私房菜 啤酒鸭 – 由Tony Chiang 主理和提供

I have no clue how this happened, but somehow my dad got onto a web tv cooking show called MeiMei’s Kitchen. I think MeiMei was part of our China tour group… maybe.

Anyhow, this video, while hilarious, is in Chinese. A few highlights, then…

• my dad’s segment starts around 21:00, so fast forward to there
• the point of his recipe is that it’s super easy to prepare. You simply dump a bunch of ingredients in, roast it for 45 minutes on one side, and then 45 minutes on the other, and you’re done.
• when he’s ripping the fat out of the duck’s ass, he says “American ducks are fattier than Chinese ducks”. In America, everything is fatter, even the ducks!
• watch him wield the bottle of Yuengling around 28:00. He says he likes the lagers because their taste isn’t quite as strong. According to dad, “darker beers have more sugar” if that’s what you’re after.
• and absolutely don’t miss the chopstick poking at around 31:00, it’s absolutely brilliant. When he rips the wing off, he’s saying, “oh, look how tender this is, the meat just falls off the bird!”

Any Fort Collins friends want to make this at our next family dinner?

Two male Thomson’s gazelles face off

Today’s Tanzania Tuesday entry is about members of the antelope family.

Thomson’s gazelles are ubiquitous. They were, by far, the most common form of wildlife we saw in our travels. They’re twitchy and prone to bolt and perhaps the size of a blue heeler dog.

You’d think that it would be easy to differentiate Thomsons from impalas, because the impalas’ horns are curved to such an extreme degree.

In fact, it’s hard to tell the difference between the female impala and the male Thomson. The way to be sure is to look for the horizontal strip on the Thomson. Impalas don’t have stripes.

Impalas are larger than Thompsons too. They seemed to be about the size of a North American doe deer.

This is a dik dik. They’re really cute, really small, and rather rare. I think we saw two in all of our travels.

Too bad we never heard them scream, which is supposedly what they’re named for. It would be cool to see a mini-deer the size of a large cat, scream.

Speaking of rare, these were the only two eland we saw at all. The above photograph was taken from about 150 yards and even with the tight crop, they still don’t really fill the frame. Eland are extremely shy, and when we pulled up, even at 150 yards out, these two shied away. I only had about 30 seconds to get this shot.

Topi are pretty cool, leathery looking creatures. They were more common in the western part of the Serengeti, compared to the eastern part of the park.

The life of all animals in the bush is an itchy one. Flies, gnats, mosquitos, and all sorts of other flying biting stinging nasties fill the air and are just waiting to swarm. No animal seems safe, except possibly birds.

The lesson to be learned here is that air power is always the advantageous form of warfare.

Happy Tuesday!

Thanks to the Gothamist for an awesome vintage flashback to platypuses at the Bronx Zoo.

Be sure to follow that link above to see some nice photos.

I’m really not adding any value over what Gothamist has already written, since they thoughtfully included a link to a 1957 TIME article entitled ANIMALS: End of the Affair. But I will quote you some awesome facts from the article that I didn’t know before:

• baby platypus is called a “platykitten”? really?
• typical platypus dinner: 25 to 35 live crayfish, 200 to 300 worms, one frog, several scrambled eggs

Anyhow, read the TIME article too and catch the delightful story of Cecil and Penelope Platypus.

Happy Platypus Friday! (And thanks to my brother Victor for pointing this out to me)

Tech Tuesday is on temporary hiatus, as it’s been replaced with Tanzania Tuesday.

Today’s topic is lions!

In Swahili, “simba” are one of the highlights of any safari. Everyone wants to see lions. Luckily, these cats are rather easy to find while on safari, as they’re rather large (compared to say, leopards), and tend to laze about openly.

Surveying the Ngorongoro crater.

Default state of being: waiting and watching.

A lazy male.

Stalking an ostrich. Dream on, kitties…

What you won’t see much of are lions actually hunting. Mostly, this is because they hunt in the early dawn hours, and likely, you won’t be awake unless you can convince the rest of your group (and driver!) to be up at 5am and out the door by 6am.

If you do manage to find lions hunting during the middle of the day, you probably won’t see any actual kills, since what happens is that one safari truck pulls up to watch the hunt, and then ALL the safari trucks pull up alongside to watch as well. The constant influx of trucks obviously disturbs both predator and prey, meaning you probably won’t see any actual kills. Sigh, the tragedy of the commons.

You may have better luck in the less popular parks, but in the Serengeti… forget it.

Thompson Gazelle metaphorically crapping its pants…

Lion cubs are somewhat hard to spot, due to their smaller size and their coloring. But when found, they obey the law of charismatic megafauna, which is to say, babies of said megafauna are invariably cute.

Flies are a fact of life in the bush. Every animal has to deal with them, even if they’re at the top of the food chain.

Lions will hunt people; they’re what make the bush dangerous. It’s not like the ocean, where you can go scuba diving amongst sharks and they probably won’t bother you. If you’re walking around in the bush, especially at night, you’re easy meat.

Packer estimates more than 200 Tanzanians are killed each year by lions, crocodiles, elephants, hippos, and snakes, and that the numbers could be double that amount, with lions thought to kill at least 70 of those.

lions on wikipedia

Otherwise, happy Platypus Friday!

Here’s how you block and hide it using the Adblock extension with Google Chrome.

Manually edit your filter and add these lines:

meebo.com
##div#meebo.meebo-00

 
The first line prevents you from downloading content from the meebo website, but sadly, it’s insufficient to hide their obnoxious bar.

The second line hides this latest piece of web dog poo.

Looking down into the crater of the Ngorongoro Conservation area around sunset.

So said the driver sent to fetch me from Julian Dean International Airport. We stepped into the night and sped towards the Dar Es Salaam CBD.

“Speak Swahili?”

I fished around a bit and managed “jambo!” but after that, nothing. Asim, satisfied, repeated

“This is Africa country.

Tanzania.

Dar Es Salaam.”

Made it!

The street meat is delicious.

I ran to the empty departure area, slightly out of breath and as I checked in with the gate agent, she smiled and ripped up my boarding pass. It took me a half beat to catch on as she mumbled about “operational needs forcing a seat change” and handed me a slip with a single digit number on it.

And that is how I came to spend my most luxurious cross-atlantic trip yet. The seats recline to full bed position and they featured a lovely vintage port along with a cheese plate for dessert.

One of the nice little perqs of my company is that you get access to business lounges. I’m happy to report that the Panorama lounge here in Zurich is impeccably jawesome.

And this is why I would slit your gramma’s throat to keep elite status every year.

Time to go find a Swiss toilet. My finely honed traveller’s intuition tells me they’re going to be better than what I’m about to encounter over the next two weeks.

Auf wiedersehn!