A shift worth tracking, and the ones being over-claimed.
Wonders of non-alcoholic cocktails (and 4 of my best recipes)
A shift worth tracking, well before the market decided it was premium: notes on no-lo, and four recipes built to prove the case. Eventually, Normal. created its own non- and low-alcoholic bar brand, NOLO! in Seoul, Korea. Each year, an estimated 60,000 people give up drinking for Sober October. About a fifth of UK adults now call themselves teetotal, and among 16-to-24-year-olds it’s close to a third. This isn’t a local trend — in developed countries, alcohol consumption is in long-term decline, for reasons that are generational, cultural, religious, and increasingly personal. I can’t give up on alcohol. I won’t.…
Descent into baloney we must fix
Notes on digital nomadism as the new overtourism, filed from Ubud and Canggu, Bali. June 2021. Boisterous bullfrogs wake me up earlier than usual. They’ve been going literally since three in the morning, went on for 30 minutes, stopped and started again at six, they haven’t stopped since. I am not in favor of killing them but I’d love to figure out a way to get them outta here. Yesterday, a chicken guy (he called himself that) came and took three of them away but they were immediately replaced by four others. As I said, they’re ‘bull’-proportioned and I tried…
On eating wholesome – sattvic diet (plus recipe)
If there is one thing that this Upside-Down-tragedy gave than took, it is my new found energy to peruse recipes I learned over the years and kick my hindside back to the stove. True, YouTube helped. So did Jamie Oliver’s army of mignons that dominate search rankings for any food item you google. But it was also having spent so much time on the road when I surrendered control of what goes in my food to hotel cooks and airline catering and extended periods as an expat in cities where food supplies are outsourced to distant lands that always gave…
Cities, profit from this
As I write this story I glance down from my perch in Seoul. On this particularly crisp October morning I was enjoying a cup of Fall Blend on the terrace of a coworking café. Groups of young men dressed in the sharp, telltale style of consultants in their first year on the job (navy suit, white shirt, no tie, monk-strap shoes) pacing through rotating doors of the building; boisterous women in pairs in fashionable getups with just-so-right hemlines (below the knee but not quite calf-length) flashing their Galaxy phones toward contact tracing QR code reader; around me clusters of two…
This time is different
This blog is called the Minimalist Travels for a reason. It’s supposed to be an observation of the world that surrounds me and be a witness to the beautiful and express it with minimalist prose. Yet, this morning it is the brutalist ugly that compels me to be a witness to. As the tv, print and online media re-peddle night after day how they are rattled by the Brexit result few expected, I can’t shake off the feeling that we should have seen this one coming. Forces of economic nationalism and working class anger have been brewing ever since the last financial crisis and…