video: vin sans romance

IMG_2300I’ll be the first to admit that I had a somewhat naive idea about how wine is produced in the 21st century. This being France, I assumed little old men in flat caps individually filled each bottle with a pipette out of oak casks – while precariously dangling a cigarette out of the corner of their mouth, natch. But oh, how times have changed: industrialization is everywhere. As I recently discovered at Domaine D’Astruc in Malras – and as these two video clips below make abundantly clear – it might completely shatter the romance of winemaking, but there’s something beautiful in the startling degree of efficiency achieved.

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video: zen & the art of oysters

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video: by the cool, blue triangular water

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tease: driving with the top down

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video: fast-track shopping


As if the daily grind of grocery shopping wasn’t enough, try having to navigate around the train schedule, too, like these shoppers at the Maeklong Railway Market outside of Bangkok.

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One of the chief attractions at Carnival is the music. Mostly it’s ear-splitting, bass-thumping soca cracking the air from flat bed trucks piled high with amplifiers. But every so often along comes a steel pan band, which miraculously manages to make a raft of cut down oil drums sound like an orchestra.

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upon a floating gypsy village we come

After leaving JBI we came upon Ko Payni, a floating gypsy village at the head of Phang-Nga Bay. Anachronistic as that sounds, it was nevertheless established by nomadic Malay fisherman near the end of the 18th century. (Check out the brief video clip or double-click the panoramic below to get a sense of the scale of the environs.) At that time Thai law limited land ownership solely to people of Thai origin, so the resourceful gypsies built a settlement on stilts, skirting the law on a technicality while giving themselves easy access to the fisherman’s life. As the community grew prosperous, it expanded and today the village is home to some 1,500 people, a mosque, and even a football pitch, all built on barnacle-covered poles over the sea. As I arrived late in the day, I had time for little more than a coffee and a quick poke around, but it left me wondering what the village must be like in the moonlight – and at bed time as the water laps beyond the gaps of the wooden slatted floors.

gypsy panorama

ko payni

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here a tuk, there a tuk

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a precipitous change in the weather

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video: very, very early

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video: beach walk, in stereo

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video: where am i going?

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video: almost a sunrise

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video: dodging bullets (and buicks) at the office

As you can see, there’s a perfectly good reason as to why I’m taking shelter in Mexico this weekend.

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video: first snow (new toy)

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