Good to see so people from so many different places! I discovered Book of Words about 12 years ago when I was living in a bit of a cespit of a town on the coast of the Namib desert, called Walvis Bay (translated into Whale Bay). The whales were long ago hunted out of the area by evil European whalers.
Although travel guides will tell you about the beauty of the world's oldest desert meeting the cold Atlantic sea, where the welwitschia plant is a living fossil thousands of years old, then don't mention the truly unique fragrant air. For about six months of the year, during fishing season - fishing and tourism being primary industries along with uranium mining - locals are treated to the gut-dissolving odour of burning fish.
Nobody tells you this when you first arrive in Walvis, as locals enjoy watching newbies choke and gag at the unrelenting stench. Walvis Bay in the fish meal producing capital of the world, if
http://www.namibian.com.na/2003/june/national/03DF72CE4C.html is to be believed. Having moved to the town when I was 12, I never grew used to it the way that other kids had. While nobody ever truly gets used to the smell, you do learn to manage your gag reflex.
I remember with fondness taking my English boyfriend to Africa for the first time a few years later, and taking him to Namibia. Though not in fishing season, the factories seem to have been fired up for some strange reason - nothing serious enough to engage the olfactory senses of anyone who'd spent a couple of years there. He went green. And such is the only pleasure of locals, waiting for for visitors to grace the town with their presence when the breeze is blowing in from the wrong direction and watching them faint in the onslaught of putrid air.
But that's not strictly my hometown, which is the city of Durban, South Africa. Durban is home to the world's biggest sugar silos, handling 800 tons of sugar in a day, or some such large figure.
The bunny chow is local dish that claims to be the oldest takeaway meal (though the Cornish and their pasties would probably have something to say to that) A half or quarter loaf of bread, with centre scooped out, filled with mutton, chicken or beans curry, then with the scooped out bread placed back on top, the sauce soaking into the bread. Occasionally served with a grated carrot and raisin/chili salad. Fingers are the only way to eat them. Very messy, and very good! Cutlery will only get you laughed at. Nobody knows why they're called bunnies, though the chow part is self explanatory. Some believe it it a bastardization of the name Banhia, a family who sold the dish from their restaurant.
It is thought to have originated among the Indian immigrant workers who would used the hollowed out loaves to take their meals with them to the sugar plantations. Ghandi would have had them when he worked as a lawyer in Durban in the late 19th/early 20thC. The poor working conditions that he witnessed kicked off his campaigning for civil rights.
So who says that sugar is a bad thing.