Tartine's Gougères

The strangest thing happened to me when I was walking the streets of San Francisco last month. For some reason I wanted to enter a camera shop so I can find a way to clean the lens of my Powershot G7 and a good tripod. Being a tourist (and click-happy at that), I was always armed with my G7 hanging around my neck, but I found that I couldn't enter the camera shop. Because there were enthusiasts hanging outside the door. With their spiffy SLRs.

Can you believe that? I was embarrassed. I'm trying hard to think whether I embarrass easily. There was a party where I once set the dance floor on fire-- and not in a good way. But I was completely untouched by alcohol; I just did it because I liked moving my ass. I eat out by myself all the time. And I am not ashamed to fall hard on my ass on the skating rink; I just laugh it off (serves me right for going so fast). But just put a group of photogs together and I shrink.

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Southern Comfort (Greenville, North Carolina)

Already I have new pictures from San Francisco, but as many of my friends have just come from there, it seems pretty lame to post them so soon. For now, I'm going to be talking about the place I spent most of my time in during my last trip to the States- Greenville, North Carolina.

I have to be honest, before coming to Greenville I was readying myself to be sneered at, but all in all, I can say that the people I encountered- from my fellow doctors to the patients to random people on the street- were mostly quite nice. The picture above welcomes you to East Carolina University, the third largest university in the state. Go Pirates!

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Tartine's Pumpkin Pie

The food culture between countries sometimes differs at the most fundamental level: for instance, how you treat a fruit or vegetable. Here in the Philippines, just like in at least Brazil, avocados are treated as a dessert fruit. It bothers me (not genuine bother, more of an amused wonderment) that people have called it a vegetable when it is clearly botanically a fruit, but also that people are surprised when it's used for desserts. Here the addition of avocados to sandwiches and salads is a recent phenomenon, and still quite uncommon at that. Guacamole was more well-known, but people in the provinces would scoff at it. What truly bothers me is how clumsily avocados are used in desserts in the Western world, like recipes for ice cream that are essentially sweet frozen guacamole. Yuck. Avocados here are very simply enjoyed by scooping out the flesh and introducing a river of sweetened condensed milk into it.

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Tartine's Pumpkin Tea Cake

THANKS to everyone who read, commented, and most especially contributed from last week's post. I'll be replying to the comments soon, but for now I'm glad to have touched people enough to give in a time of despair. You are all so, so awesome, in case you didn't know that yet.

In college we once had an assignment in Communications class: think of one funny thing you witnessed. It can't be a funny story you heard from someone else, it can't be something you saw on television. It had to have happened to you (or, at least, in front of you). I think I must have written down the lamest story about how some lame teacher was tormenting me, thinking it was probably marginally funny. Well, it wasn't. Truth is, it was hardly that funny, and to no one's surprise, it was even less funny to everyone else.

The sad fact is, even though I am a laugher (I consider myself a sitcom guy) and I never fail to see the humor in everyday situations, I could only remember the laughs and the belly laughs, but not what made me laugh. Or if I could, it was from some line from The Simpsons or something.

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