Bacon

Letter B, day 14/14, 28/365

This is not bacon. This is “Korean bacon” also known as samgyeopsal (삼겹살). This basically means “three layer meat.” The name is apt because this cut of pork is supposed to have meat, fat, meat, fat, meat, and fat.

The fattiness of this meat is a virtue, though. Truly; for the grease filters down across the domed grill you see here, then through the kimchi, mushrooms, and bean sprouts grilling alongside it. My favorite way to eat this meal: take a piece of meat, smear it around in a mixture of oil, salt, and pepper, then wrap it in grilled kimchi and top it with a slice of grilled garlic.

So, so good.

By the way, pictures on this blog will be mediocre until I’ve recovered creatively from Cambodia. I’ve got some ideas in mind. Send me your C prompts, folks! I’ve got a fair number, but as I expected, interest in my project is waning and thus I receive fewer suggestions. I hope that changes soon.

Borders – Cambodia – Six Images

For this post, I begin with text, because it will be quite image-heavy. As mentioned before I departed for the Kingdom of Wonder, I intended to choose a post from each day I spent away from Korea to use for that day’s entry in this project. Of course, I knew I would take a bajillion pictures over the course of the trip, so that presented no problem.

What posed a problem, was that I knew there wasn’t a really practical method for receiving, choosing, and making a picture for various B-related prompts while travelling. Plus, I just didn’t want the hassle on what was ostensibly my vacation.

I chose to take an easy way out, and went with what was suggested to me by Rachel Sanchez, a colleague of mine from graduate school: borders. Now, I could have been super creative, but like I wrote, I wanted this to really be a vacation. Thus I decided that every picture taken on this trip would more or less qualify as fitting into the concept of borders, although that didn’t stop me from occasionally shooting with that specific idea in mind.

Travelling, as those of you who have done so know, is all about crossing borders. Whether you travel in your home country and pass between municipalities, provinces, states, or regions, you experience borders whether you’d like to or not. Borders come in the form of people; through emotions, speech, and ideas; through places, environments, and geography; through gastronomy, aural and olfactory perception; through everything that is different.

Thus I present six images from my trip. They’re not all great, but they reflect my trip well. Please check this Flickr set to see the rest of my Cambodia images as I edit them and upload them.

Now, get out there and travel!

Day 1: Ting and a bowl of pho: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

Day 2: $.50 Anchor draft beer and a map of Angkorian temples

Day 3: Light and shadow inside Angkor Wat

Day 4: Lines and reflection at Preah Neak Pean

Day 5: The lonely tractor – along a canal leading into Tonle Sap Lake through the Submerged Forest

Day 6: Early morning sun and clouds over marshes near Tonle Sap Lake