Text 23434, 71 rader
Skriven 2012-04-07 04:26:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: eo trip rep 515
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We started with Singhas in the normal way and progressed to
seafood hot-sour hot pot, tart and spicy, with lots of squid
and greenlip mussels and some other things thrown in, lots
of cilantro and lemongrass. You could add extra hot pepper
or lime at your option. Alex is mad for green papaya salad,
so we had that and told the proprietor to hold off until we
had figured out the rest of the meal. At some point Chuckie
decided that we'd spent too much time dithering; he started
bringing things out, including a couple Guinness black
lagers (tastes like ordinary beer with black food coloring).
Pork jerky Issan-style with coriander seed, he said, goes
very well with som tum, and so it was. We also had a nice
beef in yellow curry, followed by catfish with basil and
red sauce, which was done authentically, the fish cooked
pretty hard and the sauce rather salty and hot. This last
didn't universally appeal, as we have become accustomed to
eating food without rice, whereas in the almost universal
scheme of things, the food is meant to be eaten with rice,
almost as an accent to it. At some point, sated, we went no
mas and said our goodbyes. As I had a very early flight, it
had been deemed silly for me to go back and pay another
night's hotel, so I went back to snooze on Alex's couch
for a few hours. I had him fix me a perfect Manhattan and
watched a bit of Food Network before falling asleep.
==
0328 UA1134 PHX EWR 0635 1415 739 3F

At the airport an hour before, security was pretty packed,
but traffic flowed pretty quickly, and I had half an hour at
the United Club, which was manned by one somewhat grumpy
old fellow. Aboard, the crew were also kind of grumpy, but
they were okay, though my headphone request (they didn't put
them out ahead) had to be repeated an hour later.

The Continental full breakfast. Fruit appetizer - really
nice pineapple, decent grapes, a huge quantity of very
crunchy cantaloupe and honeydew, and a small wedge of ripe
mango -, very abundant and pretty acceptable; cup of fruit
yogurt; cinnamon roll (pretty good though not quite warmed
through) or croissant; main plate of potato au gratin wedge,
rather tasty as always, horrid sausage puck, and a decent
fluffyish omelet filled with decent Cheddaroid.

I was pretty much ignored by the cabin crew, which is fine.
We were at the gate on time, which meant that I had time to
visit the club for a quick drink or three.

UA4879 EWR BWI 1500 1608 Q40 1A

The DH8-Q400, a somewhat upgraded version of the commuter
workhorse, is fairly comfortable and reasonably quiet (when
it came out it was advertised in the aviation magazines, it
was described as quieter than most jets); it's also quite a
bit more sightly than the other props and in fact than most
of the commuter jets. This was a gleaming white new one, and
I had 1A, which has nice legroom.

A cutish, nice Brazilian FA. I slept through this flight.
Discovered that my SmarTrip card had disappeared sometime
in the past week or two, so I ended up paying full boat for
the bus; as I didn't get a free transfer, I stopped off in
Rockville for a meal at Tara Asia (an iDine place), where I
had a very mediocre fried calamari with sweet chili sauce,
much improved by ground smoked red chile flakes, followed
by a pretty good, extremely brown, and impossibly abundant
matsaman beef, also much improved by ground smoked red chile
flakes.

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