I haven’t taken any trips or incredible food pics as of late, so I thought I’d share with you the things I’m really liking in my day-to-day recently. And one I’m really hating. Maybe I can make this a regular thing!
As usual, I’m trying to surround myself with good food, drinks, friends, and travel (even if I am still spending eight hours a weekday lawyering at my desk).
The Things I’m Loving…
1 – Marching Powder by Rusty Young and Thomas McFadden
I’m having trouble even typing this post right now, because I’m so ready to get down to the pool and break out this book – I’m not kidding. After slogging through a not-so-exciting book about India, I’m so glad that Marching Powder has been exciting from the get-go. A backpacker cult classic, it follows the true story of Thomas, a British citizen caught smuggling cocaine through the La Paz airport and his years spent in an infamous, corrupt Bolivian prison, and Rusty, the American traveller who visits and helps him write his life story. I’m not even a quarter of the way through and I’m hooked.
I’m one of those nerds that read The Beach as I travelled through Thailand, so I can only imagine how awesome it would be to read this book while venturing through South America.
(Thanks to the lovely people at Whole Foods who let me bring my leftovers, not buy anything, and sit at their patio tables while I read during my lunch breaks. I’m not sure if they’re just turning a blind eye to my tupperware containers, but I appreciate them letting me soak up some sun with my book while taking a break from the office.)
2 – Rosé Wine Flights at The Wine Feed
Though I haven’t been here super recently, The Wine Feed on Glenwood (located two blocks away from my apartment) is excellent for a pre or post dinner drink. It’s owned by the two nicest guys ever (Phillip and Philip) who willing to chat and advise you on the selection. My favorite thing to order here are their wine flights, which rotate seasonally. Each wine flight on the menu features solid pours of three different wines for $11 or $12. If you prefer, there’s an optional cheese board too.
The minute it became warm enough (and socially acceptable) to drink outside, we headed to their patio for my favorite thing on the menu (aside from their $4 pinot grigio on tap) – the rosé flight. Charlie opted for a flight of whites that evening, but they also have choices of reds and other various “themes” of wines – currently, there’s one featuring “smooth Cali reds.”
We’re members of the Wine Feed Wine Club and receive two bottles (a white and a red) each month. It’s a great way to learn more about new wines… you know, aside from the other way I learn about wine: picking up any bottle at Trader Joe’s less than $7.
3 – The Beer Cheese Dip Appetizer at Clouds Brewing
This is one of my favorite appetizers ever. Whenever we visit Clouds, I usually order it as my meal. The phenomenal beer cheese sauce comes with a sliced bratwurst, pieces of toasted pretzel bread, and sauerkraut. This cheese sauce is so amazing that I could put in on everything. And I do. Sometimes I make little mini brat – cheese sauce – pretzel bread – sauerkraut sandwiches, but usually I just dip anything and everything I can find in the cheese sauce until it’s gone. If by chance there’s any leftover after we eat all of the bread and brats from the app, I hoard it on my plate so the waiter doesn’t take it away and then dip everything else (chips, fingers, etc.) in it later on in the meal.
Clouds is also only a few blocks away! I keep wanting to try their $4 bar food apps on weekdays from 4:00 to 6:00… if only I could get home from work faster. And get this, the drink special when we were Saturday night was “a mystery beer and a shot for $5.” What?! Yes, we will be having that. We both got excellent beers (though sometimes you get a PBR or Budweiser, and I wouldn’t complain about that either). Charlie’s mystery beer was a Fat Tire and I got a Blonde Ale from Fortnight Brewing Company in Cary.
And the shot? We had the option of kamikaze or Fireball shots… but due to Charlie’s Friday night Fireball festivities, we opted for the Kamikazes.
4 – The Daily Travel Podcast with Nathaniel Boyle
Ever since becoming addicted to Serial, I’ve been trying to find more in the world of podcasts that I can get into. The Daily Travel Podcast is one of my favorites so far. It consistently provides inspiring interviews with people who find unique ways to make travel a part of their everyday lives. Nathaniel is a super likeable narrator and interviewer (podcaster?) who has had some of my favorite travel bloggers on the show, along with other folks who have decided to design their lifestyle around travel and/or working from the road. I download a couple of his podcasts before I head to the gym in the afternoons, and I feel like I learn new stuff the whole time I’m on the treadmill. (Seriously, it makes running go by so much faster.) And since I now have a car with Bluetooth capabilities, listening to podcasts really makes traffic in the afternoons a little less miserable.
There are over 200 episodes of The Daily Travel Podcast, so you won’t run out any time soon. From an interview with one of my favorite bloggers, Alex of Alex in Wanderland, to Mike Margolies’s story about drinking hallucinogenic Ayahuasca in Peru, these interviews are so interesting.
Another great travel podcast I’ve found along the way is The Budget-Minded Traveller by Jackie Laulainen. She gives great tips on how to travel cheaply and also has some excellent interviews with some real travel pros. (I actually met her at WITS in Boston and may have fan-girled just a little bit.)
And The One Thing I’m Hating…
Fruit flies.
Oh man, they are bad. And they multiply so quickly. They recently took over the kitchen and bathroom in our apartment. Trying to fight them off myself, I consulted Google and set some homemade traps: wine with a drop of dish soap (to break the tension and drown them), vinegar in a jar with a funnel (to trap them), and a plain ol’ bottle of red wine (because they fly in and can’t fly back out). I really thought we were making some progress one morning until coming home from work to a TON of them. They breed like crazy and their lifespan is basically egg to adult in eight days. Oh, and they’re doing all that breeding in our drains.
My mom said they’ve had pretty bad fruit flies at their house too, so that made me feel a little better – like maybe we weren’t just living nastily. And it was fun for a little while chasing them around with Charlie and swatting them. (Like the one I smashed on his bathroom mirror and left there just because… “I wanted to display my kill!”) In the end, we conceded defeat and left it to the professionals. One upside to apartment living is calling maintenance whenever anything goes wrong.
Rachel! You joined TBS! How did I miss that?! That’s so exciting! And if it’s worth anything, I really enjoyed this post and would love it if you made it a series. I never read Marching Powder although I always said I would while I was in South America. The book about India wasn’t Shantaram by any chance, was it? I’ve heard amazing things about it but it’s like, thousands of pages long and I’ve always been a little intimidated by it. To trap fruit flies, I always just slice up some fruit (bananas work well) and put it in jar, cover it with saran wrap and poke a few holes. Novel idea, I know–using fruit to trap fruit flies…
Leah recently posted…Tranquility in the Streets of Medieval Girona
Hey! Yes, and I joined through your link so I hope you got a piece of that! So the India book was Holy Cow and it was on Nomadic Matt’s travel books list – it was pretty good and then became a little ehhhh and so slowww toward the end.
Haha, so I did also have another fruit fly trap using the saran wrap-poking holes technique (though again, with wine because I had no fruit), but thank god they’re gone now. I thought I was gonna lose it!
I read Holy Cow a few years back and remember being meh about it-I felt she complained a lot…Some of my favorite travel narratives are Elizabeth Bard’s two books (Lunch in Paris & her newest, Picnic in Provence), Japan took the J.A.P. out of me, and my all time favorite-Es Cuba by Lea Aschkenas (I’m obsessed with that country). I just finished an incredibly sad and sobering nonfiction read about India (life in one of Mumbai’s slums) that I would recommend-Behind the Beautiful Forevers. And now I’m reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in preparation for my trip to Savannah next week 🙂 (I’m a librarian, hence the book I just wrote ABOUT books lol).
Yeah, fruit flies are the devil. I significantly cut down on buying any produce during the summer that just sits out because of this. Although a couple of years ago I started doing the apple vinegar with plastic wrap on top/poke a few holes through and it always does the trick.
Julie recently posted…Visiting Rosenborg Castle
Wow thanks for all the book recommendations! I’m really into the non-fiction travel stuff right now. I’ll definitely check out Es Cuba – I’ve got to get there! Marching Powder is really great – I didn’t want it to end. Have fun in Savannah! I’ve only been once, but it’s super nice, perfectly Southern, and a bit eerie… and you can drink on one of the streets by the river!