The Street Food Guy

Eating and drinking my way around the world

Eating

Eating and Drinking in Ljubljana

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As fate would have it I would be moving to Tirana to work with Pioneer Media on a movie. I have previously said that getting there was quite the journey, but after a mere two nights trying to “acclimatize” we had a business trip to Ljubljana, capital city of Slovenia, and as fate would have it one of the few European countries I have not been to. Country 142.

Getting to Ljubljana meant leaving for Mother Teresa Airport at 3 am and thus sleep would not be the option. Vodka would be the option.

I’ll not go into great details about the journey there, but it involved us getting on the plane last, sitting in business class, and arriving in Ljubljana somewhat jovial. We also arrived 8 hours before our AirBnB were ready to let us in. We carried on the jovial theme in the bars alongside the beautiful river that flows through this extremely beautiful city.

Food wise, whilst I like Asian street food, I do miss European fare. Slovenian food is very Slavic in nature, although with nice Italian influences, meaning lots of meat, cheese, starch, and great drinks.

Ljubljana is a small compact city, with EVERYTHING being in walking distance, even castles! We sampled a hell of a lot of cool bars, and restaurants, but I have to give special mention to two places.

The first super cool one, and right down our alley was the Union brewery, where they offer a tour, lots of beer to try, and heartly Slovenian food which consisted of lots of meat, and pickled vegetables.

The second place to check out in Ljubljana is a bit more weird beard was the former gay area of the city called Metelkova. This former military barracks now homes a prison themed hostel and has become an anarchist commune full of very off the wall bars, and a very pseudo-punk scene.

 It’s pretty cheap too, and rakia always tastes good. I got the impression that should one have wanted, nightly friends could have been made quite easily, but after taking our livers to the limit we settled with a few beers at the English Pub.

How else would an Englishman finish a trip to Ljubljana?

Manila to Tirana – The Long Way

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Usually a day that starts in the Conrad Manila is good day (I got the stay through points OK), I certainly do enjoy a Hilton breakfast, which is certainly rather dissimilar to my street food jollies.

But today (or rather 2 days ago) was not to be a normal day, for I would be moving to Albania to work on a movie. Sounds cool right? It is, but it’s also not exactly Hollywood, so I was tasked finding the cheapest option for flying from Manila to Tirana. I might be a Street Good Guy, but I am a flight guru.

Really by flight guru I mean I will go through hell and back to save a few bucks, which is exactly what I did. I managed to hang out by the pool in the Conrad until they kicked me out, but this still meant I was in Manila airport, or Ninoy Aquino Terminal 2-3 hours before my flight. There is nothing at Manila terminal 2, no lounge, and you can’t smoke. I withdraw some money, as I didn’t think I would need any and treated myself to a Sarsi! I know how to live. If you can spend a little more and avoid terminal 2 in Manila, do it.

I scored a window seat and slept my way to Bangkok, where I was to have 24 hours. Now usually a man of my ilk would see 24 hours in Bangkok as a chance to let of steam shall we say! But I simply booked a hotel near the airport, a rather decent place called Nari Siri Lake View. Nice, but weird lift and no visible lake. I spent most of the 24 hours in my room watching movies, bad movies from the 80’s on Macao channel TV Lotus. If a man is thirsty enough, he will drink piss. Although I felt I should do at least one thing “gareth” and got some street food (it was either that or a LadyBoy).

And thus, the next part of the journey Bangkok to Vienna! You can no longer smoke in the airports of Bangkok, but they at least had a decent lounge, and I ate heartily.

I then pulled my classic get on last trick to Vienna, a flight which was happily half empty, and scored 4 chairs to myself. 8/10 hours sleeping through that journey! Although valium does deserve an honorable mention.

I arrived in Vienna with a 7 hour layover, and spent a lion’s share of it catching up on 3 days work in the airport carpark. Sure I could have gone into Vienna and looked at some historical shit, but you can see that shit anywhere right?

Full kudos to Vienna airport, you can smoke, a lot, there’s booths everywhere, even in the lounge.

The flight to Tirana was one of my more interesting ones, with mass turbulence, problems with the landing wheels, and 15 minutes before landing the flight attendants asking us to read the safety manual.

Luckily, we didn’t crash though, and I was through passport control in 10 minutes to be met (late) by friend, ready to start a new adventure living in Albania!

The Street Food Guy does Albania! Might even blog about it….

The Gutter Gourmet and the Gentrification of Poverty

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I recently wrote a blog about PagPag. If you have not heard of PagPag it is a Filipino word that literally means to “dust of the dirt”, but in culinary terms means people that go around dumpsters, fetch food, essentially dust of the shit, and then sell it to other poor people in the slums. As you’d probably guess this is not done for fun, or choice, but is one of necessity. A necessity that even though pagpag can cause stuff as horrible as cholera it beats malnutrition.

pagpag

I style myself as the Street Food Guy, and I know I have probably had dodgy oil during my time living in Asia, I’ve had the odd bad stomach, but whilst I do like to get down and dirty with the locals I feel lucky that I am not on an economic scale that would necessitate me needing to eat left-overs that could kill me.

But whilst I might have my faults, I feel that few would call me a hipster twat (although there’s a lot you could call me).

Ironically on a flight from Taipei to Manila (home of pagpag) I found myself reading an article on the Guardian online called “I’m the gutter gourmet: how I have spent a month eating other people’s leftovers”. The article is written by someone called Andrew Meyers. I can’t work out from the article if he is a journalist, with the only things I can work out for sure is that he has a job, a father that seemed less of a twat than him, and that he is obviously king of the hipster twat people.

pagpag

He spends the article talking about how he enjoys margarita pizza with cigarette ash on it, chicken chips from thrown in bushes from Arsenal fans (why did this massive cunt have to be a gooner), and about pretentious trips to high end parts of London to eat quinoa from dumpsters. 

So, assuming you haven’t read his garbage, and assuming you are reading my verbal diarrhea, I’ll let you know the main summary of his article. There’s too much “street food waste”, ok fair enough.

He summarises with “its fun being the gutter gourmet. Perhaps word will get around the social media grapevine, and it will, with groups of bearded hipsters combing the sidewalks of Hoxton and Instagramming their putrid-palate pleasers”.

It’s hard to see if he is trying to be funny, or ironic with that ending, the ending of a shit article, that essentially is about there being nothing these urban elites won’t try to gentrify.

Good job Andrew Meyers, you’ve managed the gentrification of eating from dumpsters, and having managed a side bit of cultural appropriation (that’s still a hipster buzz word right) from the people of Smoky Mountain in the Philippines.

You can read this steaming, obnoxious, pretentious pile of donkey wank here.

Dongguan Guide

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Whilst I do enjoy living in Shenzhen I do have a proclivity for visiting Chinese backwaters for a bit of street food, a nice hotel, and a blog. Dongguan can hardly be described as a backwater (having 8 million people), but when you are sandwiched in between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, you gonna have a bit of an inferiority complex.

Background to Dongguan

Dongguan used to be famous for being the biggest brothel in Guangdong, but nowadays its pretty much the place where they moved all the factories from Shenzhen and Guangzhou. More pollution, but plus point is that its a bat shit crazy place to live in comparison to Sheznhen, or the soulless Guangzhou.

What is there to do in Dongguan?

Wikitravel lists a museum about the opium war, and a mall. I can confirm it is a very nice mall.

Dongguan China travel guide

Hotels of Dongguan!

This is why I like going to lower tier cities of China. I paid $60 to stay in the suite of Hotel Silverland, a 4 star type affair, with a swimming pool and a huge suite! Did I need two toilets and a living room? I did not.

hotels in Dongguan China

Street food in Dongguan?

Breakfast buffets in Dongguan tend to be of the shit variety, but downtown there is a ton of great restaurants serving no end of great southern canton cuisine. I ended up eating in a lamb BBQ place where a big piece of sheep was put on the fire and you had tongs and a cutter to get said meat to your plate.

Street food is abundant, and as well as standard BBQ/Kou Rou type affairs, chinese version of chips/fries seem to be the order of the day.

If you’re a seafood lover crayfish seems to be the local specialty, as well as shrimp, and seafood is a good bet in general seeing as you are next to rivers and seas.

The best street foods in Dongguan China

Drinking in Dongguan

It may not be Shenzhen, but there are enough foreigners in Dongguan to mean that there is a bit of a bar scene. The word on the street is that the Liberty Brewing Co is the place to be.

There’s also Jiuba Jie, the former bar street that used to also be the “red light district”. Fun fact at one stage up to 10% of the women of Dongguan were “on the game”. The red light district has largely gone, and so has the life from the formerly buzzing bar street.

Summary

Cheap hotels, good food in general, and street food in particular. The Street Food Guy recommends Dongguan!

Pagpag is Not on the Menu!

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As the self declared Street Food Guy, and of course a regular visitor to the Philippines i’m not averse to getting myself down and dirty with the street food scene, and have tried all manner of guts, intestines, the obligatory balut, birds nest soup, and even tamilok, a food so god damned awful they decided to make it a “challenge” to eat it, but this is nothing compared to pagpag.

pagpag from fast food

Pagpag in Tagalog literally means “to brush of the dirt”, and when used in the context of food, it means leftover food, but not your homebred leftover food, leftover food that is rummaged from bins. If you’re not salivating yet, be patient.

The salvaged food tends to come from one of the numerous fast food joints, such as Jolibee, or mcDonalds, is then taken back to one of the slum areas, such as smoky mountain, before it is then fried up, and sold for a pittance to people equally poor and hungry.

pagpag

Unsupridingly there are a huge number of health concerns associated with eating pagpag, from typhoid to cholera, and in general it is discouraged, although sadly whilst it is discouraged, a 2015 report stated that pagpag had actually helped decrease malnutrition in some of the most deprived areas of the country. In the airtight choice between pagpag and malnutrition, pagpag comes out an easy winner.

There main plan to reduce the proliferation was a broad stated idea to “reduce poverty”. Obviously fairly obvious, and a great idea, but its the reducing poverty part that is literally the hard bit!

pagpag

Yet away from the slums you will not really see pagpag, and it is unlikely as a foreigner visiting the country you are likely to come across it, but its worth noting whenever you are enjoying yourself in any country that suffers from poverty how the other half actually live!