transplog

It's a breezy Friday afternoon, the first day of your vacation. You walk the wide concrete trail that separates the San Francisco bay from a mega biotech campus. The bay waters sway to and fro but glint white when the sunlight hits a crest just so. The biotech labs and offices, precise in form and function, also twinkle a bit in the sun.

Surely you wouldn't be surprised by the occasional random thought? Vacation and clean air and sunshine do that to a person.

And your shrewd old math teacher, she'd probably appreciate that random thought too: the shadows on the bridge do look like they're marching across the planks in perfect logarithmic scale.

Bridge and shadows in logarithmic scale

Sometimes you can simply look at the surface. You don't always need to look in: navel-gazing left for another day.

Look at, not in (streetlights)

Look at, not in (clouds)

Wandering an unfamiliar town, without map or guide, can bring the joy of small, random discoveries. (Or the despair of hopelessly wrong turns, but that's a post for another day.)

Brugge (Bruges, if you kow-tow to the French) is a UNESCO World Heritage site (link) cited for its outstanding quaintness. Cobblestones worn to nubs by your great-great-great-great-greats lead to market squares resplendent with Gothic spires. Inky waters slip between the streets, surfacing occasionally so that tourists may pause on the arched canal bridges: posing for that snapshot.

So wandering in Brugge is best accomplished after a few days of performing the mandatory tourist ablutions: canal tour, brewery, churches, etc.. Only then can you scrabble along the narrow alleys and happily arrive nowhere of any significance.

And then you may find the joy of a small, random discovery.

Mind the scholastic snail with tiger tattoo

If you're in a country not your own, then more amusement comes in the form of mis-translating. Meanwhile, I always mind the snails.

If you find that you're fresh out of means to obtain calories, then I highly recommend this one: chocolate-cherry bars topped with nuggets of toasted hazelnut.

Chocolate-cherry bars
topped with roasted hazelnuts

The result might be compared to a deconstructed nutella/gianduja with the uppity twang of tart cherries. (Since the most trendy dishes are deconstructed these days, so too must nutella submit.)

Thanks to Cook's Illustrated for the recipe: CHOCOLATE-CHERRY BAR COOKIES WITH HAZELNUTS (subscription/login required).