Bilaeva

I'm coping with a boring patch at work by listening to back to back episodes of Excess Baggage, a BBC radio programme about travel. In the last 24 hours I've heard dozens of tales of people's adventures across the globe, bringing into painful focus the fact that the last time I ventured to a new country was 2003! Ideas are swirling around my brain, slowly taking shape as escape plans. I think perhaps it's time I took a gap year! I could renew the lease on my apartment, thereby securing a home for myself, then sublease my spot for a couple months, quit my job (it's about time anyway), and disappear on a hair raising adventure. Ok, so you would never find me paddling up the Amazon or hitchhiking across the Sahara, but there are some once in a lifetime adventure destinations I'd love to hit up...
Peru Georgian Republic









Vietnam Samarkand












China

Something I can do is put a ball in the back of the net. We played five-a-side football on Saturday morning over in Battery Park City. Three goals were scored on each side, and I scored two for my team. Not bad for my first ever match. It was a glorious morning and we had ridiculous amounts of fun. My skills don't extend to passing, dribbling, or tackling opposing players but there's the rest of the summer for that.

I can do a few things that no one could mess up and occassionally I get lucky if I follow a recipe exactly. But on the whole, I'm a dead loss in the kitchen. Every time I try a baking recipe I come up with something different. Same recipe, same ingredients, never the same result! I tried making curry a couple months ago. Even spent $50 dollars on a small food processor I was so excited. It cooked for over two hours and I still didn't have a proper curry in front of me, finally ended up taking suggestions from the floor, adding flour, cream, and whatever else my roommates shouted out. They all said it was delicious. They're good people, aren't they!

But I'm not one to give up easily (ask me about the last bloke in my life...) and having seen the film Ratatouille twice in the last two weeks, I figured if the rat could cook so could I. I hurried to our posh supermarket, the infamous Jubilee, and collected up all the ingredients for, you guessed it, ratatouille, a dish I love so much I used to eat it cold out of a tin. I laboured for ages over thinly sliced tomatoes, squash and eggplant, I even made my own special sauce to go with it. The anticipation could have been measured on the Richter scale, and the result was utterly deflating. It didn't taste unpleasant, but it was nowhere near anything special.

Dad can go to a restaurant in Thailand, come home and collect up all the revolting looking ingredients and reproduce the dish he had in Thailand for our own dinner table. Clearly this is not something that is passed genetically. I got all his quirky stuff, but not his talent in the kitchen. The only consolation is that I live in places like London and New York where there's never a shortage of delicious food to be found. Oh and if I ever invite you to dinner... think about it carefully before you say yes.