I haven’t posted in a week because MD and I have been hard at work in Seattle and at Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Islands located in northwestern Washington.

We’re working on our project that we’ve been keeping under wrap.  No, it’s not the new book, and, no, it’s not Metabosol.  It is something pretty cool and even revolutionary in its own way.  Barring further bumps in the road (there have been a few), we should be able to reveal all on September 1. The reason for the secrecy is that this project is most press worthy, but, for reasons that will be obvious when we reveal what we’ve been working on, we don’t want the press to report it prematurely.

We flew into Seattle Sunday afternoon after buzzing across the top of Mount St. Helens and looking into the crater left when the top 1300 feet of the mountain blew off on May 18, 1980.  After landing, we got picked up by our partner and taken to his boat for an afternoon on Lake Union.  A huge annual celebration was taking place, so we spent the afternoon on a lake made choppy by a thousand other boats while the Blue Angels zipped through the sky overhead.  Seattle has been experiencing brutally hot temperatures, which we got blasted by on Sunday afternoon.

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When we were in London a few weeks ago we met for an hour or so with Heston Blumenthal, who treated us to a four hour lunch at his famous restaurant, the Fat Duck. The meal was unlike anything we had ever had anywhere, and it shows why the Fat Duck has won the Best Restaurant in the World honors for a couple of years running.

I’ve intended to post on this fabulous meal, but haven’t yet because of the time it would take to describe everything.  I took photographs of every course, and if I included them all in one post, it would probably take a half an hour just to download it.

An article in the Telegraph, the UK’s most widely read newspaper, last week gave me an idea as to how to do the post on the meal.  I’ll divide it into multiple posts whenever something comes up that inspires a description of one of the courses.  Since all of the courses at the Fat Duck are of a theme, this won’t be too difficult.

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Product review: Globe Trotter luggage

The photo you see above is of my beloved Globe Trotter Cetenary roll aboard.  I took it with me on this last trip to Hong Kong and London, much to the chagrin of MD, who hates this piece of luggage with a passion.

MD is a packer extraordinaire and is totally practical.  When it comes to packing, ‘cool looking’ isn’t in her vocabulary.  Since we travel so much, we have gone through many pieces of luggage over the years, and she has found the Hartmann bags best for her particular style of packing.  She can cram more into her Hartmann bags than any one believes possible.  And when she pulls her packed stuff out, it all looks great.

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I apologize for not being more attentive to this blog since leaving Hong Kong a week ago.  But my excuse is that we’ve  been in London.  I’ve always been on the same wave length as Samuel Johnson, who said “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”  I have a great blog post in mind, but I just can’t bring myself to spend the three or four hours it will take me to put it up when London beckons outside my window.

There are so many things to like about London that I don’t know where to begin to describe them to those who haven’t had the opportunity to visit.  For one, it’s probably the only major city in the Western world in which the highest  building is only 46 stories.  Most of London looks much like the photo at the top of this post that I took while crossing the street yesterday – non-skyscraper skylines with old buildings with very old buildings interspersed.  One of the main things I really enjoy about London is the fact that being a pedestrian is almost a full-contact sport requiring full attention, especially for Americans who are used to looking the wrong way when crossing the street.

I loath the American way of being a pedestrian.  In the US pedestrians have the right of way and are usually pretty obnoxious about it.  I can’t stand it when I’m in a car and a pedestrian or a group of pedestrians slowly strolls across the crosswalk, taking their time in an almost passive-aggressive fashion.  The most annoying pedestrians are those who consider it a point of honor not to look at the cars coming to a stop as they saunter across in front of them, as if to look indicates a sign of weakness.  These people know that if the car hits them, it is the driver’s fault and not theirs.  But they don’t stop to consider that they, the pedestrians, will be the ones in the hospital or in the morgue.  They seem not to understand that accidents are called accidents for a reason.  Being kind of an  aggressive person myself, I love to close  on these saunterers at a rate that gets their attention.  I consider it a victory if I make them at least look at my oncoming car and perhaps start to consider if they need to jump or not.

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After our meeting at the factory we’re working with, the president of said factory treated us all to a feast at our restaurant.  As Chinese tradition dictates, such feasts are accompanied with many, many toasts.  The toast works this way:  the person making the toast picks out a specific person to toast, walks over to that person, raises his/her glass and gives the toast.  The translator translates.  The person receiving the toast answers back.  The translator translates back.  Then both toaster and toastee down drinks in one swallow.  After this, the glasses are immediately refilled by one of the servers.

In our case, the liquor used for toasting purposes was either red wine or bai jiu, a Chinese white wine that is actually more of a distilled liquor.  The Chinese love bai jiu, which has a distinctive flavor.  It’s about 50 percent alcohol and has a front end taste that is kind of like the essence of an infusion of dirty socks in some sort of floral alcohol and a back end like lighter fluid.  It’s an acquired taste, and one that I had sort of acquired after a zillion toasts.

As the meal progressed, the toasting evolved into each toast requiring the downing of both a glass of red wine and a glass of bai jiu.  Thank God we ran out of red wine and baiu jiu before I ran out of consciousness.  The photo above shows me just before downing a glass of each after a toast from the head of operations at the factory.

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