Russell Peters is already a comedy superstar in much of the world. A recent one-off appearance at London’s Shaw Theatre sold out in 48 hours and when his first shows in Sydney and Melbourne were announced in May 2006, 10,000 tickets were gone in less than two days with zero advertising. In April 2005, Russell was the first South Asian to headline and sell-out the Apollo Theatre in New York City.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a breathtaking archipelago located east of India. It is also my next exotic destination as I will work as a scuba diving instructor there for a while. As mentioned in my diary in earlier posts I have a friend there who own a part of a diveshop on the beach that was voted the best beach in Asia in 2004 by Time magasine. When I was offered to come and work at Barefoot Scuba and meet up with the owner Jeremy Zay Blake (Jez) and my friend Wayne Blairs who work there as a videographer I accepted right away. I had several other offers for work over most of the world, also some management positions, but I have always had a small dream of diving in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and to meet up with my friends again.
As my next destination is the Andaman Islands I need to do a stopover in Chennai (also known as Madras) in India and I thought it could be a good idea to find some more facts on this Indian city before I arrive. When I was digging up facts I could clearly see there is loads of interesting stuff for a visitor like me to pass time with, the main problem would be to get enough time to see it all. Please feel free to use the tips in this post if you should visit Chennai yourself.
If cuisine is about cooking style and food, then its features must be related to people, race, history, tradition, culture and science. In comparing cooking styles of the Thais (actually ‘Tais’ rather than ‘Thais’) and the Chinese more than two thousand years ago, both peoples shared the land of present day China but cooked differently.
The Chinese had already developed the rice steaming technique but the Tais were still boiling their rice. With evidence of rice-husk imprints on 5000-year-old pottery jars and rice seeds radio-carbon dated at 4000 years before Christ, both peoples slowly changed their habits of eating wild rice to cultivated rice of glutinous and non-glutinous varieties.
I uncover some really cool facts about chillies.
Surprisingly, chillies were not known in South-east Asia - home to many of the world’s hottest cuisines - until the New World was discovered. The Spanish introduced them to Europe in 1514, and the Portuguese introduced them to India and South-east Asia almost 100 years later.
Natives of Mexico, Brazil and Peru used to drink chocolate spiced with chili, and colored red with annatto (a food coloring derived from the lipstick tree) which made their mouths red and bloody-looking.
Historically speaking the knowledge of traditional Thai massage reached South East Asia some 2500 years ago. It is said to have been introduced then by a doctor from Northern India by the name of Jivaka Kumar Bhacca, a contemporary of Buddha and personal doctor of the Magadra King Bimbisara. Kumar Bhacca is known to have been a friend of Buddha and a doctor for the Byddhist monks. He is mentioned in the Pali Kanon, the old texts of Buddhism of the Southern school of Theravada (found today mainly in Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand).
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