Turbans, tropharia, and zhuànshū

Sunday, despite everything, was another good day. I slept basically the whole morning, which is usually a good start, and when I got up, Monshu made us waffles and bacon. He was watching "Ground Force" on BBC America and when it ended, I flipped to IndiaVision on the International Channel. The first video was six minutes of Sikh devotional music accompanied by images of the three performers, the Golden Temple, devout worshippers, and what I think might have been the Guru Granth Sahib draped in precious cloth. The rest of the hour was a peppy mix of Bollywood and bhangra interspersed with ads for South Asian businesses and festivals, mostly in California. The code-switching was amazing; "office", "telephone number", and the actual digits of the phone number seemed to be in English regardless of the language of the ad.

The highlight of the show came during a bhangra dance number when Monshu got up and began workin' it. That represents only the third time in my life that I've seen the Great White One dance. He excused his high spirits by saying, "There's something about the music that's just so happy." During the ads for a music festival in Fresno, he said, "That could be fun. Bollywood-style dance numbers, all the bright colours." This from Mr Minimalist Aesthetic! It's like we've come to interpenetrate each other to such a degree that when I'm droopy, he takes up the slack by becoming the silly, bouncy one.

We napped in the early afternoon, then Monshu woke me up for our concert of Russian liturgical music at the local Greek Orthodox church. Unfortunately, we were both a little disappointed. At the Christmas concert, there had been three standout baritone soloists. This time, however, there was little in the way of solos. The pieces also seemed shorter and lighter. Only one seemed to build and develop like the longer pieces in that earlier performance.

Fortunately, it poured while we were in the church and, by the time we left, there was sun. Back at the ranch, we ordered from Reza's and got some pleasant surprises. First of all, their grilled scallops were very good and very reasonably priced. We tried some new vegetarian things, shami and borani of spinach, and found them both very tasty. Afterwards, we logged on to answer some of the questions that had come up during the day: What is an amritdhari Sikh? Who was St. John Kochurov and what's his connexion to Chicago? How do you say "I am" in Hindi?

Oh, and as far as answering questions goes, I had a real "Eureka!" moment earlier in the day. Friday night, Monshu had presented me with imprints of the Chinese seals he's gotten on eBay and asked me to label what each was. One had me puzzled. My best guess at the two characters (hé "harmony" and zhāng "chapter") made no sense. After a while I gave up and decided I'd just have to study my book on the lesser seal script again before my next attempt. Then, as we were leaving, I caught sight of the large brass coin hanging on Monshu's door. It has four characters on it and two of them were the ones I couldn't identify: rú "as, like" yì "idea" (i.e. "as you like", "as much as you can imagine", etc.).

A feast of American saints

So, while researching the life of St. John Kochurov (whose Chicago connexion is that he helped found Holy Trinity Cathedral--designed by Louis Sullivan--in Ukrainian Village), we stumbled across an excellent page on American saints hosted by the Orthodox Church in America. St. Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America, was the only one Monshu and I had ever heard of before. Who knew that there was a St. Raphael of Brooklyn? The story we found most interesting, however, was that of St. Alexis Toth, who was actually a Uniate priest until snubbed by Fr John Ireland (a man, quoth Monshu, "who did a lot of good for the Church and a lot of bad") because of the window it opened on Catholic immigrant history--though the tales of half-Aleut missionary St. Jacob of Alaska are also not without their (entirely different) appeal.

Enjoy!

Armchair adventures in less-than-extreme cuisine

Saturday night we visited Nuphy, fresh from his laparoscopic surgery. I was out gallivanting with Nibadi and didn't make it there until 5:30. Monshu was just stepping outside for a smoke and I went right up to the living room where ottr4bear and Rubeus were chatting with Nuphy. The old bear had something of the autumnal air of a patriarch to him, relaxing as he was in large recliner in nightshirt, robe, and two blankies.

We needed to order food and Nuphy said he was curious about this Chinese delivery menu that he'd gotten. (I can hear the sighs of relief from rollick, among others--finally! He is going to talk about food!) He thought it'd be of special interest to me because one side was completely in Chinese. On that score, he was totally correct. I compared the Chinese menu to the English and here are the differences I noted:

• The seafood section was three or four times larger.
• There were no appetisers listed.
• Entrees had only a single price and it was equal to or lower than the lower of two prices for each entree on the English menu.
• There were no symbols indicating spiciness.
• There were organs. I can't tell you exactly which organs, since I haven't learned the characters for them all, but I do know the "flesh" radical when I see it and it usually denotes organs.
• The fried rices and chow meins had intriguing names as opposed to being identified simply by choice of meat.

I chose an interesting-looking chow mein, Yangzhou dry [something] beef, and passed the menu around. Since my selection was only on the Chinese menu, I decided to try ordering all the dishes off of there. Would the portions really be smaller, as Rubeus was warning? I had to find out.

I asked the operator if I could give her numbers instead of names. She hesitated, then said okay. I gave her the number for chénpí jī (orange chicken) and she said, "From the Chinese menu?" with a slight querying lilt. I felt like my little ruse had been discovered. "Um...yeah. The next one's also from there" and I gave a number and attempted to say "sesame chicken" in Cantonese, but she cut me off. I got the message: Please don't murder my language; listen how kind I'm being to yours! At the end, she said something about soup, which I hadn't ordered or intended to. When I queried her, she said, "When you order off the Chinese menu, you get soup. Is that alright?" Twist this roundeye's arm!

I wish I could say it was all fantastic, but...well...it was typical Cantonese delivery food. Monshu held his tongue until after we'd left and then let loose his condemnation. The further we were from Nuphy's, the worst he deemed it. At first it was "nothing special", but by the time we were at his door it was "really bad". I humbly think that the chow mein was the most interesting dish. The beef was tender and spicy--I think the character for "dry" might've been refering to a dry rub of some kind. (The worst was probably the bloated crabless crab rangoon.) The soup was...odd. Large serrated leaves gave it a slightly sour taste--a bit like sorrel soup, but not so intense. I drank half a bowl and no one else touched it, but Nuphy was subsisting off of broth alone, so I wonder if he hasn't downed some by now.