Bourdain’s Field Notes
NEW JERSEY, May 2016—I woke up this morning in Borneo and went for breakfast in a crowded kopitiam (coffee shop), where I greedily devoured a lip-burning, nose-running, utterly delicious bowl of Kuching-style laksa. Tomorrow, I’ll board a long boat and, for the second time in my life, head up the Skrang River—hits time for Gawai, the Iban harvest festival where I will (I am warned) be drinking way too much rice whiskey.
And yet, and yet … in the midst of all this … exotica, my mind runs to New Jersey.
New Jersey, too, was exotic to me once. For much of my childhood.