POTATOES AND BREAD WITH SPAGHETTI -- yyummmm

I have to tell you a little story about how well some people travel and about how hard it is for some people to accommodate to the change in culture from one country to another.   Actually it is more about food than anything else.  As you go along through the story you will think of other things that are difficult to switch on and off in our fundamental cultural DNA.
There are places in North America, Europe and South America where it is but a short walk away to another cultural mind set.  In Southern California, for example, it is but a stone's throw away to go from sliced bread to tortillas, beans and soccer on the southern end and from Bourbon horse racing and baseball to Rye whiskey and hockey, on the northern end.
Europe and Asia offer similar challenges to those who live there.  The challenges are greater when North Americans or Asians go to Europe and experience three or four culinary cultural changes in a two week period.  This is a short story about a two week period of exposure to one single cultural change.  Mainly from rice to pasta.
Not from rice to USA style, once a month or so of spaghetti and meatballs, but from rice, the staple, to pasta the staple.
"When are they going to stop serving pasta?"
"They won't stop serving pasta."
"I've had too much already."
"If you were Italian, you'd quickly get sick of rice at every meal."
"Oh, but everyone loves 'pancit" and 'lumpia.'"
"Those are not Filipino staples.  Rice is the Filipino staple, just as potatoes are the staple of many european countries and pasta is the staple of the Italians."
"Well, maybe I'll just stick with bread."
"Good idea."

Have you ever been to the Middle East?  The food is tasty and delicious.  Rice is the staple, along with bread.  Hummus is everywhere, all the time.  Here, you can have my share of that.  Fish, dried and salted, fresh and pickled [your choice] for breakfast.  I love pickled fish for breakfast.  So do the Swedes and the Norwegians from what I have heard.  I guess it all depends how you were brought up.

Like for instance, did you ever ask yourself why you would eat bread, potatoes and spaghetti at the same sitting?  Isn't that a bit too much starch?  We do it all the time, right?  Get a "Big Mac" with double cheese and a large fries.  Now listen, I will take Balut and rice anytime over the Big Mac.  I just heard ten people choking over that last one.  Choke all you want.  I just saw ten Japanese running toward the seaweed (Nori) and sweet rice rolls before punching in their PIN number for a vending machine can of Sapporo beer.

You realize, of course, that we could go on all day talking about these things.  So I'll let you off the hook here.  I will go home now to enjoy my oxtail stew with banana hearts, bitter melon cooked in a crushed peanut broth/sauce.

PICK YOUR POISON

Drugs, drugs, drugs.  I have some personal stories about drugs.  None of them touch on the consequences of mixing marijuana into bourbon as I seem to have done here.  Actually, I have to confess that even when I was doing marijuana, I would never do both of them together. I was afraid that the mixing of the two would perhaps kill me.  Seeing that I was never in a suicidal mode when toking my way through a mellow evening with my thirty-something friends, it is clear that I was in no danger of crossing the line into vitally dangerous territory.  In fact, the most dangerous thing I ever did was to brag that even at my age and after some 20 years away from the baseball diamond, the 70 MPH pitching machine could not strike me out.  It was not very late into the night, so I still can't figure out why I would have ever said such a thing.  The "put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is" upshot of the brag was "I had to pay for the next buy of "Sensemilla Columbian Select" greenery.  At the time, that was somewhere close to $50.00 per ounce.
That's about what it would take for one evening of "mellowship" for the six of us.
We set the date.  I promised that I would not take any time to practice before the test.  We gathered at the batting cage at the appointed time and place.  It was decided that they would feed $1.00 into the machine.  If  I remember well, that was about 25 balls at 70 miles-per-hour.  By the 22nd pitch I had two strikes on me.  One of the "gang" was trying to make me quit while I was ahead.  Pitch 23, foul tip.  Whoooo!  Pitches 24 and 25 clean contact.  I WIN!   So what do we do?  We go to our favorite bar, of course.  We had no weed because everyone thought that I would buy the next pouchful.  So that night was a Canadian rye and Kentucky Bourbon gathering.
So, we went from being Illegal Aliens to being Legal ones.  I will end this by saying simply that if the buffoons in D.C. want to balance the budget, all they have to do is to legalize and tax their sweet old aunt Mary Jane.  On top of that, the market would freeze out the transfer of the wealth from South to North and the illegal immigration problem would be halfway solved.
See how smart I am?  Much smarter than the bribe takers in D.C.  Problem is, I'm on the wrong end of the wealth redistribution stick.