A simple but incredibly delicious feta dish. You won't make it just once...
The post Recipe of the Month: Spicy Baked Feta (Bouyiourdi) appeared first on Legal Nomads.
Perched atop the fire house in Lincoln, Illinois is a lone phone box that seems to have simply fallen out of the sky and landed on the building, but in fact the glass phone enclosure was installed to help warn against massive storms.
During the 1960s weather prediction technology was not what it is today, but the need for the service was possibly even more pressing. The simplest way to find out what was coming was to get to a high vantage point and take a look. Unfortunately under high winds and rains, this presented its own problems. However the technology for keeping people safe from the elements while they talked on the phone had already arrived in the form of the classic phone booth.
It is not known exactly who decided to marry the two things on the roof of the Lincoln fire house, but ever since, the enigmatic phone booth that was simply plopped there has been a popular oddity. While in use, a firefighter (usually one lower on the seniority ladder) would ascend to the roof during inclement weather and look for tornadoes or particularly nasty storm clouds. If they spotted any, they would pick up the phone and let their emergency working fellows know.
Today the phone is no longer in use, but the phone booth is still visible from the street. Apparently the oddity attracts a number of gawkers from around the world each year.
The history of Africa, and the Rift Valley in particular, is not a static one. Throughout history, the movement of different groups of people - hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, agriculturalists - have created one of the most unique and complex landscapes on the planet. The archaeological remains of this part of the world thus remain enigmatic, with few links between the people who created them and those who inhabit the area in the present day. So it is with the Engaruka ruins, which today overlook a dusty arm of the Rift Valley in north-western Tanzania.
The story, as told by the archaeology, is vague. Sometime in the 15th century, locals began experimenting with the small-scale cultivation of indigenous African crops such as millet and sorghum. Over the next three centuries, however, their success in these small-scale endeavors led to a vast expansion in the farming system and a significant increase in population. A huge amount of labour was invested over this time in building furrows to canalize the Engaruka River and redistribute water to the fields, which sprawled at the foot of the Rift escarpment. Large terraces were constructed, repaired, and reconstructed such that over time, they reached a cumulative height of over 3 meters in places. On the slopes overlooking these fields, villages expanded to incorporate a burgeoning population, which at its height may have included over 8000 men, women, and children.
Visiting the site today, its location does nothing to betray its prominent history. What once may have been one of the biggest inland centers in eastern Africa is now a quiet corner of Tanzania, on the edge of the much more popular and touristic Ngorogoro Conservation Area. The road to get here is long and unpaved. You must either catch the bus that runs twice a day from Mto wa Mbu on the shore of Lake Manyara, or else risk life and limb on a one-and-a-half-hour dirt bike (‘Piki-Piki’) ride through the bush. Either way, you are not likely to encounter any of the safari traffic of Ngorogoro, but instead the rush-hour gridlock of dozens of Maasai pastoralists herding their goats in the middle of the road. Once here, the climb up the Rift escarpment to the location of the village can be brutal in the midday 40°C heat. You may wonder, among the other unsolved mysteries of the site, why in God’s name the inhabitants of Engaruka chose to build on a slope like this. Then, looking back over the abandoned field system stretched out below, you may begin to realize what a huge project the building of this site was, and what a significant place it must have been. Tally this with how little is known about the site, and the questions multiply.
For all its "natural" wonders, the human agency that created the landscape of eastern Africa is often overlooked. In fact, much of what is considered ‘natural’ about the east Africa landscape is the product of thousands of years of human interaction with and within the environment. The Serengeti plains, for instance, are a carefully managed anthropogenic landscape that has been shaped through the sustained grazing of pastoralist herds for the past two thousand years. This makes Engaruka even more important as a site: for standing out as a testament to the rich human history of an area of the world whose human history is often forgotten.
Sometime in the 18th century, the villages of Engaruka were abandoned and the fields at the foot of the Rift escarpment ceased to be cultivated. On par with the rest of what is known about the site, the reasons for this sudden desertion are unexplained. Nowadays, locals at the modern village of Engaruka, about four kilometers from the ancient site, have their own theories about who lived here 500 years ago, while archaeologists return again and again with ever more elaborate equipment to answer ever more elaborate questions. The answers to these questions, however, will necessarily rely in part on mere speculation.
This morning I wrote that Delta had started charging more miles for stopovers on international awards and that one of two things were possible: An unannounced devaluation, with stopovers no longer permitted on a roundtrip award (even though no such announcement had been made and the website said stopovers were still allowed) A glitch with […]
The post Delta’s Website Charging Tens of Thousands of Extra Miles for Awards: Feature or a Bug? appeared first on View from the Wing.
Last night I posted about how Delta's website stopped pricing stopovers on award tickets. Previously you were allowed one stopover and one open jaw on a roundtrip award ticket.
Though as of yesterday, award tickets didn't price the same way. While open jaws still priced fine, itineraries with stopovers simply priced as multiple awards.
Nothing surprises me anymore in this industry, so I can't say I was surprised to see Delta SkyMiles make a major award ticket policy change without notice.
Delta Points has an update on the situation. It appears as if Delta is claiming that this was part of a "recent change in IT at delta.com." Per a message from someone at Delta management:
The post Delta SkyMiles Clarifies: They Didn’t Mean To Get Caught appeared first on One Mile at a Time.