I looked it up in Wikipedia. It was invented by a chef who couldn’t source snails, and substituted locally-plentiful oysters. 
I don’t enjoyTraveling. A high dollar trip in first class seats and 4 star hotels makes it more tolerable. I prefer staying home or renting a cabin at the lake.
The price doesn’t save me from the long lines at TSA and the hassles at the airport. The food in the hotel is way over priced and often not that good.
The beach is crowded and there are a limited number of chaise lounges. Sun block is messy.
I have some great memories of vacation trips.
I wouldn’t want to be a rich dude that travels regularly every year.
I don’t know where you live, but a nice seafood restaurant that has raw oysters would be very likely to have other sorts of similar cooked items.
Poached mussels in garlic broth, clams casino, oysters Rockefeller are all ways to get your slimy bite-sized shell-dwellers in a more typically palatable form. Can recommend all of them.
FWIW, despite growing up here in seafood Central, my GF is not a fan of raw oysters. But loves the Rockefeller style. More solid, not slimy, and the cheese and spinach makes the flavor (and salinity) a lot less one-dimensional. The topping adds a nice crunch too.
You’d think, but for whatever reason they’re not a common dish hereabouts despite a multitude of fresh oyster places (and oysters are harvested commercially here). Not difficult to find mind you, just not common. Then I have to find someone who is willing to a.) go with me to that place, b.) forgo something else and c.) let me eat a couple off their plate and d.) be in the mood for all of the above myself 
. Also me and mine don’t usually frequent nicer seafood-specific places generally. The combination of all of the above just means its a dance I’ve never quite completed.
But again, I don’t particularly care so it’s not like this is a lifelong quest. If I never eat a one, I won’t feel in the least bit disappointed. It’s just one of a number of dishes in the back of mind that I’d vaguely like to try some day. I mean lobster thermidor is similar - I like lobster and would vaguely be interested in trying it, but who does lobster thermidor in restaurants anymore? Hardly anybody in my neck of the woods and on the rare occasions you do find it in a fine casual or below place (because I’m no longer willing to dress up in a dinner jacket to eat out), it is so pricey that you usually go, eh - the beer-battered fish and chips looks good 
.
I do enjoy massages, very much so. If I had the money to indulge in them, I would regularly do so. It is on my mental bucket list to experience a hammam (a Turkish bath where an attendant scrubs you squeaky clean while massaging you with copious amounts of soap suds). From time to time, I will get a Thai massage in a place that does walk-ins, as it is the most accessible kind around here.
However, I don’t particularly enjoy getting my hair cut (in general, personal grooming is something I find a chore). I have long hair which I get cut in a man-bob, and then get a trim when it gets very long (I am due for one on Wednesday). The last time I went almost a year, now it will have been about 9 months. The hairdresser I go to is a bit expensive, but I am willing to stay with her because she knows me and because I prefer her communication style to the one I had before her (she is very communicative and I like talking with her – we are able to find common topics to talk about, whereas the previous one was a cold fish).
I very much do enjoy travelling but again my income doesn’t allow me to do so often. I wish I could pay for first class tickets and stay in a 5-star or at least higher-end hotel with full room service. However, I’m happy when I can take a low-cost flight anywhere and stay in a hostel.
It was actually at a Hammam in Turkey that I discovered this (I was stationed in Sinop Turkey in the 80s and a shipmate talked me into the Hammam) In my experience I paid for a 300 lb bald Turk to beat the shit out of me. You can keep it.
Anthony Bourdain did NOT enjoy it.
Fresh flower bouquets. I mean, they’re all right, but I don’t have any sense of smell, so it’s just an expensive pretty thing that decays before my eyes, and I have to keep the pets from eating it. Also, it seems like a spotlight on the giver, “Look, look what I gave!”
I’ve had a lot of massages. None ever felt like i was being beaten. It’s usually gentle pressure on the muscles. I know there are a lot of styles of massage. My SIL (a professional massage therapist for many years) once did one that involved more poking and pressure into the soft tissue. That felt weirdly intimate, despite being fully clothed. But the typical swedish/deep muscle massage is about slowly and firmly manipulating the muscles to unkink them.
This. Much of spa treatments are woo BS. Aromatherapy? Please; spare me.
But your basic massage, where somebody kneads your body parts for 45-50 minutes while you lay there in comfy surroundings with soft music is hard to beat. It’s very physically satisfying in a non-sexual way. By the end you’re a special sort of relaxed.
That’s a luxury I totally enjoy.
I’m shocked I’ll be the first in this thread to say cruises. I don’t get seasick or anything, I just find it appalling the resource waste and human exploitation…it’s kinda like going to vegas and watching how much water they waste in the middle of the desert.
I haven’t been on a cruise, so i can’t say. But i have been to Vegas, and i don’t enjoy visiting Las Vegas.
I managed to have fun while I was there. I watched a lot of Cirque and magic acts. But i hated the smoky casinos. And your have you walk through them to get anywhere. There might be good food, but i didn’t find it. I did find weirdly enormous sushi with gold leaf. Um, give me a nice piece of fresh fish in a size that doesn’t require a fork and knife, thanks. And yes, why are we doing all this in the middle of a desert? I was much happier when those meetings i had to attend were held in Chicago or Philly.
Same. Physical touch, smalltalk plus the randomness of it (I travel around and can’t be bothered to go back to a specific place for a specific barber, so my haircuts are never quite the same).
I would feel bad for the many hairdressers losing business, but I’m looking forward to the day where there’s some kind of automated haircut machine.
“Expensive” is an understatement. Graff Diamond makes a couple of watches that go for $40 and $55 million, and both are ugly and ostentatious (though they look like women’s watches). Patek Philippe makes a broad line of men’s watches, some of which are in the $20 to $30 million range.
If that’s too rich for you, you can get a Vacheron Constantin Traditionelle Tourbillon Retrograde Date Openface for only $200,000, though your friends at the country club will look down on you. If you’re really a pauper you may have to settle for a Vacheron Constantin Traditionelle with manual winding – there are several models for only $34,400, but at that price they probably don’t even keep time and you’ll be shunned by polite society.
I just check my phone. Seems to do the job.
Watch channels will talk about watches at $4000 as “budget” and something “every man should have in their collection”. To me that’s still serious money for basically a bracelet with a useless added function.
Let alone when they try to do a de beers and claim you need to spend N times salary for a watch.
My Timex does its job: it tell me the time. That’s all I need it to do. I don’t understand why anybody who wears a watch needs anything that does the same, but costs a helluva lot more.
I get that there are people who see $4000 watches as “budget,” and that’s fine. That’s their prerogative. But if I was able to get such a watch—well, I think that I could use that money for something else.
Perfectly sensible. I haven’t worn a watch in decades, and only wore one prior to the era of compact cell phones when I was still working. BTW, I wasn’t making up those prices – they’re all legit prices in US dollars, and most of what it buys you is either ugly and ostentatious or bizarrely over-complicated so that it can be hard to actually see the time.
No matter how much money I had, a super-fancy watch would be absolutely the last thing I’d spend any money on. Its only purpose is to announce, “look how rich I am!”, and the irony is that almost nobody would notice, anyway. And even if they did, and remarked “wow, that watch is worth over a million dollars”, how is that supposed to make me feel better about myself? And if they then pulled out a gun, I might feel considerably worse!
You maybe can also look forward to baldness. It’ll probably happen first.
Same with both massages and haircuts. Well I did have a friend that was a ‘haircutter’ it was a real business. I could have a beer while there. But for the most part, no thanks so I only go about three times a year.
Same goes for massages. I’ve had one of those. It was a ‘gift’.
I’ve been on one cruise. It was a mess. Spring break. Kids would line up at the bar, get a drink and just go to the back of the line and start all over again.
There was a medical emergency on board that was no fault of anyones, but it involved a med-evac coast guard helicopter when we where out at sea. That delayed our return to shore by a day and they decided since we didn’t pay for the extra day of booze, they shut down the bars. That was as close to a mutiny as I hope I ever see. They opened the bars back up.
We are going to go on another with a more up scale company.