandwiches was a veggie wrap, and it was the only item of the nine offered that one couldn't get between 10 pm and 6 am, continuing the idea that seems to be a worldwide misconception: vegetarians do not eat after sundown.
It was also the first example reinforcing one of the recurring themes we always notice about the United States when we arrive: it's the land of nitpicky little rules. No loitering. No skateboarding. No smoking within 50 feet of the entrance. No bills bigger than $20. No music past 9 o'clock. No food or drink. No substitutions. No minors. No shirt. No shoes. No service.
Eventually we were able to get a shuttle from the airport to hotel, but since we had nine hours to go before we could actually check in, we left our bags and went out to kill some time in the city. We went first to the Tempo Café (6 E. Chestnut Street), a 24-hour diner-style place with excellent food where we got omelettes. We went to get more coffee at a Starbucks, then did some browsing and buying at a Border's.
We took a cab to Chinatown, where Shawn took a few pictures and we went to a Vietnamese restaurant for some spring rolls. They normally had meat in them, but they were happy to make them vegetarian on our request. The only problem being that, when they arived, they were nothing but lettuce and a sprig of cilantro rolled up in a sheet of rice wrapper. It was still only noon, and we had three hours to kill, but I was starting to hallucinate from being up so long. We walked to the train and took it downtown, where we walked a few blocks and stopped at another Starbucks for more coffee and to pass another hour.
We were really dragging on the walk back to the hotel. We crossed Michigan Avenue, and what seemed to be a couple of blocks that took us about 10 minutes to travel when we were going in the other direction in the morning, seemed to be several miles that took forever to traverse in the afternoon. At last we arrived at the W Chicago - Lakeshore and checked in. We had made a special request on our reservation - that they secure a copy of the Wallpaper City Guide for Chicago in advance and give it to us at check-in. Sure enough, they'd done it.
We took a nap and showered before going down to dinner, where we were reminded of one of the things we miss about the United States while living in Mexico: the great diversity of great ethnic foods available here. At the Mediterranean-style restaurant in the hotel, they are running a special series of dishes from various Asian regions. We had a vegetarian pinkabet, a dish popular in the Philippines, and ordered some smaller plates: spanikopita, hummus and mixed olives. I got a couple of Manhattans, made with Maker's Mark, a label we just can't get in Mexico, where the only non-Scotch whiskies places ever seem to have are Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. I'm not sure which was more intoxicating, the bourbon or the vast selection made possible by American-style capitalism.
Still reeling from the conflict of the love-hate relationship I have with the land of my birth, I retired to a matress that was 10 times softer than any I've ever had a Mexican hotel, paying 10 times more than I would for a hotel room there. I switched on The Daily Show, where the brilliant Jon Stewart was somehow able to make me laugh my ass off over Americans talking about how they won't vote for Barak Obama because he's not white, because they have somehow been convinced that he is a Muslim, and because he's "Hussein."
One day down. Sixty more to go.
Posted by crispy at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)
May 19, 2008
The United States Trip
It is official. Shawn has reached a settlement with his former employer, so we will be visiting the United States for several weeks to visit our parents. We will also be doing a bit of sightseeing along the way in places like Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and New York.
I already have mixed feelings about the trip.
On the positive side, it will be great to see the folks and our friends, and to catch up on what is going on. I will delight in going out to a bar, being able to choose a whiskey from a list that has more than just eight Scotches and one Bourbon, then sitting back to enjoy some real jazz played on a real piano, not a synthesizer with a built-in drum kit. I will revel in the cool cascade of iced air that pours forth from the open freezer case as I try to decide which of the ten varieties of Morningstar Farms® burgers I want, or maybe I'll just get a box of Boca® Bratwurst, some sauerkraut and pumpernickel buns. I might just buy some electronics without the 270% markup.
Yet while I look forward to basking in the unrestrained consumerism that is perhaps the best remaining aspect of life in the United States, I fear just being there. It is funny to us that gringos coming to visit invariably ask if it's safe here in Guadalajara, because it's so quiet and calm around where we live. Here one has to be cautious about the occasional cab driver that wants to overcharge you by ten pesos, the government official that promises to fix the roads and then absconds with half the funds for the project, or the sharp pieces of metal that jut forth from the crumbling remains of some neglected building, started long ago but never completed. There is danger here, but it does not seem to have the same violent, lethal quality that danger in the United States has.
Sure, Mexico has some dangerous places. News stories appear with an alarming frequency about the escalating war between the narcotraficantes and the authorities. Charles just recently reminded me that, while I fall in love with Mexico City every time I visit the Zona Rosa for a few days, in neighborhoods of the capital that have not been sanitized for public consumption, people are afraid to walk the streets at night or wear jewelry outside. There are parts of Mexico that are dangerous, but in general, for most people, Guadalajara just isn't. It is a big city where one should be cautious, but overall, it's a nice, quiet place.
In contrast, in the United States, it's the nice, quiet places that scare me the most. It will be a long time before I forget the experience of driving across the United States with Shawn about a year before we left, going to Massachusetts to get married. Along the way, we got our fair share of weird looks from front desk clerks when we checked to a reservation for only one bed and caused many an eye to roll when we asked for the salad without the apple-smoked bacon or the flame-broiled chicken breast on top. Yet it was the public opinion we heard on the radio driving through nice, quiet places that finally got to us.
"Them immigrants come here tuh steal awr jobs, 'n' they don' even bother tuh learn them some English!" one caller to a talk show railed. "They needs tuh learn the language if'n they wanna live here."
Another, calling in to answer the host's question about how the audience would feel if Condoleezza Rice ran for president, said, "I don't think America is ready for a black woman to be president." She was not the only caller to have such sentiments, although other callers said, "I don't think America is ready for a black woman to be president."
The last time we visited the United States, in April 2007, while stuck waiting in an airport, the TV monitors were showing an Anderson Cooper special on CNN. Despite plenty of ongoing real news (a bomb set by Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq in the cafeteria of the National Assembly of Iraq kills eight people, 33 people are killed and 29 others wounded by shooter Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin dies at the age of 76), Cooper was immersed in an hour-long, special presentation investigating the gay question.
Once again we will be driving across the United States, and I hope that this time we find that Americans have gotten tired of discussing whether homosexuals and people of color deserve any rights and have moved on to discussing what new direction they want the country to take. I hope that we are surprised to find our fellow citizens engaged in a respectful and intelligent debate about things like the economy, education, or technology instead of fiercely arguing the source of the next great threat to life and liberty and the best way to snuff it out entirely before it takes over.
The last time we were traveling across the United States, the whole place seemed like one big paranoid science fiction film from the 50s, where people are threatened by some metaphoric mouse and end up razing entire cities in their fearful panic, trying to cleanse the world of the menace that never really was. The events of September 11, 2001 were not yet five years past, the War on Terror was blindly lashing out against inappropriate targets, and the American public was too numbed to give a damn that their government was torturing prisoners, wasting billions and illegally monitoring their communications. Maybe enough time has now elapsed that Americans are ready to get back on the horse and take their place at the reins of one of the most powerful countries in the world, tackling difficult problems and returning the nation to a place where at least the ideas of truth and justice have some value. Or will rising inflation of key goods, a collapsing housing market and an impending recession bring out the worst in people?
If history is any indication, I'm afraid we are to be disappointed.
Posted by crispy at 07:08 AM | Comments (9)
May 09, 2008
You Pee, You Pay!
Bus Station Pay Toilets, Querétaro
They lack the vitriolic signage of some facilities in the United States, but Mexico has its fair share of toilets where one has to pay for entry. These are especially common in bus terminals, like the one in Querétaro, pictured above.
In most cases, they cost MXN $3, which is roughly USD $0.28. The machines as shown above make change for 10 or 5 peso coins, but they do not accept 20 or 50 peso notes. If there is a human standing or sitting outside the entrance of the facility, they usually can make change for smaller bills.
The theory is that the money goes toward the upkeep of the bathroom and to provide things like toilet paper, hand towels and soap. I'm not convinced that there is not some serious skimming off the top going on.
I do not expect scented terrycloth towels and a foot massage for that price, but I have been to several such bathrooms where it seems like a rip-off. At times, an attendant will give you three squares (yes, three individual squares) of toilet paper for your MXN $0.30 as you enter. It's better if they have an actual roll of toilet paper you can use as you need it, but often, when these are provided, they're not in the stalls where you use it, but rather out by the sinks where you wash your hands. All the stalls share one big industrial roll from a dispenser mounted on the wall, and the user is supposed to tear some off as she enters. I do not understand where the economy is in that. I think the idea is that they only have to pay for one dispenser that way, but when faced with the decision in advance about how much toilet paper one is going to need when the actual time comes, the tendency is to over-estimate. No one wants to get caught with his pants down, literally, in such a situation.
It doesn't hurt when traveling in Mexico (and probably anywhere, for that matter) to bring one's own toilet paper. It seems odd to me that no company has come up with any kind of product for this here. I've seen Charmin travel rolls (small, packed in a hard plastic case) in the United States, but to my knowledge, they don't sell those in Mexico. Go figure. The best commercially-available product that I've seen here are moist wipes that are used for babies, and those seem to be available everywhere here. Otherwise, you should try to remember to wad up a bunch and stick it in your bag or pocket before going out and about.
Sooner or later, you'll be glad you did.
Posted by crispy at 12:10 PM | Comments (3)