Monthly Archives: December 2025

International Meals – Mauritius

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When I was in grad school…

No not for the Physics degree, before that.

No not the previous one either, the one before THAT.

Dear lord, I’ve spent way too much time in college.

At any rate, ONE of the times I was in grad school, I had a fellow member of my cohort who was from Mauritius.  She said that she used to have trouble at immigration control, because the country was so tiny that it sometimes didn’t appear on their list.

“I’m from Mauritius.”

“Mauritania?”

“No, Mauritius?”

“You’re from Mauritania?”

…sigh “Yes, I’m from Mauritania.”

“C’mon in!”

This was obviously a different time.

Speaking of different times, at different times, Mauritius was occupied by the Dutch, the French, the British, and was visited by the Arabs and Portuguese.  There’s no evidence Zheng He ever went there, but sure, why not – let’s say he did too.

Suffice it to say, the food culture of this island is quite diverse.  In terms of the national dish, the one that comes up the most often as a candidate is a lentil filled flatbread called dhol puri. And since flatbread by itself is kinda boring, we’re going to make another dish called sausage rougaille.  Rougaille is a tomato based sauce that is quite common on Mauritius, and putting sausage in it is a good way to get some protein in there.

I found a website which appears to be written by an expat, so we’ll go with her recipes.

First, the flatbread.  You take channa dal (split yellow lentils) and boil them.  How long?

“Until mushy”.

Oh dear – it’s THAT kind of recipe is it?  Ugh. Fine. How about an hour?  That seemed to work.

Once the peas are properly mushy, you blend them with some tumeric, salt, and cumin seeds to make a paste.

You also make a basic flour and water dough and leave that to rest a bit. But the interesting thing there is that you use the bean water to mix with the flour.


Once the dough’s had a chance to rest, you fill it with the chick pea mixture.

That gets sealed into balls, and those are rolled super thin for cooking.


Cooking couldn’t be simpler – just grill on both sides for a few minutes each.  One thing the video I watched stressed, however, is that every time you flip one of these things over, you should brush it with a little oil.  I suspect a lot of the flatbreads we made for our Indian meal would have gone better if I had heeded this instruction – it really did make a difference in keeping them soft.

OK, what shall we eat WITH these breads?  Rougaille turns out to be fairly straightforward.  First you sweat some onions with thyme, coriander seed, curry leaves, ginger and garlic pastes, and… peppercones?

You know what, my French isn’t any better.


This actually smelled pretty amazing all by itself.

To this, you add tomato puree and diced tomatoes.  The recipe actually called for a specific brand of tomato puree, but we definitely don’t have that one at our local Save On.  So I just pureed a can of basic “diced, no extra salt.”

And in it all went to simmer down.

Speaking of specific brands, I DEFINITELY didn’t have the specific brand of honey chicken sausages the author was asking for, so I just got some bog standard mechanically separated chicken wieners.

I shouldn’t be so dismissive – these things smelled pretty good while they were being browned.  A little color imparted, they were chopped into short segments and chucked into the tomato sauce to finish cooking, and that was the dish!

Here’s the whole meal, with some white rice to fill it out.

This is one of those things where showing everything separate isn’t really an honest picture of what the meal is like.  Here’s a better idea:

That looks more like a nice tasty home cooked meal.  And it was!

The tomato sauce, in particular, was REALY good, from all the seasoning.  The chicken wieners punched surprisingly above their weight, and the bread had a great texture for scooping it all up.  In terms of flavor, the bread was a bit dull, but it’s nothing a bit more salt wouldn’t have probably fixed.

Mauritania, I’m sorry, Mauritius, really has some tasty food – we’d certainly be down to try some more at some point.

Next time, the start of what we suspect is the final country we’ll be breaking into multiple meals!

Recipes:
Sausage Rougaille
Dholl Puri

Thailand, Day 14: Seoul. Wait, what?

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As we mentioned in the first post, while you can fly direct from Bangkok back to Vancouver, it would be on Air Canada, which I recently described to a zoomer coworker as “mid”.  The coworker pretended to be very impressed that I had used “mid” correctly.

We chose Korean Air Lines instead, as it allowed us to use our accumulated Sky Team miles to cover the entire airfare.  And unsurprisingly , flying KAL involves a stopover in Seoul.  (Technically Incheon, FWIW)

Specifically, a nine hour stopover in Seoul, which actually gave us enough time to take the 50 minute train from the airport into the city and see a few things before coming back to make our flight.

Now, the airport itself runs excursions for tourists in exactly our situation.  They even provide appropriate winter clothes for said tourists.  Sadly, those excursions all leave at 9 AM, and we didn’t clear immigration until 9:20.

So we went looking for our second airport bag storage in two days.  On the way, we encountered ANOTHER paparazzi intensive situation.  First we saw a bunch of people standing around with remarkably high powered camera equipment in the camera hall.  Then, what was clearly an entourage entered, and all the cameras started whirring, and a group of nearby teen girls started jumping up and down excitedly.

And then there was some running around and general fuss as people tried to get better glimpses of whoever it was.  It was all very exciting. Our best guess is that it was probably this person.

But at any rate, we disposed of our luggage and headed into town.  Where we were confronted with the fact that it was -5 C in Seoul at the moment.  Remember I said the airport tours provided parkas?  Remember I said we weren’t on one of those?

Yeah.

So not a lot of pictures, because it’s hard to take photos when your hands are jammed firmly into your pockets, and you’re shivering so hard you can’t hold the camera still.

We want to the Namdaemun market, because a) it sounded interesting, and b) it was directly adjacent to the train station.

It was interesting.  A different vibe from the markets in Thailand, possibly due to the cold, who knows.  We got some coffee, we got some snacks, we considered just flat out buying parkas, and then we made our way to a narrow alley in the food market section that specialized in one particular type of food – cutlassfish stew, or Galchi Jorim. All along this narrow, covered path, was shop after shop with grills outside in the hallway, and tiny little seating areas inside.

We picked a likely looking one, and discovered that there was exactly one menu item.  This stew for two, plus side dishes.  Sounds good to us!

There were a million bones, but absolutely worth the effort. So good.

We then went and saw the nearby sight.  Here is the sight.

Apparently this is the Sungnyemun Gate.  It was very, very cold.  Let’s go back inside now, OK?

We went back inside.  We had coffee.  We went back to the airport.  We went home.

I would very much like to come back to Korea some day wearing appropriate clothing.  But the one meal we had was a banger, so I’m looking forward to it.

Also, we once again landed well before we took off.

Thailand, Day 13: One Day in Bangkok

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Our flight out of Bangkok to return home left at 1 AM, but our internal flight from Chiang Mai landed at 11 AM (theoretically), so we would have one more full day to explore the capital.  We arrived bright and early at the Chiang Mai airport, and the coffee abundance continued – I counted 9 espresso machines and 5 gates in the section of the terminal where we were.

What we didn’t have was punctuality, so by the time the plane got to Bangkok and we found somewhere to store our bags, it was already well past noon.

Yeah, I got nothing.

Still, who wants to stay in the airport?  We wanted to go find one more restaurant that had been recommended to us before we left, and after that we didn’t have much of a plan other than wander around and see what we could see.

Oh, and it was around thirty, so not the most fun day for a lot of walking.

The restaurant in question is called “Sri Trat,” and is more of a fine dining establishment than most of the places we had been besides Rorsor.  One dish that everyone said was a MUST try was the barracuda salad with peanut brittle dressing.

Not only is this a must try, it is a “worth booking a flight to Bangkok just to eat.” The fish is cooked in vinegar, ceviche style, and then topped with a spicy Thai dressing full of, well, crushed peanut brittle.  It was EASILY one of our top-three dishes the entire trip.

Here’s a recipe if you want to try to make it at home – I’ve already done it once (with cod), and it was definitely in the ballpark.

The rest of the meal was excellent too.


The fruits in the cocktail at left are snake fruit, something I’ve never run across in North America at all, but they’re really tasty if you can find them – somewhere between a banana and a pineapple is how I’d describe it.

Lunch accomplished, we just moseyed around looking for other stuff to look at.  We found a small poster gallery at a nearby mall. The mall itself was already decked out for the traditional Buddhist holiday of (checks notes) Christmas.

We spent some more time just experiencing the insanity that is Bangkok.


And then we decided we wanted to do something a bit more air conditioned with our time, so we headed to the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, a museum whose architecture was not so much Guggenheim inspired as “directly lifted.”

On the way, we encountered the definition of irony:


Yes, that’s a mall directory sign displaying a “not found” error.

There were a number of interesting exhibits at the art gallery, but two in particular caught our eye.  The first could best be described as “What if Keith Haring were the PR agent for the Illuminati?”

Sadly, we don’t have any pictures of that one, and I can’t figure out who the artist was, so you’ll just have to envision it.

What we DO have pictures of is the massive exhibition of an artist I’m kind of surprised isn’t better known in the west – Chatchai Puipea.  Dude doesn’t even have an English language Wikipedia page.

And yet the variety and sheer magnitude of works on display was really something.


If you’re into contemporary art, he should definitely be on your list to investigate.

From there, we wandered around to a few more nearby malls, including a sort of grubby one that reminded us a lot of Nakano Broadway in Tokyo, and then back to the food court of the mall where we had lunch on the very first day.

For our last proper meal in Bangkok, we had crab noodle soup with wontons.

For desert, we got smoothies, and then had to wander around the mall consuming them, because we couldn’t take them on the train back to the airport.  While doing that, we ran into what appeared to be a boy band giving a press conference about their new movie.


And because there’s no justice, these knuckleheads DO get a Wikipedia page.

Papparazzi popped, smoothies consumed, it was time to board the train and head back to the airport.  Thailand was amazing – we definitely want to come back at some point.  But interestingly, there will still be one more blog entry after this one.  Stay tuned…

Thailand, Day 12: Monk’s Trail

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On our last day in Chiang Mai, we decided to go for a walk.  Specifically, we decided to make our way up a hiking trail, colloquially referred to as “the monk’s trail”, since it leads first to a monastery, and then to a temple.

Both of which are up the side of a reasonably steep hill.

We took a Grab to the start of the hike, and it really was a very tranquil walk in the woods.


We had been a bit nervous, because some videos we had watched on this hike indicated that it was quite punishing.  But the first bit, from the trailhead up to the monastery, was fine.


Some neat birds, a few waterfalls, and we arrived at Wat Pha Lat, which was a lovely secluded spot to rest for a while.


And at this point, we were faced with a choice – there was a road that passed nearby, on which we could probably get a ride to the temple at the top of the hill.  Or we could keep hiking.

We decided to at least hike up to the road, instead of walking over to the main entrance.

Whoo boy – the hike up to the road was near vertical, and when we came out, we realized there was a LOT more near vertical between us and the temple on top of the mountain.

So we hailed a passing songthaew, which appeared to be well used to this eventuality.

And as the truck switchbacked up, and up, and up, and up, and up, we became less and less concerned that we had somehow wimped out, and more and more grateful that we had decided not to spend the entire day hauling ourselves up the side of a a mountain.

Besides, it’s not like we were done climbing.  Disembarking at the entrance to Doi Suthep, we were confronted with one or two stairs to climb to get to the temple.


Like Tiger Cave, though, the view was worth it.

I managed to give myself two jump scares in quick succession in one of the smaller rooms around the temple complex.

Something we’d seen at quite a few temples was lifelike figures of famous monks.  Including some relatively recent ones with modern-looking glasses.  This was a pretty common thing.

But I missed the one near the entrance to this room until after I walked in, so I turned, and immediately started, because there was a figure of a monk sitting to the left of the entrance.

OK, that’s funny.

Then the monk moved and I jumped again, because it turns out this was a real person, and not a figure.

The main stupa at Doi Sutep is at the very highest point, and is itself pretty darned impressive.

And then we had to do the stairs the OTHER way.


One songthaew later, and we were back in town.  Only two more meals left in Chiang Mai – what to do? How about some Thai style fried chicken?


Yes please.  It was so good we forgot to take a picture of it before it was gone, that’s how good it was.

For the afternoon, we wanted to try one more thing that tourists in Thailand do, and that’s get a Thai massage.  There are massage places everywhere in the tourist areas of Thailand.  I cannot stress just how common they are – typically 2 or 3 per block.

So picking one in particular can be difficult, but fortunately we had gotten a recommendation from some of our friends from the elephant sanctuary trip the day before.  When we arrived, there was scheduling availability for each of us to get a foot and leg rub together, so that’s what we did.

And here’s the thing… I don’t think I did this right.  I had never gotten a professional massage before, and so I just assumed that the masseur knew what they were doing, and if things started to hurt, they were supposed to.

Things started to hurt.  Specifically, when he started digging into the balls of my feet there was a lot of pain.  Not the fun pain, not the “oh you bastard, keep doing that,” pain, just… pain.

But I thought that was normal, so I bit my lip and powered through.

It wasn’t fun, and I didn’t feel better at the end.

And from talking to Leigh afterwards, I realized that isn’t what’s supposed to happen.  I should have said something when the pain got bad, and asked the masseur to slow down, or do something else.

But I didn’t, so I spent the next couple hours limping around the hipster neighborhood of Nimmanhaemin.

Now to be clear – it’s a fun neighborhood.  We saw some cool jewelry stores, had some (sadly underwhelming) craft beer, ate some chocolate, got fooled by some AI generated slop on a playlist (ugh), and generally enjoyed the atmosphere.

One last meal – what to do? We had been told that one thing that it is good to try in Thailand is Burmese food, since it’s so hard to get in North America.  On the one hand, we were actually an exception to that rule, since we were fortunate enough to live near a good Burmese restaurant in Michigan for quite some time.

On the other hand, we lived near a good Burmese restaurant in Michigan for quite some time, so we knew how delicious Burmese food is.  Pickled tea leaves, here we come!

(At least there was SOME food left when we remembered to snap the picture?)

We wandered back to our hotel, and went for one last walk around.  Chiang Mai is great, and probably our favorite place we stayed in the whole trip. 5/5 would tourist again.