First Night in Sleepy Panjim (What I Did Last Night)
I wandered the old streets of Panjim last night. I was trying to decide what the city felt like, and I thought about all the old cities I’ve been to. It wasn’t grand enough to be Budapest. It felt similar to Savannah, but Panjim is more run down. Lisbon is grander and cleaner. St. Petersburg, Russia, has a similar feel with the formerly grand buildings now in disrepair. But Panjim feels more like a village than a city. There are far more bars and liquor stores in Goa than in Mumbai. These Catholics, I guess, take a looser attitude toward drinking than do the Hindus. I saw so many dark holes in the wall populated by men, only men. The streets were mostly deserted on a Friday night, and my part of town was darkened by power cuts. Panjim has less than 100,000 people and is one of India’s smallest and sleepiest capitals (the state capitals in the tribal northeast are probably small and sleepy too).
I went to a restaurant called Viva Panjim recommended by Lonely Planet. A sign near the restaurant said it was recommended by Frommer’s and the Rough Guide travel books too. And this is probably why every single white person in Panjim came to the Viva Panjim. I wanted prawns, but the guy taking my order confused the hell out of me (a common fate when I talk to Indians), and I ended up with chicken xacutí, which is what Lonely Planet recommended. My experience with Goan food so far has been that it’s meat in thick brown sauces and tastes basically Indian. This could also describe chicken xacutí. It was just ok. It was chicken in a brown sauce with coconut. I also drank a Cobra beer. Maybe it had been cooled and heated too many times, or maybe it’s just crappy beer, but it was flat and tasted like cough syrup when drunk with food. Cobra is an Indian beer, by the way. (Also by the way, I haven’t run into any cobra snakes yet, and they better just be keeping their distance)
Goa is famous for fenni, a supposed “cashew wine.” I had a feeling it would be a clear, strongly alcoholic drink – and disgusting. I mean, how tasty can a drink from those dry cashew nuts be? The answer is: not tasty at all. The smell of alcohol was overwhelming, so I diluted it with two parts water, took a sip, and that was my last sip. It tasted like rubbing alcohol with sea salt dumped in it. Feeling Portuguese, I also got a glass of Port. I had had Port once before (at Pastis in New York, when I was trendy), and I remember it being highly alcoholic wine. My verdict then was that it wasn’t very good. My verdict last night was worse. It tasted like highly alcoholic wine mixed with grape juice.
I knew the fenni would be disgusting and the Port questionable, so I got a desert too. The desert was the best part, but it scored a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10. Imagine an omelette with a thin, watered-down caramel sauce poured over it. This is what I ate. I think, I think, I was able to decipher from my waiter that the name is caramel puri. So the food wasn’t that good, but the restaurant was small and in a restored home, and everything looked antique. It had old world charm that Indians don’t generally care as much about (yet) as do European and Americans. The proprietor lady played a cd of what I think was Portuguese music, but she was also playing the radio, which was playing American pop songs (I’ve heard “Don’t your wish your girlfriend was hot like me” twice in two days). I didn’t talk to any white people (there were Germans, French, British, and unidentified), and I walked around town some more, dark alleys included. You know what? The darker the alley the better.
I went to a restaurant called Viva Panjim recommended by Lonely Planet. A sign near the restaurant said it was recommended by Frommer’s and the Rough Guide travel books too. And this is probably why every single white person in Panjim came to the Viva Panjim. I wanted prawns, but the guy taking my order confused the hell out of me (a common fate when I talk to Indians), and I ended up with chicken xacutí, which is what Lonely Planet recommended. My experience with Goan food so far has been that it’s meat in thick brown sauces and tastes basically Indian. This could also describe chicken xacutí. It was just ok. It was chicken in a brown sauce with coconut. I also drank a Cobra beer. Maybe it had been cooled and heated too many times, or maybe it’s just crappy beer, but it was flat and tasted like cough syrup when drunk with food. Cobra is an Indian beer, by the way. (Also by the way, I haven’t run into any cobra snakes yet, and they better just be keeping their distance)
Goa is famous for fenni, a supposed “cashew wine.” I had a feeling it would be a clear, strongly alcoholic drink – and disgusting. I mean, how tasty can a drink from those dry cashew nuts be? The answer is: not tasty at all. The smell of alcohol was overwhelming, so I diluted it with two parts water, took a sip, and that was my last sip. It tasted like rubbing alcohol with sea salt dumped in it. Feeling Portuguese, I also got a glass of Port. I had had Port once before (at Pastis in New York, when I was trendy), and I remember it being highly alcoholic wine. My verdict then was that it wasn’t very good. My verdict last night was worse. It tasted like highly alcoholic wine mixed with grape juice.
I knew the fenni would be disgusting and the Port questionable, so I got a desert too. The desert was the best part, but it scored a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10. Imagine an omelette with a thin, watered-down caramel sauce poured over it. This is what I ate. I think, I think, I was able to decipher from my waiter that the name is caramel puri. So the food wasn’t that good, but the restaurant was small and in a restored home, and everything looked antique. It had old world charm that Indians don’t generally care as much about (yet) as do European and Americans. The proprietor lady played a cd of what I think was Portuguese music, but she was also playing the radio, which was playing American pop songs (I’ve heard “Don’t your wish your girlfriend was hot like me” twice in two days). I didn’t talk to any white people (there were Germans, French, British, and unidentified), and I walked around town some more, dark alleys included. You know what? The darker the alley the better.
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