pogoism

Reno is great for 2 things – eating out and drinking. There’s not a whole lot else to do, other than snowboarding in the winter and kayaking in the summer, so in the last few months I’ve been to a lot of restaurants. But in my 9 months here, I haven’t found anywhere that has totally satisfied me, until yesterday.

I (foolishly) walked home from work yesterday, all the way up McCarran, on the hottest day of the year, so by the time I got home, I didn’t really fancy cooking. After looking up Bavarian World, and discovering they had very little in the way of non-carnivore food, I remembered Naan and Kabab. It advertises itself as a Mediterranean restaurant, but the name and the font on their signs is a give away that it isn’t.

It’s Middle Eastern food. I can see why they wouldn’t want to market themselves in this way, this is America, after all. But don’t let that put you off, this place is delicious. Alonso and I started with the veggie combo, which was dolmades (rice stuffed vine leaf), falafel, hummus and baba ganoush (mashed eggplant). For main course, I had the prawn kabab, and Alonso had the salmon kabab. The prawn was delicious, perfectly cooked and flavoured. The salmon one… not so much. We finished all that off with baklava. Amazing food, and all for less than the price of sushi too! The service here is fantastic, even for American standards – at one point the chef (Chef “Maurice” – not his real name…) came round, and asked us how our meal was. “Good enough to tell your friends?” before thrusting some business cards in our hands!

Go try this place if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed.

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I got my list of possible final year projects this week. Out of a list of 90, I have to somehow whittle them down to 10, and rank them in order of preference. That’s going to be a long task, as I have do at least a little bit of background reading for each project I’m interested in. I’ve got until August 10th to do it though, so it’s not so bad.

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As I’m sure didn’t pass you by (unless you’re in America), Eurovision was today. I love Eurovision. It’s camp, it’s ridiculous, it’s trashy, and it’s over the top. Yet, bizarrely, it makes me proud to be European. My national identity is something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks. I’m thinking about coming back to the US to do a PhD program, and after that probably settle here, but in order to do that, at some point I’d have to become a US citizen, and possibly surrender my UK citizenship. After some though, I decided I didn’t really want to do that. I’m proud to be from the UK. Yep, it certainly has it’s faults, but being a UK citizen also makes me a citizen of Europe. Being from Europe is something I’m extremely proud of – it’s such a vast place, full of different cultures, people, languages and opportunities, something America will never be, no matter how hard it tries.

Oh, and by the way, how did Germany do so badly in Eurovision? They had Dita von Teese for heaven’s sake! And why did the UK give Turkey 12 points?! Am I missing something? Those water things from the roof were amazing too.