Culture Vultures – We Are Where We Eat?

This week my travels have me back in the Philippines, a place that I truly adore and am only too happy to return to, with frequency. Regardless of where you go in Manila you may very well experience every shade of the social greyscale and cross between historical to uber-modernisation but, despite being one of the most populated cities in the world, as soon as you step off your plane it is a place that resonates kindness, courtesy and hospitality at its most genuine, without being subservient.

I find Manila a humbling experience for this very reason that the same hospitable behaviour is not one that can be guaranteed in so many other cities across the world. But as I consider how so many people leave one country to build a life in another, or to travel and tour new places, I wonder…. how much of our behaviour is really to do with our heritage, or are our core values and behaviour, in fact, actually influenced by our surroundings?

Travelling near or far, I meet and build friendships with so many people that are orginally from other countries and are now living in another and, as I understand their past and present I wonder ....does our DNA define who we are and how we treat others, or are we conditioned by what goes on around us and where we decide to live?

For example, can the kindness and caring nature that I so applaud in Manila survive the busy pace of London or New York, or does western city living smother this characteristic warmth and desire to help others, to replace it with a coldness for self-survival and a blinkered and introspective single-vision?

Does a travelling hub like New York exude a service mentality only because of the transience of so many other cultures that walk its streets every day, or does everyone really wish that everyone else has a nice day?

Is there perhaps a reason why there is always an Irish Bar on the corner of every major city, busy every night, celebrating a carefree top o’the morning, or is it that everywhere needs an escapism for some luck of the Irish?

In today’s world of fast paced living and cross-border travelling it is questionnable if multi-culturalism is even possible, or is it in fact at risk of becoming de-culturised as we advocate a lifestyle and behaviour based on where we decide to live versus being home-grown and true to what we know from our roots and where we were born? Is it really a case that we are what we eat, or more true that we are where we eat…?

 ‘Til next time, Pandora

Old Classics or the New Jurassics?

They say that what goes around, comes around. Trends, fashions, fads. Everything is cyclical and, whether a few years or a few decades, everything reappears for a new generation with a new modern twist.

Now, normally I find myself logging onto blogging as a result of some form of inspiration that has triggered my thoughts from a random observation, conversation or event. This week, conversely, my thoughts have provoked contemplation, if not concern, following one said random conversation with a fresh faced teen, who chatted to me about her weekend plans to curl up with her boyfriend to watch some old movies and escape the cold....

The concept of her plans, I whole-heartedly agreed with. I couldn't better depict the perfect lazy weekend, with the heat of a log fire and an old movie…you know the ones – Casablanca, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, It’s a Wonderful Life. Or, moving to technicolor modern classics with the genius of Scarface, The Godfather trilogy, all of Rocky (maybe with the exception of V).

Unless, that is, you are under the age of 21.

Old movies, according to Miss Teen, referred to the cinematic masterpieces like Matilda, Speed, and anything Hugh Grant circa Four Weddings and Funeral. I didn’t dare remind her that colour TV did not always come in 3-D and via download but, as I stopped to think of my own rainy day DVD (and, for that matter, VHS) favourites, I wondered ....had time passed me by so quickly that iconic had unwittingly transitioned to archaic, or when exactly did classic suddenly mature to Jurassic?

I remember back to the days when my mum would inform me that the cool new clothes I shopped for were just like the ones she wore in her day, and how I cringed that she suggested her style was just ‘coming back around’. And my dad feeling disturbed that my pop star idols had ruined the ‘original’ version of tune that everyone was singing to and playing in their car.

Even the word vinyl feels vintage these days, ironically saved only by the fact that retro is actually the new cool. But, as Generation MP3 gradually devolutionises the humble CD to extinction and 3D movie screenings in cyberspace threaten the closure of the multiplex, I wonder ...is the modern age really growing up too quickly, or have I assumed the role of my parents of the ‘second time around’?

For those of us who grew up 'analogue' and have just more recently made the 'switch' and joined the cloud ...is it simply the case that we are spending too much time looking back, being cool with the retro, that we cannot actually move forwards…?

‘Til next time, Pandora

Cheese Bored and Fromage Frail….

It has been said before that I do not suffer fools gladly and, by my own admission, I may sway to the lower than average levels of tolerance for certain and many things. Randomly, milk is one of those things.

There is no medical proof to my intolerance of calcium fortified commodities. My name is Pandora, and I am a self-diagnosed lactose-intolerant.  

Perhaps it is my vague recollection, or suppression, of being forced to drink warm curdling milk through a straw at school as a child that serves as the trigger to my lactose-overdose and which I hold fully accountable for my abhorrence to the white stuff, but by default it includes everything else that would appear to derive from the under belly of a cow.

It is with despair, therefore, that despite setting out to enjoy an evening of gastronomic delight this weekend I was, in fact, served up with delight-turned-fright-night as I watched my fun-undo in a cheese fondue -  cheese breads, cheese sauces, cheese toppings, cheesecake, cheese crackers, cheese boards.

One by one every plate destined to annihilate my palate. Turophile, I am not.

I have no doubt, however, that there are many of you that think there is nothing better than some feta - even my own uncontrollable shudder with the udder has a few unexplained exceptions that permits a semi skim dash on my cereal, an occasional peppermint mocha, a Bailey's over ice and, controversially, I have acquired a somewhat novice cheesetolerance via pizza. That, however, is as much calcium as I can attest my bones have been grown from. I am by no means a reformed cheesephobic. For me and my olfactory receptors, in fact, this cheese fest was not goudha…

So, as I continue to play Houdini with the haloumi I wonder…from where have we derived our obsession with Camembert and the glee with Brie? Is cheese the new social canapé, or am I pre-destined to be the one who is cheesed off, going crackers and truly on the whine?

‘Til next time, Pandora

New Year, NOT New You

I have never been one for New Year’s resolutions. I call it realism. Realism and a fairly solid recurring drop-out rate from my peer group that would suggest that, unless some form of miracle accompanies the 12 chimes of the New Year countdown, then 80% of your life in one year is fairly certain to continue just as it left the year gone by. 

It may be worth contemplating that and considering that it may be somewhat of a challenge to find the time to climb Kilimanjaro, call home every week twice a week, get to bed 1 hour earlier Sunday to Thursday, develop the perfect six- pack or, if truth be told, to hibernate long enough on bread and water to successfully eradicate your debt, especially when the chances of staying tee-total and non smoking for more than 5 days is relatively slim. Just a hunch….

According to Freud, the keystones to our existence are work and love yet, as I marvel with friends on their new year plans for perfection, I am conscious how few of the many promises of self improvement actually involve anything work related, or doing more of what they are good at?

Work-life balance is so-called because, controversially, it is in fact meant to have both in the mix. I wonder, however ...have we become impervious to what is good in our lives that we prefer to spend half our working day dipping in and out of Facebook to tell the world how difficult it is to function on a banana and 2 oz of brazil nuts whilst the guy down the office aptly grabs the promotion you could have so easily achieved?

It would appear that a happy New Year can only be awarded through some form of purgatorial cleansing.  An unspoken rule of being entered into punitively, whereby you can only truly achieve success by suffering, intermittently falling off the corresponding resolution wagon and ending up miserable by the time you inevitably come full circle, back to square one.

Call me old fashioned, but there is nothing that breeds success more as success itself so, as we enter into the second week of this New Year, I wonder is it perhaps perfect timing for the grand opening of the Second-Chance Saloon to swap the diet for hard work? I mean...why settle for being good, when you can so easily be great?

‘Til next time, Pandora