English-language menus in the Czech Republic are often quite confusing, filled with unfortunate word choices and mistranslations. This strangely named soup from the great Café Savoy is a fave.
For the record, it’s supposed to be chicken soup with liver dumplings.
I had the carrot soup instead.
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Last weekend I had a short “Foraging” piece in the NYT about Zeha Berlin, a brand of shoes which were popular in the German Democratic Republic. Wacky yet cool, modern Zehas are where global sneaker culture meets Ostalgie, the nostalgia for Communist stuff in Germany and the former Soviet bloc countries of central and eastern Europe.
This is the kind of article where you can type as much as you want, but it’s the pictures that tell the story. Only one of my photos ran with the piece in the online version, so I’m posting a couple of leftovers here to show you what you’re missing.
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Tagged: Berlin, Germany
My current Twitter background image: a shot from our trip to Spiš Castle in Slovakia. I’m probably part of the problem, but it often seems like the Czech Republic gets too much attention, especially when compared to the country’s former federal partner. In terms of travel and food and drink, Slovakia has great untold stories everywhere from Bratislava to Snina. And in terms of budget travel, beautiful rural Slovakia can make rural Moravia look overpriced.
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Tagged: Slovakia
I’ve flown with SkyEurope Airlines on three travel assignments: first down to Dubrovnik in 2006, then back again to Dubrovnik for another story in 2007, then over to Brussels in 2008. Of all the airlines flying out of Prague, I chose SkyEurope primarily because they were traveling to my destinations at times that were convenient. Second, I appreciated the prices: the first time my wife and I went to Dubrovnik, we paid the equivalent of $95 for each round-trip ticket. And third, I liked the Boeing 737s, which I prefer to Airbus A320s for no reason I can state here.
Although I enjoyed those flights, I’m not sure if I’ll be booking any new tickets with SkyEurope, as the grapevine is rife with stories about canceled flights and canceled routes. Petr Bokůvka reports that the airline is now down to its last four aircraft. Some of the shiny 737s have been replaced with older, loaner MD-83s.
Even more ominous, at least from a travel writer’s point of view: SkyEurope’s in-flight magazine just included an outdated travel feature that sent travelers to a bar that had closed some 18 months earlier.
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Tagged: travel writing
A confession: I’m crazy about hamburgers and classic sandos. Back home — by which I mean the USA — I generally avoided diner food, usually seeking out Ethiopian, Cambodian or even (God forbid) central European cuisine instead.
But a decade of living out of the country can change you. Now I have a club sandwich just about as often as I can. And if a Michelin-starred restaurant sees fit to list a burger on the menu, I’m probably going to take it out for a spin.
So when I saw that Prague’s new Siddharta Café offered a club sandwich, lunch was settled.
Siddharta Café is part of the new Buddha Bar complex in Old Town, home to the tenth Buddha Bar — in the sense of a bar and restaurant — in the world. More importantly, it’s also the very first Buddha Bar Hotel, luxury lodgings with the same pan-Asian decorative exoticism as the bar chain. I’ll be writing about the hotel later. For now, after taking a brief tour, I can tell you that it is an extremely stylish place. “Sexy” may be overused as a descriptor for boutique hotels, but the place does have a highly charged, palpably lascivious atmosphere.
Meaning yes. If you stay here, you will get laid.
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Tagged: food, hotels
Looking back often helps to clarify where you’re heading as well as where you’ve been. To that end, I’ve put together this brief overview of my working life for the year 2008.
Evan Rail’s 2008 Annual Report contains forward-looking statements that are based on management’s expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and may involve risks and uncertainties which are difficult to predict. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Keep reading →
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I loved last weekend’s Saturday Night Live parody of the “Whopper Virgins” commercial (available at Eat Me Daily, perhaps funniest after reviewing the over-earnest original). I liked it in particular because it was so timely: I’m just now corresponding with photographer Davin Ellicson about us possibly teaming up for a story about rural Romania, exactly where the commercials are set, a place where people still wear traditional costumes and you can easily find “eastern European farmers who have never eaten a burger.”
My own experience is that most people in Bucharest seem to have eaten (and enjoyed) a Big Mac; the sprawling outdoor seating area of the McDonald’s on Piaţa Romană seems to be the city’s most popular hangout for teenagers. But outside the capital, you’ll quickly find plenty of the images Western Europe lost track of ages ago: itinerant Romany families seated around the ox-carts in which they live; folks in local costumes; traveling shepherds with their flocks. And despite joining the EU just over two years ago, Bucharest still often looks as timelessly Old World (and burger-free) as in the snapshot above.
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