Tuesday, October 29, 2019

...and all the rest is for my buddy Charles

My friend Charles did a hike in Scotland along the famous Speyside Way (read about it here), so I perked up when I saw the following three-part documentary about that hiking route:






The above videos' host, brave Tim, looks a bit like a forlorn Simon Pegg, but his narration is shot through with plenty of wry humor.

Next up is a guy who's rapidly becoming one of my favorite YouTubers: he's a German who goes by the Chinese name Andong (Koreans will immediately think of soju or cultural conservatism as Andong is considered South Korea's most traditional region). He speaks nearly picture-perfect idiomatic US English, along with his native German, fluent Chinese (he lived in China for several years, and he picked up reading/writing skills, too), a good bit of Russian, some Hebrew, and a smattering of other languages (but apparently not French: that deficit is taken care of by his French-capable German[?] girlfriend, who looks half-Asian from some angles). His videos are about food: he likes to travel, sample foreign cuisine, then go home and attempt to replicate what he ate while abroad. In the episode below, he does a jambon-beurre (ham-butter baguette sandwich) because, frustratingly, he failed to obtain the sandwich while in Paris. I highlight this video here for Charles because the part of the video that deals with baguette-making shows Andong attacking the problem with gleeful, almost heedless, abandon, and to what I think would be Charles's delight, he incorporates the ancient grain spelt into his baguette recipe.


Of course, these videos aren't exclusively for Charles's delectation. You, Dear Reader, will find them amusing and educational as well, or so I hope.

And that's the end of my video dump. Happy viewing!



2 comments:

Charles said...

Sweet! I will check these out when I get the chance. I immediately recognized the old station in the first Speyside video--we actually got turned around a bit there because we didn't realize that the trail followed the old railway line. We also sat down and had lunch near Blacksboat station one day, too. Good memories!

Kevin Kim said...

I need to go back and reread your Scotland post, as well as review the pics you uploaded.