The Fabulous Life of Ponteuf

An Open Letter to Bob & Linda

(written Wednesday night, somewhere between 20:00 & 23:30)

If it didn't cost $3.50 a minute to call, we'd be on the phone right now gibbering verses of "Throw another log on the fire" into your ear.  But it does, so instead, we're writing this out as the risotto stirs.

It's been a coldish day in Chianti.  We have two left before we shuffle off to Rome and the rest of the trip.  We had to decide what we'd do for dinner these last three nights and decided that the Porcinis and fresh pasta were too much to resist, so we're cooking.  This is after the tomato flavored pasta with buffalo mozzarella, basil and fresh tomatoes.  And certainly well past the second course of pici with aromatic marinated garlic, dried tomatoes, pancetta and hot pepper.

Now is the time when the smoke from the cooking mixes with the smoke from the fireplace, heating our small apartment in conjunction with the second bottle of Chianti.  And the second bottle of Chianti has done well for itself.  We both feel it and are firmly within its grasp.  Without alcohol, we wouldn't be foolhardy enough to attempt a third pasta course, let alone Risotto.  But
Risotto it must be, and Aimee stirs it vigorously as I type this missive out.  We've been here for some time as the 8 empty bottles of wine and only a third of a bottle of remaining olive oil will attest to.  But we cannot be derelict in our duties.  We have a package of squash blossoms that must be consumed tonight and there is no better delivery mechanism than the risotto. 

Aimee asks if what I am writing is any good, I reply "the wine is talking for me" and she says that if it was, I would've replied, "of course its good."  She then praises the virtues of par-boiled risotto.  All is well.  Once the risotto is gone, we will turn our attention to one of the desserts from the co-op and then, without fail, make our nightly trek to the gelato store; more out of habit than want.  Although, by then, want will have shown up again.

Wish you were here,
Mike

PS: This is Aimee. We've tortured the gelato man and his assistant for the night with our recurring Italian lesson. Tonight we covered haircuts, special gusti for Christmas and why Americans don't order more than one flavor at a time. We think Americans might just be not-so-smart. I had fico, l'antica delizia and mandarino, so potent of tangerine that I expect my fingers to smell like I've peeled too many fruit. I am reminded of being small in Somis; I tell him it reminds me of being piccoloa and mangia too much; he laughs.

Now we're back home, drinking Vin Santo and eating Amaretti cookies dunked in the same. Put another long on the fire, please.

MS: Give Pisa (a) Chance

Ah Pisa, famous for its leaning tower and not much else.  Justifiably the campanile is the “Field of Miracles” may be Italy’s most famous icon, recognized the world over.  However, it comes with a warning sign in most guide books.  Situated 80 km west of Florence, most guide books suggest that the trip to Pisa isn’t really worth it.  In a short trip, I would have to agree that the time spent isn’t justified, but thanks to our extended stay, we thought we’d give it a go and see for ourselves.

On the trip out, we both considered the frivolity of the visit.  My assumption, which Aimee shared, was that you’d have the monuments (Tower, Baptistry, Duomo, Camposanto) on a field surrounded by tourist shops and Nigerians vending knock-off designer goods.  We talked about expectations – would the tower be as big as we expected?  I imagined the tower to be thin and about the size of a modern 12 story building.  We then moved onto the subject of Pisa.

Pisa was a major pre-renaissance power in Italy.  Back in the 1000-1200s it had a harbor and a Navy that placed the Pisan Maritime as one of the great city-states of its time.  The city was wealthy and built the monuments as a show of the power they wielded.  Eventually bad things happened to Pisa – their Navy was defeated, their harbor silted up and their power was lost.  Even the land began to conspire against them.  The field of miracles is built on unsteady soft clay ground.  To this end, all of the monuments have unsteady foundations.  This isn’t such a problem with the larger buildings who distribute their weight efficiently, but it really shows in the tower.   The tower began to tilt after its first stage of construction when only the first 4 stories were complete.  Naturally, this troubled the architects who abandoned their work.  The work was started and interrupted twice more over a period of 200+ years as new architects attempted to build the tower higher.  Eventually, the tower was complete, but it had gained a banana shape as layers were built unevenly in an attempt to lean the tower back to vertical.

Due to the soft ground, the tower tilted approximately 1mm South per year since its construction began.  The tilting would occur from Autumn to Spring as the water table was replenished and the density of the ground changed.  In the 1500s, architects and engineers attempted to correct the lean by digging out and filling the foundations.  This process caused further lean and scared future architects from further attempts.  By the 1900s, accurate measurements of the towers acceleration were made and by the early 90s, it was clear that the lean was accelerating and soon could become catastrophic.  The tower was closed off to visitors in 1992.

Of course, the lean is what makes the tower famous.  It’s why people have visited Pisa for the last 700 years (especially after having the medieval town destroyed in WWII).  In the 1800s there was debate as to whether the tower was built to lean on purpose. 

After being closed for nearly 12 years, the tower was reopened in 2001.  A team of experts used a system of counterweights to prevent the tower from toppling while digging out a few cubic meters at a time from the higher Northern foundation of the tower.  This process eventually brought the tower back to its 1500’s inclination and reduced the annual lean to less than 1mm.  When the process was complete, the weights were removed and the tower reopened.

The drive in from Florence dropped us into a character-less Italian city.  As we got closer, we could see the tower looming in the distance, leaning quite noticeably.  The road began to clog up and buses appeared in our path.  Pisa is a university town and it shows – there are students everywhere.  We managed to snag street parking and headed into the campo. 

As expected, there was a solid line of tourist shops and Nigerians along one side of the campo, fortunately, the other three sides were clear.  The complex is surrounded by a wall and really is something to behold.  Gleaming white monuments stand against the green grass.  It’s a pretty amazing sight amidst the commonplace modernity surrounding the field.  What can you say about the tower?  It leans, it looks as though it will fall any second, but it is captivating.  For about 20 minutes.  We declined the 2 hour wait to climb the tower and skipped the tours of the duomo and baptistery.  An hour after arriving we were on the way back to the car.

Pisa is a Japanese tourist mecca – and perhaps the prime example of one.  You exit your vehicle, you look at the monument for a few minutes, you take some pictures and you leave, perhaps purchasing a souvenir on the way out.  But, that’s one of the nice things about the tower; it really does speak for itself.  Oh, and you probably should check out the pictures we took in our photo album . . .

MS: Straighten up and Drive Right

Few things strike fear into the hearts of normally intrepid travelers than driving on the wrong side of the road.  No matter where you are from, unless you deliver mail, there is a group of countries out there that have managed to screw up and put the steering wheels on the wrong side of their cars.  Can’t we all just get along?  Wasn’t Esperanto a good idea?  (Actually it wasn’t as the Esperanto movie starring William Shatner can attest to) Sadly, no, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. 

If you’re used to the steering wheel being on the left side of the car, things get a bit different when you go to Africa, England, members of the commonwealth (Caribbean islands, the South Pacific, etc).  I had once dabbled with right hand drive on St. Kitts.  It was a bit harrowing since the oncoming traffic (which I’d hope would help affirm which side was mine) was irregular and very large when it did come.   But that was several years ago.  My challenge was going to be driving from London to Bath.  Yes, that London – the London that has one way streets, insane cab drivers and roundabouts.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good roundabout, but was a bit nervous about entering one that went clockwise.  Fortunately, the pickup was at Wembley, quite a distance from central London.

I’d rented a class A, the cheapest car offered—figuring it would be small and have the lowest collision deductible.  My panache with rental cars seems to work overseas as well; I was upgraded.  For my trial by fire into the world of right hand drive, I would be commanding a blue Honda Accord station wagon.  This was not exactly a small car.  As a bonus, it had a GPS, Air-Con, and park distance warning.  The leather seats didn’t hurt much either.  The car was a manual transmission which really freaked Aimee, who drives one daily, out.  She was afraid that if she were driving, she’d have a hard time shifting with her left hand.  Since my daily driver is an automatic, this wasn’t a big deal for me.  Anyway, we plugged Stonehenge into the nav system and soon had a course to follow.

Pulling out of the parking lot was an adventure.  For it is at this moment that you begin to question your sanity.  With navigation being relegated to the car, Aimee’s sole job was to keep me on the right, I mean left, side of the road.  The biggest rule to follow is that the driver should always be closer to the center of the road than the passenger.  My first turn out of the rental location was a right turn.  In RHD, this is akin to a left turn at home – so across the lane of oncoming traffic, I went.  Things went fairly smoothly, but I was having difficulty maintaining lane position.  My habit was to drift to the left most edge of my lane.  This is especially worrisome when there are parked cars in this position.  With Aimee’s help, I was able to recalibrate my lane position properly.  We soon turned onto the motorway (freeway) and were off.

Driving on the motorway was quite easy as all oncoming traffic is separated by a divider.  On the way out of London, I played it safe, keeping my speed down while my brain was adjusting to travel on the wrong side of the road.  On the way back, the adjustment was complete and I kept up with the rest of the English speed demons.  The hard part about driving in England is the small towns.

Imagine a two lane road—just wide enough for one lane in either direction.  Now imagine that same road with parked cars lining both sides, half of their bodies up on the curb.  This is a typical town road in England.  You may ask what happens when someone wants to drive down this road or even what occurs when two people are going in opposite directions on this road.  The answer is simple—chaos.   With the cars parked on either side you have slightly more than a car length to squeeze into between them.  This is normally fine when the road is deserted.  When faced with oncoming traffic, one scans for an opening in the parked cars and pulls into it, hoping that the oncoming vehicle will not side-swipe you on their way past.

Driving on our way back from Stonehenge and Bath were a breeze.  The hardest part of adjusting is the first 15 minutes or so.  After a day, driving on the wrong side of the road was a snap.  That doesn’t mean that turning the car in at Heathrow wasn’t a relief; it definitely was.  But it made our next rental in Cape Town quite easy to drive.  I had about 2 minutes of uneasiness, but then it was very easy to pick back up.  The hard part was adjusting back to left hand drive in Turkey during a rainstorm. 

The Turks are notoriously bad drivers, having one of the highest accident rates in the world.  Starting out in an absolute downpour didn’t help much either.  I made the mistake of going the wrong way down a one way road.  Fortunately it was empty and I soon corrected my course.  After arriving at our destination, I was converted back to LHD and looking forward to my next adventure in right hand drive – New Zealand in November, where I’d be driving a campervan.

MS: Döner Kebab: or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ramazan

It’s a new experience to be in a Muslim country.  The days are punctuated with calls to prayer from the minarets surrounding the numerous Mosques.  In our current political climate, this very foreign sound can be somewhat frightening.  Perhaps you recall the movie Black Hawk Down where soldiers roam the empty streets of Somalia trying to escape back to safety with the Muezzin’s call as an eerie background soundtrack.  Maybe you fear that all Muslims are out to get anyone from America.  Either way, it can be a setup for a very wrong impression.

Mosques in Turkey are just as prevalent as churches in America.  The only difference is they are easier to spot.  Typically they are the only buildings in town that are not composed totally of right angles.  The minarets, often the tallest structures in town, are hard to miss as well.  And here we are during Ramazan where the faithful fast from 5AM to 7PM. 

We were both a bit nervous about traveling to Islamic countries during Ramadan.  For some reason we didn’t grok that Turkey was in this group.  Once we got here, it sort of hit us over the head.  So this is Ramadan . . . .

When you see all of these Mosques it’s hard not to be overwhelmed as there are many and they really do standout.  But then you have to realize that most are active places of worship and Islam is a people’s religion, where everyone from the street sweeper to the tour guide to the businessman goes to pray.  Too often in America, Islam is seen hand in hand with terrorism.  It’s an unfair generalization.  It’s like assuming all Christians are like the Branch Davidians in Waco.  Still there was an air of uneasiness for me when we arrived in Istanbul.

We stayed in the country first and took most of our meals at the hotels and seemed to be more separated from the day to day lives of the Turks around us.  Once we arrived in Istanbul, pedestrians again, we were thrust into it.  Our first adventure in Istanbul was finding something to eat – it was 6:30 and our receptionist warned us that it may be hard to find a place to eat around 7 as that was when the fasting ended.  We set off towards the Blue Mosque – assuming there’d be food near this tourist attraction.  Rain was coming down hard and we were glad for our borrowed umbrellas as we ascended towards the Mosque.  We passed by several local restaurants packed to the gills with men, and only men.  The women were not out in the neighborhood we were staying in.  Soon we made it to an area with brighter lights and signs, the Mosque was close – there were tourist shops aplenty.

We rounded a corner and found ourselves in the hippodrome, a former chariot racing stadium that has become a large oval shaped road with a park in the center.  Surrounding the park were food stands, and even in the pouring rain, an impressive amount of people.  We walked up to one of the succulent cones of lamb rotating on a charcoal fired vertical spit and began salivating with an intensity that was soon noticed by one of the men working there.  He bid us to follow him to the covered space behind the front of the stall and we sat down to an amazing meal.  We both ordered the same thing, a plate of Döner Kebab, a Cola Turka and a stack of flat bread.  Out came a plate of rice pilaf covered with fresh shavings of lamb from the spit (with plenty of crispy bits) and a small pile of lettuce and chopped tomatoes.  We quickly made burritos with the flatbread and doused our dinner with the mild chili flakes that were on the table.  Next to the chili was a large squeeze bottle of lemon juice.  Adding this to the burrito made a good thing even better.  We were soon chewing happily. 

The Turks are generally credited with exporting Kebab to the rest of the world and they definitely do it right.  Here the Kebab spits are rotated by hand so that each layer is crisp and tender.  The meat is pleasantly fattier than what you see elsewhere.  This extra bit of fat, usually seen as a white cap on top of the cone adds so much flavor.  They offer the Kebab as a plate, a sandwich on a french roll, in a sourdough round, or in flatbread.  Some places top it with a salad, others with lettuce, some with tomato and one even included a handful of French Fries on top.  All were delicious.  Other treats at the Hippodrome Ramazan fair included copious glass cups of fresh Turkish tea and Turkish Coffee brewed over a charcoal fire.  They had popcorn and cotton candy as well as fresh squeezed pomegranate and orange juice.  There were trays of impossibly good baklava on offer and a unique confection.  This confection started with an empty lollipop stick that was dipped into this soft goo and swirled around in each of five flavors to coat the stick.  You eventually ended up with a unicorn-horn like lollipop only the candy was still liquid and not hard.  A bit sugary for my taste, but Aimee loved it.

We looked around and checked out our surroundings.  The long line of Kebab stands shared the same tarp-covered back area and they were full of happy Muslims enjoying their first meal in 14 hours.  There were couples on dates, groups of businessmen, laborers, families and more.  Everyone turns out for the food and settles into a convivial atmosphere centered around it.  Suddenly I felt much better about this whole Ramazan thing.  These were people brought together by delicious simple food.  As people started cheering a soccer game on TV, their blood sugar back at normal levels, I realized that there really wasn’t that much setting Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists apart.  In the end, all we really crave is a good meal in the company of people we care about.  And those crispy bits?  They don’t hurt either!

MS: Why not Live in a Cave?

There are many reasons to come to Cappadocia (pronounced Cap-A-Dokie-A) in Central Turkey.  Actually, there’s really only one reason to come here: Geology.  You see, the collection of villages that make up this region are built on foundations of tufa.  Tufa is a stone made from volcanic origins that is not only very strong, it is also very easy to shape.  It bears weight well, but at the same time could be shaped, whittled and hollowed out with an emery board.  As such, the area is littered with caves dug out anywhere from the late BCs to the 1100s or so.  In fact, people were living in caves here as late as 1952.  The result of this is that the landscape looks like Monument Valley (where almost every classic Western was shot) had it been transported to the planet Mongo.  Imagine narrow spindles of rock supporting boulders.  Think of Indian (feather, not dot) cliff dwellings.  Now plant some olive trees and place this mess in a hilly landscape and you’ve got a rough idea of Cappadocia. 

But why live in caves?  The caves were dug out to protect the inhabitants from religious persecution of one kind or another.  First it was the Christians hiding from the Romans, Hittites, Muslims, assorted Arabs and (likely) tax collectors.  Being good Christians, they dug out impressive churches with elaborate paintings.  Numerous saints held court in these small enclaves.  Eventually, the Christians moved on, leaving their caves, art and churches behind.  No sooner were they gone than the Muslims moved in to escape their persecutors.  Islam shuns the depiction of people in art, so the faces within the Christian church art were scratched out or covered with plaster.  With Turkey holding one foot in Asia and a big toe in Europe, it’s no wonder that people have been going back and forth over religion for centuries.

Fancy staying in a cave?  The region has countless hotels, motels, pensions and other establishments that will cater to your needs.  The good ones are small – after all, there’s only so much rock to carve a room out from.  Just because it’s a cave doesn’t mean its uncomfortable.  Our cave room is nicely carved out with crown molding chiseled from the rock, electricity and a fully functioning bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub.  The persecuted souls who hid out here millennia ago never had it so good.   

Cappadocia isn’t exactly on the beaten path.  To get here, you’ve got to hop a plane from Istanbul to Kayseri.  Once you hit Kayseri, you have another 65km to travel before you will hit cave country.  You could rent a car, but the rates for doing so are astronomical, even for Turkey.  The better hotels will cover your bus fare into town if you’ve made a reservation in advance.  Once you make it to your room, you’ll need to make arrangements for seeing the sites.  The main things to see are in a 30km circle, so you’ll need to either join a larger group or get a driver.  We opted for the driver and had a full day tour of the region.  We started with a visit to the pink valley to see the rock formations formed by years of rain and weather eating away at the soft tufa, leaving large rocks supported by narrow spindles.  From there we went to Zelve’s open-air museum which house the region’s first dug caves.  There in the face of the hills are cooking chambers, churches and houses cut into the rock with primitive tools over 2000 years ago.  Being Turkey, and not America, you can walk right up to them, touch what you like, have a pee in the corner (sadly) of an ancient dwelling, jump to your death or otherwise injure yourself all the while experiencing this bit of history without a velvet rope in front of it.  There are some tangible benefits of a country with lax personal injury lawyers. 

After seeing the cave village at Zelve, we drove up the road a bit and saw the fairy chimneys—unusual rock formations set among vineyards of bush vine grapes.  Cappadocia is also a viticultural center for Turkey and the product is easily quaffable.  We had a nice lunch in nearby Avanos on a rooftop terrace away from the hungry eyes of the locals fasting for Ramazan (Ramadan in Turkish) and were back on our way.  In the afternoon we visited the open air museum at Goreme which was a much more substantial complex than Zelve (having been built several hundred years later).  This Unesco World Heritage site features more complex cave architecture and a church every ten feet.  We’re talking frescoes, apses, cruciform design, catacombs, the works—all in about a 15x15 square.  It was impressive to say the least.  Well, at least until our last stop of the day, the underground city of Kaymakli.

Kaymakli was built in the third century AD.  It is an underground complex of chambers that reaches about 100 feet into the Earth on 8 floors.  It housed approximately 5000 people.  Underground.  Basically we’re talking an underground city.  Again, the persecuted needed safety and digging into the Earth was the way they found it.  This network of caves had a central chimney that brought in water and air.  Around the center were a complex of caves that house families, livestock and the food, water and wine to support them for up to 6 months.  Should an attacking army show up, the cave inhabitants would roll enormous boulders into the entrances blocking the advance of their enemies.  The chimneys were camouflaged and the cave network so complex that small attacking forces could be let in, would promptly get lost and killed without incident.  The caves housed churches, wineries, and mass storage.  Should the siege go terribly long, the inhabitants had a connecting tunnel to the next underground village 8km away.  If all else failed, there were approximately 100 exits from the complex-one sure to be unguarded. 

If the rest of the day has been an appetizer, Kaymakli was definitely the main course.
And speaking of main courses, we ended our day’s adventures by returning to our cave room content that our biggest challenge remaining was the trek to the rooftop terrace where dinner was being served.   

Not for the faint of heart . . .

Following this link http://ponteuf.typepad.com/LionKillsGazelle.avi will take you to video shot from the top of our land rover.  In it, a lioness stalks and kills a gazelle.  The file is approximately 31MB, so it may take a while to load.  If you're web savvy, why not right-click and "save target as" to save the file to your computer?  This'll help with our monthly bandwidth allowance if you think you might watch it twice.

MS: Another day, another Ocean

Sitting here in Captain Ali’s pub on the shores of the Indian Ocean at Dar-Es-Salaam, I sit contemplating the end of my safari.  Was it my first choice of places to go/things to see?  Not really.  I went into it thinking it would be cool for the first day or two, then be like a really long trip to the zoo without ice cream.  I was right about the ice cream.  All the rest; dead wrong.

Something you don’t see in America is the food chain from top to bottom.  When was the last time you took the trash out at 11:30 on a weeknight and felt the cold fear that a roaming bear would take a swipe at you?  Aside from being chased by a skunk once, for me the answer is never.  Not so in Africa.  Our camp was in the Serengeti, a collection of luxury tents around a central dining tent: Plush by anyone’s standards of camping.  On this particular morning, we had been woken (Jambo = Hello in Swahili) and were up for a balloon ride across a portion of the Serengeti park.  The day before had been quite momentous – a female lion had used our land rover as strategic cover and ambushed a gazelle about 20 feet away, breaking its neck and eating it with little time lost.  It was a moving experience to say the least – to see the lack of real effort on the part of the lion was astonishing.  Most lions I saw had a harder time keeping cool in the noon sun than this one had killing a gazelle.  Anyway, back to the 4AM Jambo: as we walked single file in the dark to the waiting land rover, I realized how simply a lion could have bolted from the brush and incapacitated me.  In America, the top predators have been killed or at least know to stay away from humans.  Not so in the Serengeti. 

Later that afternoon, the rains came.  From the ground came ants, followed by other insects and rodents feeding upon the ants.  I looked out upon the valley in front of me and realized that my non-permanent camp would be gone in a few more months and things would play out here as they had for the last 5000 years or so.  I haven’t been in a place so unspoilt by humans in quite a long time.  If for nothing else, Safari gives you perspective that’s hard to find anywhere else.  For me, that was a pretty magical sequence of events.  Having visited Oldupai gorge a day earlier only reinforced the fact the we’d been here a long time and the majority of humanity’s accomplishments and changes to the Earth have only been around for a relatively short time.  Later we were among a forest of Baobob trees with average ages of about 4000 years.  It’s so rare to see a landscape that has been untouched by progress, fire, flood or catastrophe for so long.

The safari lasted 10 days – 2 in the Ngorongoro Crater, 3 in the Serengeti, 2 in the Selous (Southern Tanzania) and 3 in Ruaha (also South) and it was an amazing experience.  To go on Safari represents a significant chunk of change, but it is quite an amazing experience and one that I am extremely glad to have had.

MS: New Adventures in Bad Steak

**keep an eye out for the special "Maver Speaks" posts - this is the first in a series**

We visited a chain restaurant this evening; a South African chain – the Spur Steak Ranch. Billed as “South Africa’s Family Restaurant,” each Spur is independently owned, operated and named. All share the Indian logo and the surname “Spur Steak Ranch,” but they differ in first names – ours was the “Montego Spur Steak Ranch.” Most names have something to do with a foreign conception of the American West – Santa Ana, Colorado, etc. Perhaps I’m ignorant, but Montego sounds awfully Jamaican. That aside, the restaurant is decorated as if by someone who has never been to the United States, nor has seen a Western. Perhaps they read about one somewhere and proceeded to mix metaphors with abandon – imagine a Chili’s or TGI Fridays decorated by someone who had the restaurant decoration scheme passed down through generations of oral tradition. At the spur this adds up to cowskin booths below pueblo walls, serapes and cleverly designed dreamcatcher specials boards (featuring a Plains Indian in front of totem poles) suspended from the ceiling. It’s kind of like being in the middle of a spaghetti western – a foreign perspective on an American theme.

As the Indian, Mexican and Cowboy themes clashed for dominance, our waiter arrived with our faux wooden menu boards promising juicy, tender AAA steaks served with a variety of sauces, including the nefarious “Monkey Gland” sauce, which seems to be a real customer favorite. One of the novelties of the South African steak house is the hot stone method of serving your steak. I had read veiled references to it in the in-flight magazines between Joberg and Cape Town and was itching to try it. I added a side of Monkey Gland for character and awaited the arrival of my sirloin. The MG sauce preceded my hot stone sirloin by several minutes, so I subjected it to some rudimentary taste tests. It contained neither monkeys nor their glands; rather it was a semi spicy, thick BBQ sauce with bits of onion floating in it.

Then the hot stone was set before me. Imagine a rectangle – half of which is an exceedingly hot stone, the other half made up of a completely raw steak next to some fries and rings. Chuckling for a moment at the fuss of producing a raw steak on the same tray it was to be eaten on (touching the already cooked fries) would cause at home, I oiled up the stone and threw the steak on it. The stone was hot – by the speed the steak cooked, I’d estimate around 600 degrees F. But, since I was in charge of cooking the steak, it came off perfectly rare! Now this, I could get used to – no more overdone steak! Of course, the ability to ruin the steak is entirely in the customer’s hands. It’s kind of like buying a dry aged steak at Whole Foods in Pasadena – you can pay the same price per pound as you would at Morton’s for a dry aged steak, but you get the pleasure of overcooking the steak without the option of sending it back. Brilliant!

The steak itself? Well, a quick word on prices. Burgers cost about $6, the steaks were about $2 more. With that in mind, my expectations were met. This wasn’t prime beef, but it had great flavor and for the price, was a bargain. Then the wonderful strangeness of the place kicked back in to overdrive. Many tables away a birthday was being celebrated. Ever been to a restaurant where all the waiters gather to perform a birthday song? Think, “I don’t know, but I’ve been told . . . someone here is getting old. Sound off . . .” Now, imagine it being sung out by native Africans. It might have been the malaria meds, but for me the incongruity is hilarious. As I walked past “Salad Valley” on the way out, I spotted a small casket on a hand cranked rotisserie. I believe this is to make sure Iron Eyes Cody turns over in his grave as you leave.