It’s been a while: traveling for a month in the USA did wonders to my schedule, which is why this blog has been asleep. Also, I’ve been blogging for AOL’s Gadling.com as usual, plus updating my Food Wine guides, working on several apps, and researching three book proposals. You’re right, that’s no excuse for abandoning my personal blog. I could work on it from midnight until 2 AM, say, or during my sleep…
Here are the ledes and links to my silly, tongue-in-cheek (food is a theme) stories about Jumbo Chicago and Lilliput Paris on Gadling.com.
Doggie Bag Heaven: A Martian Chows Down in Chicago
Chicago, Chicago – the city is so big and so fabulous you have to say it twice. Buildings are not just tall, they’re also as broad as entire cities. Alleyways are as wide as turnpikes. People are not built for bigness: they’re digitally enhanced for hugeness. Fittingly the portions on the giant plates in the vast eateries of Chicago are bigger than jumbo-size. They’re mega. They’re obscene.
An old-paradigm, European-size guy like me from San Francisco via Paris feels positively dwarfish in Chicago. READ MORE
After Chicago there was lovely San Francisco (giant trees, giant servings, Giants baseball, gigantic everything)and never-a-dull-second New York (need I specify: giant, towering, Jumbo, huge, massive, throbbing, pulsing…).
Returning to tiny, old, quaint little Paris was like being at a country club… everything is so small and so old… including our apartment building… So here’s the story about shock on the system (positive shock, mind you).
Letter from Lilliputia: Small is Beautiful in Paris
[flickr image via Jim Linwood]
It started on our flight back to Paris from New York: our seats had been put through the drier. They were too small to hold our newly fleshly forms. After a month in Chicago, San Francisco and New York City we had expanded our views – and backsides. Well, I had. My wife doesn’t thicken. Her DNA descends from termites.
The Paris taxi seemed luxurious after the battered Yellow Cabs of Manhattan. But it was shoebox-sized: half our luggage rode on our laps. We nudged bumper-to-baby-bumper down uncannily smooth surfaces into the groomed, green perfection of central Paris. READ MORE
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