Travels in the Riel World

Anthony Bourdain is a well known author and host of the Travel Channel show No Reservations, where he expounds on the topics of food and travel. Recently, he did an online interview with the website Gadling. An excerpt:

How did you get interested in travel? Were your foreign experiences limited to your trips to France as a kid, or did you get the opportunity to travel to other places?

What right minded person would NOT travel the world if and when given the chance? I began to travel seriously as soon as I COULD. It took a successful book–and an indulgent network to allow me the opportunity–and I’m making the most of it. Until Kitchen Confidential at age 44, I’d been hardly anywhere.

Sometimes it’s tough to tell which you are most: an eater or a traveler. You seem to really get to the heart of a culture through its food, so much that the viewer forgets they’re watching a culinary-focused show. Which comes first? Do you travel to eat, or eat to travel?

Eat first. It seems to open doors if you show people that you’re willing, eager and appreciative of their food. Food, of course, is the purest expression of a culture and a region and a history–and people tend to be proud of their food. Eating and drinking–breaking bread with our subjects (my crew as well) is what makes so much of what we get to see and do–and the unique way we see it–possible.

The sport of soccer appears to have achieved - if only temporarily - what politicians have failed at, which is to unite Iraqis across sectarian divisions. The underdog Iraq national team pulled off an improbable series of upsets, defeating Vietnam in the quarterfinals, South Korea in the semifinals, and then three-time champion Saudi Arabia in the championship game to win the 2007 Asian Cup. The team, which includes Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, had Iraqis of all types celebrating in the streets after the championship match. As the NY Times reports:

The bare statistics will record that in the 71st minute of a soccer tournament 5,000 miles from Iraq, a Kurd from Mosul kicked a ball onto the head of a Sunni from Kirkuk, who ricocheted it into the goal to secure a 1-0 victory for Iraq over Saudi Arabia on Sunday in the final of the 2007 Asian Cup.

What weeping, shouting, horn-honking, flag-kissing, Kalashnikov-firing Iraqis will remember is that their team, known as the Lions of the Two Rivers, overcame virtually insurmountable sporting and societal odds on Sunday to vanquish the land of the Two Holy Mosques. It was one of the few unifying moments in the recent history of a perhaps fatally disunited country.

Taking its nickname from the waterways of the Tigris and Euphrates that gave ancient Mesopotamia its name, the Iraqi team — prevented by the threat of terrorism from training on its own soil and, perhaps, even returning to it — was a little-favored underdog. It had never reached the final of the soccer tournament that its opponent had won three times, making victory over a wealthier and better-prepared regional rival all the more satisfying…

“Our happiness depends on these guys who played in Asia; I wish they would come and take over the Parliament, for they are the ones who really represent us,” said Murtada Sabbar, as he danced around the inside of the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad waving a handgun in celebration.

While the jubilant crowds remained wary of the bombers and gunmen, many hailed the team’s achievement as a victory, however temporary, over those intent on reducing Iraq to chaos and misery.

That’s the question posed in this recent article in the International Herald Tribune, which in turn quotes from a debate taking place among some French leaders.

France is the country that produced the Enlightenment, Descartes’s one-liner, “I think, therefore I am,” and the solemn pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and other celebrity philosophers. But in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet.

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Needless to say, not everyone agrees.

But the disdain for reflection may be going a bit too far. It certainly has set the French intellectual class on edge.

“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Lagarde’s comments.

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in café conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials BHL “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases. I’m pro-American and pro-market, so I could have voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, but this anti-intellectual tendency is one of the reasons that I did not.”

Of course, perhaps the real lesson is here isn’t whether to think or not to think. What’s more interesting, from a cultural perspective at least, is that the French have found a way to think and debate about whether they should be thinking and debating.

There is a short but entertaining article in the Christian Science Monitor about how fiestas are ingrained into the Bolivian way of life.

Our cab turned a corner in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, on a rather drab, wet, Sunday afternoon, onto a spectacle of twirling skirts and top hats, as women danced down the street.

What fortune, we thought. Of all the streets, and all the hours in the day, we happened to bump into a cultural event.

Then the next day, in another cab, we turned another corner. Again, a burst of yellow shawls and skirts; costumed dancers; and cars decorated in orange, red, and hot pink tapestries.

It was then that we learned that Bolivians embrace their local fiestas in much the same way Americans enjoy their summertime barbecues.

There are any number of street fiestas in Bolivia, which include musicians, masked participants, and dancers strutting the Morenada or the Diablada.

Many of the country’s grandest fiestas align with major celebrations within the Roman Catholic Church, but in towns across the country, residents celebrate indigenous gods and beliefs, too.

Like, um, light. I was struck by this Associated Press story about students in the African nation of Guinea who spend their evenings in the airport parking lot so they can study under the street lamps there.

The sun has set in one of the world’s poorest nations and as the floodlights come on at G’bessi International Airport, the parking lot begins filling with children.

The long stretch of pavement has the feel of a hushed library, each student sitting quietly, some moving their lips as their eyes traverse their notes.

It’s exam season in Guinea, ranked 160th out of 177 countries on the United Nations’ development index, and schoolchildren flock to the airport every night because it’s among the only places where they can count on finding the lights on.

Groups of elementary and high school students begin heading to the airport at dusk, hoping to reserve a coveted spot under the oval light cast by one of a dozen lampposts in the parking lot. Some come from over an hour’s walk away…

Only about a fifth of Guinea’s 10 million people have access to electricity. Even those that do experience frequent power cuts. With few families able to afford generators, students long ago discovered the airport…

The students at the airport consider themselves lucky. Those living farther away study at gas stations and come home smelling of gasoline. Others sit on the curbs outside the homes of affluent families, picking up the crumbs of light falling out of their illuminated living rooms.

Talk about a change in lifestyle. Emily Prager just wrote an interesting story for the NY Times about her decision to uproot her life and leave New York City in order to move to Shanghai.

I left Manhattan a year ago, after a lifetime there…I decided to move myself and my 12-year-old daughter, Lulu - whom I had adopted as a baby in China - from the old capital of the world to the new: to make a home in Shanghai, a city of the future.

It was a bold move on her part, but the most interesting part of the article is not her decision-making process nor her experiences with the Chinese real estate market, both of which are intriguing, but rather the fascinating descriptions of life in her new Shanghai neighborhood. Here is an excerpt:

There are two types of life coexisting in Shanghai: the Westernized life which is becoming more or less like New York’s, and the old lane life still lived by a good many of the city’s inhabitants, now including myself and my daughter.

Each lane is a perfect little ecosystem. There is a lanekeeper who watches over the lane and a lane sweeper who comes morning and evening to clean it up, to whom I contribute about $5 a month. At the end of each lane is a little house with square windows, which covers garbage bins on one side of a wall and a communal sink on the other.

I can also leave garbage outside my door against the lane wall. The first time I did , I was embarrassed: I put out a big garbage bag stuffed with unnecessary junk while my neighbors had almost no garbage at all. It was clear they used no paper products and ate every bit of food. I have not bought paper towels or anything that I can do without since.

There are recyclers who travel the lanes in bicycle carts and collect boxes, making their living by taking them to recycling stations. They ring their bicycle bells to announce their arrival and you bring out your brown paper or cardboard boxes or bags. They fold every bit ever so neatly and tie it all up with string. Sometimes their stack is four feet tall and four feet wide, a huge burden delicately balanced as they ride slowly away…

People buy fresh food daily. They buy clothes directly from clothes carts or in markets. Things like nail clippers and cotton swabs are sold from carts in the street outside the lane, as are dishes and cups and most other household items. I went to buy some string one day and the man cut me a 12-inch piece. People buy only as much as they need. They do not hoard and their homes are not full of items they never use.

My house is very solid and I never hear my neighbors. In all but two of the other houses on the lane, three or four families still live in very close quarters. (People seem amused and curious, rather than resentful, about the difference in the ways we live, but I am often embarrassed by it.) Windows are always open, even in winter, but the ethic is that one does not look in. Privacy in China is mental rather than physical. You make yourself unaware of who’s right next to you, whether it’s someone shelling beans or having an argument or brushing his teeth in his underwear. People sit out in the lane during the day and chat and laugh. In the evening, if it’s warm, families set up tables and barbecue.

Easter Island may not have been voted in as one of the world’s new seven wonders recently, but that doesn’t lessen the allure of the place for those travelers willing to make the long journey to this Pacific island. David Swanson recently wrote for the Boston Globe about his own experiences there.

Travel to the ends of the earth and one discovers there are still mysteries to be solved.

Deep in the South Pacific, 2,500 miles west of continental South America, lies Easter Island, a remote Chilean outpost dotted with stone statues. I landed here with a vague comprehension of the island’s mysteries.

How were its enigmatic sculptures, weighing as much as 82 tons, transported from a volcanic quarry to their sacred ceremonial platforms miles away? Who were the statues meant to represent, and what’s with the round red hats — decidedly un-Polynesian — some statues wore? And why, between the first European contact on Easter Sunday in 1722 and Captain James Cook’s visit 52 years later, were most of the stone heads toppled?

Does a country’s culture influence its traffic conditions? Sure, why not? After all, some countries have orderly traffic in which a majority of drivers adhere to rules, whether they like them or not, and other countries have seemingly more chaotic roadways, but nevertheless a traffic system that is understood and followed by locals. These things don’t just develop in isolation, they are connected to the way people perceive the world.

So I was intrigued to see this recent NY Times piece about the traffic in Cairo, Egypt, in which the writer connects the behavior of drivers to some larger cultural issues. An excerpt:

Chaos. It is often the word associated with Egypt’s roads, its maddening bureaucracy, its ill-prepared health care system. But it is chaos only to the untrained eye, the uninitiated, and in the case of driving here, the weak of heart. There is a system, from top to bottom, which may be corrupt, class-based, inefficient and ineffective, but it is a system nonetheless.

Drivers almost never look behind them. And they rarely look to the side. Instead, the whole flow of cars moves like a school of fish, straight ahead, then weaving, darting in unison. The traffic stops, usually, when a traffic officer steps into the road…

Over all, the Egyptian system seems to function on three basic principles: Every man for himself; when necessary, offer a little baksheesh (cash); and accept that money and connections go first.

“We are people who don’t do things unless someone is there to make us do it,” said Essam Qassem, a cabdriver fighting his way along Hassan Sabry Street in the well-to-do area of Zamalek. “We don’t comply with rules on our own.”

That’s the question posed by Washington Post writer Emily Wax, who contrasted the considerable beauty and charms of this South Asian locale with the violence that comes with being a disputed border territory between India and Pakistan.

The heavenly side of Kashmir…

Everyone from Buddha to Led Zeppelin found inspiration in the stunningly beautiful Kashmir Valley, with its fields of wildflowers, stream-laced forests and glaciered Himalayan mountains.

The late Beatles guitarist George Harrison rented a houseboat on Dal Lake and learned to play the sitar, jamming with the 4:15 a.m. Sufi chants that echo through the valley just before sunrise.

The Buddha called Kashmir his favorite place to meditate. And after lounging on Kashmir’s sleepy Nagin Lake, Led Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, was moved to pen “Kashmir,” an epic rock anthem fused with Eastern riffs…

Backpackers looking to escape India’s scorching 115-degree heat in favor of Kashmir’s mild summers saw trekking through its rustic pine forests, apple orchards and hills with trout streams as the ultimate adventure-tourist destination. Worn billboards today still tout Kashmir as “Heaven on Earth.”

And the flip side…

But the signs seem like an ironic joke after an 18-year conflict in Indian-administered Kashmir has left tens of thousands dead and as many as 10,000 people, mostly young men, missing after being detained by Indian security forces.

“This place was oh so grand, before it became hell,” said Gulam Butt…

It’s a wonderful piece of real estate. But it’s in a rough neighborhood, with two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, each claiming it. There have been two wars fought over Kashmir, along with daily skirmishes between the half-million Indian security troops and the Pakistani-backed militants, along with home-grown separatists who want Kashmir to be its own country.

In the U.S., the system of jury-based decisions is a commonly accepted foundation of our legal culture. Not everyone relishes the prospect of reporting for jury duty, of course, but no one questions the basis of a legal system in which individuals are judged by a jury. That isn’t the case everywhere, however, not even in every democracy on the planet.

In Japan, for instance, which is just now planning to introduce juries in 2009, the fledgling system is having to overcome cultural obstacles. As this story notes:

Japan is preparing to adopt a jury-style system in its courts in 2009, the most significant change in its criminal justice system since the postwar American occupation. But for it to work, the Japanese must first overcome some deep-rooted cultural obstacles: a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with one another and to question authority.

To win over a skeptical public, Japan’s courts have held some 500 mock trials across the country, including six here in Nagano, the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Still, polls show that 80 percent are dreading the change and do not want to serve as jurors, a reluctance that was on display among the mock jurors here.

They preferred directing questions to the judges. They never engaged one another in discussion. Their opinions had to be extracted by the judges and were often hedged by the Japanese language’s rich ambiguity.

One Japanese woman interviewed expressed support for the new system, but acknowledged the difficulty in having it fit into Japanese culture.

Ms. Kimura strongly supports the new system. “But, really, I wondered, can Japanese really express what they believe in,” she said. “Can they really express their opinions?”

“To this day, we value harmony,” she said, and, referring to a haiku by Basho, Japan’s greatest poet, she added, “In Japan, to not speak is considered a virtue.”

That’s how Diane Speare Triant described her recent trip to Greece’s beautiful Mani Peninsula, where some ancients had suggested the entrance to Hades was located.

When someone poses that perennial question, “What did you do on your vacation?” our family has a zinger of a response: “We went to Hades and back!”

To be sure, Mani Peninsula is not the Greece you know. It is a mysterious mountain province, an untamed land of stone towers and a destination fabled in ancient writing…

Mani (or as some say, the Mani) sits on the central of three south-pointing fingers in the Peloponnese. Mount Taygetus cascades down the length of the peninsula, rising to 8,000 feet and separating the Aegean and Ionian seas. And at Cape Tenaron on the southern tip the ancients did, indeed, place the entrance to Hades. So hauntingly lovely is this moonscape, though, that it could just as well be the gateway to heaven.

…we entered Mani’s eastern port, Gythion , which bustled with a clutter of fishing boats in the harbor, dozens of taverna tables at dockside, and outdoor ouzo bars displaying hanging octopi . We nestled overnight at the Cavo Grosso Bungalows by the beach. The air pulsated with cicadas. Lemon-laden trees and hot-pink bougainvillea vines splashed the hillside with color.

With all of the depressing news that comes out of Darfur, it’s hard to believe that a mere re-design of a cooking stove could make any dent in the suffering there. But a reconfiguration of this appliance may, in fact, help alleviate at least some of the daily difficulties for long-suffering residents there. Newsweek has the story.

First, the challenge:

The violence in Darfur has not only left at least 200,000 dead but devastated the already arid landscape. More than 2 million people now fill groaning refugee camps; as they hunt farther and wider for firewood, they are denuding whole swaths of the countryside. Gathering firewood can now mean a seven-hour round trip, during which women risk rape and mutilation at the hands of the Janjaweed militias that lurk in wait. (Men can’t make the trip in their stead—they’ll simply be killed.)

Then, the solution, as devised by Ashok Gadgil, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California:

Gadgil worked with lab colleagues and students at UC Berkeley to modify an existing Indian stove for Darfurians’ needs. “Cook stoves, although they look simple, are very complex creatures,” he says, “which is why you can’t simply sit in Berkeley and say, ‘Well, this is the stove for you’.” While the Indian stove excelled at producing low-intensity heat for cooking rice, for instance, Darfurians needed a high-powered flame for sautéing onions, garlic and okra, ingredients in their staple dish, mulah. And since most families cook outside, the stove also needed to cope with the region’s strong winds.

The result of their efforts is the Berkeley-Darfur stove (darfurstoves.org) … the stove requires 75 percent less wood than an open fire, and a wind collar makes for a steady flame. That means fewer risky trips outside the camp. And those who now pay for firewood, Gadgil estimates, could save as much as $200 a year.

The final step, still being worked on, is production and distribution.

They won’t be handing the stoves out as charity—”Giving something away turns the recipients into beggars,” Gadgil says—but at $25 apiece, the devices are out of the reach of most families. Gadgil favors some sort of leasing plan, allowing families to rent the stove for about 50 cents a week. The ultimate goal is for the refugees to take over the program, from manufacturing to distribution, which would mean jobs and income.

South Korea may be a technically savvy country (it has one of the highest per capita rates of broadband internet subscribers in the world, well ahead of the U.S.), but that doesn’t stop them from consulting shamans when they need a little luck or assistance. According to this article, in fact, shamanism in Korea is more popular than it’s been in decades.

There are an estimated 300 shamanistic temples within an hour of Seoul’s bustling city center, and in them, shamans perform their clamorous ceremonies every day. They offer pigs to placate the gods. They dance with toy guns to comfort the spirit of a dead child. They intimidate evil spirits by walking barefoot on knife blades…

Korean shamanism is rooted in ancient indigenous beliefs shared by many folk religions in northeast Asia. Most mudangs are women who say they discovered their ability to serve as a mediator between the human and spirit worlds after emerging from a critical illness. They believe that the air is thick with spirits…So when tradition-minded Koreans are inexplicably sick or have a run of bad luck in business or a daughter who cannot find a husband, they consult a shaman.

I also found it interesting how the writer placed shamanism within Korean culture and the country’s other spiritual beliefs.

Shamanism’s eclecticism has influenced Korean attitudes toward religion, helping make South Korea one of the world’s most pluralistic countries — a place where Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity coexist peacefully and often overlap, said Yang Jong-sung, a senior curator at the National Folklore Museum of Korea.

“Korean shamanism is very, very materialistic and this-worldly, as Koreans tend to be,” the curator said. “I don’t think a Christian pastor can succeed here if he only talks about heaven and does not hint at health and material prosperity.”

Is the best hamburger in the world made in Cairo, Egypt? That sounds a bit surprising, but it’s the opinion of Time reporter Scott Macleod, who currently works in Cairo.

Having spent a lot of my journalistic life in Cairo, I’m fond of Egyptian food. The garlic-spiced mashed fava bean dish called ful medames, for instance, which we eat for breakfast, lunch or dinner. My teenage daughter repudiated McDonald’s after seeing Supersize Me, so when she’s out with her friends, they go to a local hangout known for its kushari, a spicy mix of macaroni, rice, chick peas and lentils.

Still, I have to admit that when it’s lunchtime, I usually head for Lucille’s, a humble American-style greasy spoon in the Maadi district of Cairo that may serve the tastiest burger in the world…

yes, a family restaurant in Egypt dishes up the best burger I’ve ever eaten, and I’m not the only one who thinks that way. One of owner Lucille Crooks’s thrills came the day she witnessed a young American backpacker talking and smiling to his burger as he alternately beheld it and munched on it. “That tickled me, he was enjoying it so much,” Lucille recalls. “He wasn’t expecting to find a real hamburger in Egypt, and not one that good.”

The secret?

When I asked general manager Essam Mabrouk the secret of the burgers, it turned out there is indeed a special ingredient, which is lathered on the beef patty as soon as it hits the heat. (He hinted it has something to do with fish, but refused to divulge more.) Mabrouk hauled me into the kitchen to show me some other reasons for Lucille’s success: fresh, organic ingredients.

Six kitchen butchers double-grind ultra-lean round and rump steaks, mixing in a secret ratio of “clean” fat, and then double-press the patties in a mold to ensure cooking consistency. The lettuce, tomato and onions are grown in the Nile River basin’s year-round sunshine, requiring no preservatives. “It really boils down to the fact that it’s all homemade,” Lucille tells me. “We’ve gone back to basics. I don’t throw anything in the grinder that doesn’t belong there.”

That’s the message of a story in the Christian Science Monitor, which reports that the 2,500-year-old teachings of Confucius are gaining popularity in contemporary China.

Come back, Confucius, all is forgiven. For nearly a century the ancient sage was confined to the intellectual doghouse in the land of his birth.

Today he is fast supplanting communism as Chinese rulers, businessmen, and ordinary citizens turn back 2-1/2 millenniums to his teachings to help them cope with the economic and social changes racking their country.

“The economy is developing very fast, but people feel the need for wisdom and morality,” says Gu Qing, who publishes books on traditional Chinese culture. “Now we’ve solved the problem of filling people’s stomachs, they are looking for something to fill their minds.”…

For most of the 20th century, Chinese leaders reviled Confucianism as a feudal philosophy whose emphasis on respect for elders, propriety, and the harmony of hierarchy had trapped China in its past. The nadir for the man whose precepts defined society for more than 2,000 years came during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards went on a weeks-long rampage of destruction in his hometown.

The current government sees Confucius in a more positive light: President Hu Jintao’s key slogan, “a harmonious society,” is a conscious evocation of the Confucian value of harmony and balance.

The new popularity of Confucius has even made a star out of university professor Yu Dan, thanks to a television lecture series. She has her own thoughts about why the ancient sage’s teachings are again striking a chord in China.

Ms. Yu says she struck a chord with a public confused by rapid change. Not long ago, she notes, citizens found a job and stayed in it for life, were assigned a home and lived in it for life, and rarely contemplated divorce. “Life was poor, but poverty brought its own kind of stability,” she says.

Today, the freedom to choose a career and a home can be unsettling, Yu says. “For a person who knows what he wants, choice is a luxury. But for someone who has no standards by which to choose, it can be a disaster. That’s why the pursuit of belief is getting stronger.”

Everyone knows about the world famous beaches in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. But what most people don’t know is that equally magnificent beaches are a short drive away from the urban madness of Rio. Juliet Pennington recently wrote about her experiences at this Brazilian Riviera for the Boston Globe:

When they heard that I was going to Rio de Janeiro, several people told me I had to see this tropical peninsula. “You’ll fall in love with it,” said one. “It’s like being in the South of France,” said another.

Being a big fan of the Côte d’Azur , I opted for two days here. I wasn’t thrilled about cutting into my time in Rio, but once I saw this quaint seaside resort community , I knew that I had made the right decision. It was as close to paradise as I have ever been.

Búzios is an easy two-hour drive east of Rio — easy provided you steer clear of peak season in January and avoid the mass exodus on long weekends and holidays. There are several ways to get here, including a bus service that makes frequent runs along the coast. The concierge at my hotel in Rio arranged for a driver to take me in a private car, a great option…

While not the small fishing village it once was, Búzios isn’t another Rio. Thanks to strict zoning ordinances, there are no high-rise buildings and colonial Portuguese-style architecture is favored. Single- and two-story pastel-colored homes with Mediterranean-style, barrel-tiled roofs are tucked away amid lush, tropical vegetation, while other, more stately homes are perched on cliffs overlooking one or more of the magnificent beaches that draw visitors to this inviting enclave.

Tomorrow is July 7, 2007 - a date popular with numerologists and, apparently, wedding planners. It is also the date that the New Seven Wonders organization is going to announce the winners of its global internet balloting to select a contemporary list of seven wonders of the world.

Actually, the final list will apparently include eight wonders. After the Egyptian government complained about the Pyramids (the only survivor of the seven wonders of the ancient world) being forced to compete for this status, the Pyramids were given an automatic spot and so seven other winners will be chosen from the 20 remaining finalists.

What would be your choices for the seven wonders of the world? Along with the Pyramids, I would go with the Great Wall of China, Macchu Picchu, the rock city of Petra, and the statues of Easter Island as obvious choices. The final two are a more difficult choice. I’d be leaning towards the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat, though the Roman Colosseum and the Athenian Acropolis also seem like worthy selections. What do you think?

According to a Washington Post story, the leading contenders now stack up this way:

The Great Wall of China, the Colosseum in Rome and Peru’s Machu Picchu are leading contenders to be among the new seven wonders of the world, as a massive poll draws to a close with votes already cast by more than 90 million people, organizers say.

As the 8 p.m. EDT Friday voting deadline approaches, the rankings can still change. Also in the top 10 are the Acropolis in Greece, Chichen Itza pyramid in Mexico, Eiffel Tower in Paris, Easter Island, Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Taj Mahal in India and Jordan’s ancient city of Petra…

The Colosseum, the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, Taj Mahal and Petra have been among the leaders since January, while the Acropolis and Christ the Redeemer statue made their way up from the middle of the field to the top level, according to latest tallies.

The Statue of Liberty and Sydney Opera House have been sitting in the bottom 10 since the start. Also faring poorly are Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex, Russia’s Kremlin building and St. Basil’s Cathedral, Britain’s Stonehenge and the city of Timbuktu in Mali.

Update: The winners have been announced. Not surprisingly, the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the Roman Colosseum and the Jordanian city of Petra made the final cut. The other two winners were Brazil’s statue of Christ the Redeemer and Mexico’s Chichen Itza pyramid.

I’m especially surprised that the statues of Easter Island didn’t make it to the final seven. And I have a hard time believing that these are the seven most spectacular sights on the planet, ahead of not only Easter Island but such structures as Angkor Wat or the Acropolis. Nevertheless, it was an interesting exercise and, with 100 million votes cast, at least got a lot of people talking about the world.

Yesterday, of course, was the 4th of July holiday in the U.S., which meant a lot of backyard barbecues were put to use in grilling a whole lot of hamburgers and hot dogs.

In fact, Americans consumed about 150 million hot dogs yesterday, according to Forbes.com. Of that number, an astounding 66 of them were eaten by a single individual, as Joey Chestnut set an unusual world record by downing that many hot dogs and buns in only 12 minutes at the annual Coney Island Fourth of July competition.

All this news about hot dogs, though, got me to wondering about this annual cultural tradition. I never did find out exactly how or when hot dogs and hamburgers became such a staple of Independence Day in this country, but they apparently do not date to the first celebrations in the 1700’s, at least according to this Baltimore Sun story about the food of independence.

The Fourth of July in the late 1700s wasn’t celebrated with hot dogs and hamburgers. And there was no corn on the cob, except maybe in the American frontier, which in 1776 might have been just to the left of Pittsburgh.

The only holiday menu item we have in common with our forebears might be the beverages - beer, wine and alcoholic fruit drinks…

The menu might have included several different meats and poultry, plus fruit and vegetables in season. And because the colonists brought with them their English sweet tooth, there were lots of cakes, pies, cobblers and small cakes that we might call cookies or muffins today.

Hmm, Fourth of July muffins. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. April Fulton, however, had an intriguing idea, which she wrote about for NPR’s Kitchen Window - that is, to celebrate the day with selections from different regions of the country. Her menu included steamed clams from New England, southern-style okra, carne asada from the Southwest, and berry cobbler made with blackberries from the Northwest. You can see her recipes here.