Describing India

  For those who asked, a bit of descriptive prose about my India experience, round two. For anyone who has never been here, the best way I can describe India is “in your face”. It is radically different from western life in so many ways. Sights, sounds, and smells come at you full force, non-stop. By the time your mind has processed whatever oddity you have just seen, something else is zooming nearer. -A rikshaw carrying 16 people. -An ancient Hindu temple lit with multi-colored neon lights. -Chai wallas and roadside vendors of every imaginable variety. -A drunk falling down crossing six lanes of traffic, being helped to safety, and immediately ... [Read More]

New Orleans. Where Every Day is Fat Tuesday

  Days are measured in New Orleans by the number of hours it takes your stomach to digest enough to allow you to go to the next meal. At lunch you discuss, over burps, where you’ll go for dinner. At dinner, as you loosen the top button on your jeans, you ponder how much you’ll be able to shovel in your face at breakfast. And all the while you promise yourself, and anyone in earshot, that you’ll work it off just as soon as you arrive home. Of course you will. This is the unfortunate side effect of being in one of the world’s best cities for food. On ... [Read More]

Little Rock

A recent business trip took me to Little Rock for the Arkansas Economic Development annual conference. This is my 4th trip to Little Rock, a pretty river city with the welcoming people that you expect in the south. Luckily the home of the conference was the Peabody. Anyone who's familiar with the Memphis Peabody, you’d expect to walk into an historic, ornate old hotel. Not in Little Rock. It’s the complete opposite. The Little Rock Peabody is newer and very contemporary. At first that takes you by surprise. There’s no way to duplicate the Memphis one, so you have to do something totally different. Everyone at the Peabody ... [Read More]

My first conch fritter

Before I get started on this blog about the Compass Point Beach Resort and Nassau, Bahamas, I want to give you a little background. I grew up in St.Paul, Minnesota. The Scandinavia of North America. We drank milk, ate meat, potatoes and maybe some vegetables (you know, the good ones — corn, green beans and peas). Catsup added just enough spiciness to anything. Nothing too weird. I've gotten brave in my old age and now, for example, enjoy all types of wine and beer, I eat spinach salad, squash parts (at least I think it was squash, hmm), asparagus and broccoli. I know, I know, ... [Read More]

Getting to Guangzhou… barely

  There is a greater genetic difference between a dolphin and a porpoise than between a human being and a chimpanzee. This might help explain the apelike behavior of the buffoons at the Tianjin airport, seemingly determined to ensure we missed our flight to Guangzhou. My whirlwind business trip through four Chinese cities this week included what was to have been a quick 24-hour stopover in Tianjin, China’s fourth-largest city and a leading business hub. (More than half of the Fortune 500 Global companies have branch offices here.) Though a heavily industrial city, we hoped we could steal a couple of spare hours to roam around as tourists. We ... [Read More]

This Is as Texas as it Gets

How the bareback bronco and bull riders made it upstairs in the Allen (Texas) Event Center to meet visitors in the private suites is beyond me. After their bone-rattling rides on animals that clearly resented the invasion of personal space the riders represented, these guys should have been in a hospital being tended to by a team of orthopedic surgeons and neurologists. But they made it, and they couldn't have been nicer, which was in keeping with the spirit of the Texas Stampede weekend in Allen, northeast of Dallas, where I brought my 15-year-old son, Matt, as guests of the Allen Economic Development team in ... [Read More]

Careful what you eat in the land of the Nine Dragons

  You might think your biggest culinary concern in China would be your hosts serving you a still-alive animal or foul-smelling fungus. Not so much. Perhaps you think that by avoiding street vendors in favor of established restaurants you’re more likely to find foods that won’t make you sick. Uh-uh. Though China works hard to suppress news damaging to its image, do a little research and you’ll learn that the biggest health threat in Chinese eateries is “gutter oil,” which, believe it or not, is even fouler than it sounds. Cooking oil is like gold in China, where virtually every recipe requires a wok full of it, and goes for a ... [Read More]

Atlantis Lost No More

According to legend, the fabled “Lost City of Atlantis” sank into the ocean “in a single day and night of misfortune.” Some 12,000 years later, Atlantis Paradise Island shows evidence of enough real fortune to make one wonder whether the mythical city ever disappeared. The resort, a development of South African hotel magnate Sol Kerzner, rises out of the Caribbean Sea like a sparkling city that has just been discovered. And while the origins of the mythical Atlantis remain open for debate, there can be no doubting the appeal of its modern-day namesake. For three days this month, my wife Mary and I had the pleasure of exploring ... [Read More]

Dawn’s Early Light

  The aircraft is chased west by daybreak, while below us a city by a river or a mountain range awakes, over and over again, lives breaking free from the sleepy clouds on which they lay their heads. There’s another big river, its conversation with the land changing the course of each. Like a shark we keep moving, gobbling up the miles but not the hours, which always catch up, reigning over every food chain, humbling any speed you can muster. Another dawn catches us headed to where the oilsands weep oil in the boreal forest. The day comes on like a Rothko painting, suffused with the deep ... [Read More]

Shark fins and chicken testicles

Many Asian cultures place great importance on visitor’s willingness to eat any local food presented to them. Knowing this, and always wanting to make a good impression, I’ve never refused anything offered, which is why on past trips I’ve downed without hesitation live bugs, snake pancreas (cut from the still-alive scaled beast at my table) and steaming yellow crab brains, among other things. Today, I broke my cardinal rule, refusing, I believe for the first time, to eat the proffered local delicacy. My refusal wasn’t based on any assumed revulsion for the taste or texture of the food in question. Quite the opposite – by all accounts the ... [Read More]