Photos: Paan

lukaslovesphotos — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 02:43:00 GMT

Ingredients
Sikkim Version:
The sweet version, as well as the tobacco version have the same basic ingredients (at least the version I saw)

- betel leaf
- Areca nuts
- other nuts
- lime paste
- local herbs
- coconut splits
- spices

How to prepare this recipe
Sikkim Version:
Once the ingredients are chopped, the lime paste is put onto the leaf and all ingredients are filled inside the leaf.
It is not that easy to fold the leaf, as I tried it, after unfolding it in the jeep. There are for sure different techniques,
depending on the size. It is rather easy but the chewing keeps you busy for a while.

Important to say it is for chewing, I had some parts I could not eat, because they were just to hard to break, I am not sure
if it was some kind of peel.

The story behind this recipe
In early September 2012 I spent one week in Sikkim, lo- cated in North India.

I have to get into greater de- tail for you to understand why this piece of paan is still in my mind.

The days before I had to leave it was raining, like there is no tomorrow. I had a tough time schedule. I had to take this jeep to get my bus in Siliguri, which in turn had to be in the morning in Kolkata in order for me to get my train to Mumbai, where my plane would leave back to Latvia. So I could not afford any delay.

When I showed up at the jeep company in the morning, it was still raining, hasn’t even stopped for a second and the shop was closed. I called them and was told that in may- be some hours there could be a jeep, but they are not sure, as the rain washed off one part of the street the day before.

Around three hours later the jeep finally showed up.

After a five-hour ride we stopped in a village some- where at the border of Sik- kim. I love food and I take
care of the things that I eat, so I wanted to find something fresh. After a time I realised that we are supposed to leave in five minutes. I found a shop and saw a guy pre- paring, what I found out was called, paan.

I never heard about it, nor did I know what it was, but it looked colourful and fresh, so I decided to buy three of them. I got two sweet paan (called mitha) and one, what I thought was salty, called saadha. But after biting in the ‘salty’ one I realised there was tobacco inside. A bit confused but still happy, I really enjoyed all three of them.

I tried to analyse what the ingredients in the sweet paan were. I found out that the paan contained Areca nuts, lime paste, other nuts, some fancy colourful sweets and different kind of spices, wrapped in a Betel leaf. I’ve never experienced that kind of snack, and I am an experi- enced traveller, trying almost everything I find.

I will always remember this little piece of something, especially after all the stress in the morning, this paan made my day.

Photos: Meeting cultures

lukaslovesphotos — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:15:00 GMT

I´m Lukas Rapp, graduating this autumn in journlism at the University of Applied Science in Magdeburg. My passion is fotojournalism and travel photography. I would love to find my profession in this field. Furthermore my focus is about war and conflict zones. And in portraying not the cold, aggressive part, but the beauty inside this chaos. In the last eight month I was travelling beside studies more than 45.000 km to see the beauty of some contries and taking photos, which tell about their country, cultures and habits. I would never travel without camera. There is always a possibility to take nice pictures, but get to know the story behind it, is even more fascinating. The reason why I should be choosen, is that my photography is different, mine is with symphathy. I would never take a picture without thinking about the background story and the story this picture has to tell. For all of my pictures I can tell a short anecdote. It´s a beautiful feeling to reach technical limits, as you know there is space for development. I am sure with the right support I could be a better photographer, that´s another reason for applying for the Greenland Travel Photography scholarship.