Adventures in Tech

Lunches at work are usually nothing to write about, however every now and then, we get an external restaurant that makes a memorable dish. A couple of weeks ago, that was the Cajun shrimp po’boy. The sandwich was relatively simple: a toasted baguette, a big of mayonnaise, some shredded lettuce, and seasoned Cajun shrimp, however the taste was amazing. I had an inkling about the origin of the name po’boy, but the price of the sandwich betrayed that thinking. A bit of research on the web revealed a couple of origin stories. The most plausible and heartwarming was on Wikipedia : that during a 1929 street car workers’ strike, restaurant owners served the sandwich to their striking colleagues for free, jokingly referring to the strikers as poor boys, after which the sandwiches took the name, and in the Louisiana dialect shortened to po’boy.

I am a big fan of good and delicious food, irrespective of where it is sold. That includes street vendors, and “holes in the wall,” which I have always associated with small nondescript places, with no signs on the venue, no place to sit, and a staff that exudes a slightly higher risk of contracting dysentery, typhoid, or other gastrointestinal diseases. That description might be a bit extreme, but I had some of the best meals in similar places, including the famous Hyderabadi Dum-Biryani in a place not so far from that description. So where did the phrase a “hole in the wall” come from? On another historical tour of Florence, our tour guide and language enthusiast pointed out some of the palaces where Italian nobility such as the Medici family lived long time ago. Invariably at the entrance there was a slit or a hole in the wall, and the tour guide told us the story that after the nobility hosted lavish dinner parties, instead of throwing the remaining food away, they would gi...

One of my favorite activities while traveling is to take a walking tour of the city I am visiting. The tour usually consists of a small group led by a tour guide, who invariably is a student of art or history studying abroad, or an expat humanities graduate who is living abroad and is augmenting their income by giving tours. The tours are always enjoyable, combining stories about the city and its history, architecture, and cultural spots with frequent stops to coffee and dessert shops. Sometimes you get a special tour guide, who in addition to being a history buff, is also a linguistics enthusiast. When that happens, you hear special stories about the historical origin of phrases: something I am very interested in. In Rome, I had such a tour guide, and the story stuck with me, although I could not verify its accuracy. I could find one website that has a similar reference to the story. It was hilarious and I remembered it to this day. It is the story of the origin of the phrase “...