The Everywhereist

I know it’s not technically Friday, but I’m hungry and thinking about food right now, so time means nothing to me. 

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There are statements I never thought I’d say. But after enough travel, I’ve started saying them.

To a maintenance man in a New York city hotel: “Oh no, I’m happy to plunge my toilet myself.”

Or, to a girl with whom I switched airline seats, so I could be next to Rand: “Can I have your middle seat for my aisle?”

Or the phrase that escaped my lips as I sat in the Blue Scorcher Bakery and Cafe in Astoria, Oregon:

“Oh. My. God. This is the BEST yogurt EVER. Rand, try this yogurt. It’s amazing.”

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Angel wings and drinking vinegar with soda water.

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Pok Pok, for a lot of people in the northwest, is probably old news. When I first visited it a little over a year ago at the recommendation of my friend Jessica, it was still relatively obscure. The repetitive name did not hang on the lips of northwest foodies like a whisper to a lover, did not elicit knowing nods like it does now.

When I first went to Pok Pok, it was far less known.

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Follow the nose ... it always knows.

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People are constantly marveling at my sense of sense of smell, which I find rather amusing.

I tap my large and glorious nose, smile, and say, “What, you think this thing is just for show?”

And while my memory is fading a bit on precisely how we ended up at Bubo, a high end dessert shop in Barcelona, I would like to think it was my nose that led us there.

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I loved carnivals in my youth.

I loved the way cheap outdoor lighting reflected onto hay cast that world in sepia tones. I loved the smell of the air – of grease and old wood and cotton candy.

There would be twinkling lights, and music, and rides. Enormous, horribly-constructed stuffed animals hung above the rigged games on the midway, as they had for years, because no one could ever win them. Children walked by, sticky from giant swirled lollipops that never tasted as good as they looked. Men in cowboy hats and boots; women with teased hair and pink lip gloss, their names airbrushed across the front of their shirts in rainbow colors. As a child, I wanted nothing more than a shirt like that. Sartorially speaking, I suppose it’s best that I never got one.

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