Cannabis in Kathmandu, a groovy salsa setlist by Gia Fu, and the unique charm of Malaysian Food Culture.

Purple Haze: Cannabis Returns to Kathmandu

The eighth-century Buddhist tantric master Padmasambhava is thought to have been the first to describe a beyul—a place where the physical and spiritual worlds collide. These hidden valleys are buried among the Himalayas of Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and India. Some are tiny; others are hundreds of square miles. But the belly of each comprises an ambrosial, parallel dimension, limitless in divine and earthly delights, and accessible only to true believers, as the Holy Grail was to Lancelot. One could stand smack in the middle of a beyul without knowing it existed. Nobody is sure how many exist, but the working theory is that there are one hundred and eight.

Believers unlock beyuls in times of great stress or upheaval. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Sherpa people of the Minyagpa, Thimmi, Sertawa, and Chawa clans were forced to flee their Tibetan homes and cross the treacherous Nangpa La pass into Nepal, where, depending on whom one believes, a hunter or a trio of friends revealed the beyul of the Khumbu Valley, just a few dozen miles from the royal city of Kathmandu. The migrants established an agrarian paradise on the southern slopes of Chomolungma, the “mother goddess of the world.”

Emigrés from powerful and fractious regions flocked to Nepal, a spleen roughly the shape and size of Tennessee, in search of their own beyuls, farming on loam that welcomed almost any crop—especially cannabis, a bulky, dioecious herb that could be grown for food, medicine, rope, roofing, oil, clothing, and, when smoked as fresh buds, hand-rolled resin charas, or hash, a potent high… Harper’s Magazine

Gia Fu - Selecta 002 (Salsa)

The Unique Charm of Malaysian Food Culture

For hundreds of years, Malaysia has served as a rich melting pot of south-east Asian culture and ethnicities. Malaysia’s welcoming and tolerant society has long since embraced these multi-ethnic influences and Malaysian food is no exception. Influences from Chinese, Indian, Thai, Arab and ethnic Malay cooking give Malaysian food culture a truly unique edge over other national cuisines and will immediately captivate the taste buds. The result is vibrant dishes with richness, spice, succulence but also freshness. Nowhere else can you find the thick heaviness of Indian curry influences alongside dishes like Cantonese style steam Pau and traditional Malay Keropok Lekor… PAFood

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