Brief Reviews

Hard rock, soft rock, rocks with water gurgling inside; rocks from Bolivia, from upstate New York, from intergalactic space; spinel, peridots, ammonites, a truckload of amethyst aka “the Ferrero Rocher of gemstones”, jasper, garnet, watermelon tourmaline, pigeon-blood ruby, more amethyst; petrified coral, petrified wood, petrified poop; rocks for engagement rings, for healing, for paper weights; polished rocks, raw rocks, rocks carved into face of Mao; singing bowls, seashells, notebooks bound with buffalos grazed in Nepal; rocks for mob wife, trad wife, gangster wife, goth wife; chemistry lessons on iridescence of bismuth, anatomical deep dives on chakras; haggling permitted, market rates of silver and gold handy.

There is a deli next to my house I like going to on days I work from home. They only open for weekday lunch hours, and is a favorite among the office-going lot. It is the same people behind the counter — receiving orders, making food, collecting money — every single day, and perhaps if I were a bit more consistent with the upkeep of my facial hair, they would one day recognize me by sight. There is, however, one little thing odd with this place. You see, they don’t bother, like most conventional eateries, with menus. The whole concept of an inventory of items you are allowed to order and the rather pesky detail of price is too tedious here. Here, your order takes the following form: (chicken | meatball | eggplant)-(bruscetta | arugula | parmegiana | mozarella )-(hero | platter), and the price is seemingly a random number. Certain combinations prompt a question: “do you want peppers and onions with that?”, but that might cost you a few more dollars. Some of my friends think it is so quaint and cute and “so New York.” Me, I am less sure. I could live without lunchtime guesswork.

Visitors to Minneapolis might find St Anthony falls a tad uninspiring, and St Anthony himself must be rather upset that his eminent name doesn’t grace something more stately, but this underwhelming kink in the Mississippi river once birthed the largest flour milling operation in the world. Minneapolis is no longer the flour capital of the world, but its waterfront is still littered with tubular grain silos and washed-up relics of mills. One of them, the Washburn A Mill, is now a museum. Despite only burning down as recently as 1991, its walls and foundations are put to display as if they were the remains of some Roman ruins. Inside, slick wood and glass paneling meets meet industrial air-vents and scary warnings about mauled limbs and flour-dust explosions; this is industrial chic distilled to its essence. Here, you not only learn the journey of a wheat kernel in great detail, you also get to sample freshly made biscuits in the Baking Lab operated by a bona-fide embodiment of Betty Crocker. This is no Isabella Steward Gardner Museum or Lotusland; this is not the whimsy of a wealthy socialite. This is better. This is flour — you know, the stuff croissants are made of.

When I was little, I had once read the Count of Monte Cristo, which had not only convinced me that Mercedes was the sweetest name on a person, but had also developed a yearning to visit the prison island, Château d’If, where the fictional Edmond Dantes would have been imprisoned. There I was, at the Old Port of Marseille, staring longingly at an archipelago of islands a distance away. “The Château d’If est ferme — it’s closed but there is a boat to an island nearby,” I am told, and I hurriedly jump on a boat which, of course, is also named Edmond Dantes. The islands in the Frioul archipelago are dry, limestone-white, and have the texture of a crumbly bread, but the water filling its bays, oh my, I don’t think I have ever seen anything so blue. This is where Dantes must have swum to after escaping prison, where he must have met his loyal pirate friend. In these reveries, I miss my boat back to the city. “No boats until the evening,” a local restauranteur tells me, and I already feel the December chill creeping into me. I didn’t know till then how lonely sunsets feel when you are trapped in an island. At a distance, Marseille is starting to glow. This must be what Dantes must have felt like. So close, yet so far.