Last month’s earthquake in Chile brought up warnings of a tsunami, once again, bringing to mind the terrible Indian Ocean earthquake of December 26, 2004. But it also reminded me of a very different tsunami that I’d almost forgotten: a chapbook of poems I published under that title just two weeks before the Boxing Day tsunami. It was, in the words of the one review it received, an unfortunate coincidence, to say the least.

For a long time, poetry was all I really cared about, though it didn’t begin that way: I started writing poems as a way to sharpen my skills for my goals of writing fiction and reportage. It was a kind of cross-training — sure, I could tell a good story in 2,000 words, but could I do it in 38 words? Could I do it in iambic pentameter? Tetrameter? Rhymed? Slant-rhymed?

After a while, though, I began to write poems for the sake of writing poems. The first were published in small magazines while I was in a grad program for French literature in Paris, where I worked on translations as part of my coursework at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. After a few years, however — after I had moved to Prague and begun writing my own stuff just as hard as I could — they began to appear in better magazines. Seven were in the Times Literary Supplement in London. One was in the New Republic. Somebody found that piece and recorded a space-music song with the same title. He even sent me a CD.

So after a few years, I had enough poems for a book, which was put out in a 22-page, 200-copy edition by my friends at Metre Editions in Ireland. The book was distributed at bookshops in Dublin and Prague, and was even listed on Amazon.com in the US for a while. I left a few copies on commission at a bookstore in Sarajevo while I was there for a poetry festival in 2005. Now it seems to have disappeared into the aether, though I was pleased to see it listed in the National Library of Australia.

The book received only one review that I know of, from Stephen Knight in the Times Literary Supplement five years ago on March 18, 2005. Since no one saw that review back then — since I was not on Facebook and certainly wasn’t blogging at the time — I’ll post it here to give the earlier, much smaller Tsunami its due.

Evan Rail, Tsunami. Dublin: Metre.

Skewering his subjects for their intemperance in “Remembering the Swiss”, a sonnet after Joachim du Bellay, Evan Rail is not above indulging himself, most effectively in “and Counting”, its epigraph from Apollinaire’s Alcools and its enjoyable swagger announcing a voice that brims with certainty even as its speaker careers through the streets:

In the sulphur-yellow, anti-violent streetlights
by ball-footed scissor-steps unbound
I am kite-high upon the pavement flying.

Fortunately, Rail’s humour survives his drink-fuelled delusions of omnipotence. “I give off light”, he continues, “by which librarians could reshelf and file”, and he is as much at home the pages of books as out in the world. Occasionally, the two meet: the Seine “spells out /the word for love in Old French”, and blood “curls up like the letters / of an illustrated manuscript”.

A pamphlet of twelve poems , Tsunami opens with “Passport Control” and closes with “Travelling Song”, its final sentence, “I will never be home again”, celebrating its author’s footloose existence. An American-born linguist, Evan Rail studied in France and now lives in Prague. This might have resulted in low-pressure anecdotes of life on the road, but, hearteningly, Rail’s peripatetic biography is instead reflected in a poetry that contemplates borders and the slipperiness of language. Drift – cosmonauts in orbit, regarding “the distance and difference // between us and the world, this measured space”, or the “measured space between the names for things / and things themselves” – is relished. “In Praise of a False Cognate” considers Gift, the German word for poison, while “from Wanderings in Czech” finds the words for ice cream (zmrzlina) and mademoiselle (slecno) insufficiently mimetic. Witty, deftly rhymed and elegantly shaped, this poetry displays a New World confidence having serious fun in Europe.

The unfortunate coincidence of its title notwithstanding, Tsunami is a poised debut. Full of fruitful dislocations, it is a challenge to anyone who believes that a vibrant poetry can only emerge from rootedness. The marriage of gusto and attentiveness in these poems tells a different story.

Stephen Knight

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s not a good sign. But perhaps it’s not terribly surprising. I was once asked to contribute to SkyEurope’s in-flight magazine by the Slovak production company that was then putting it together (like many in-flights, the magazine is produced ex-house; it now appears to come from Ink Publishing). For a travel feature of 1,200 words, the magazine offered to pay €150, or just 12.5 cents per word: roughly half of what could be called a not-great rate per word, one-quarter of a decent rate per word, and about one-eighth of the normal per-word rate paid by most in-flight magazines I’ve worked with. (NB: this is what they wanted to pay for a full-length feature with a very short deadline of just a few days, a situation which would normally call for the fee to be increased substantially.)

Naturally, I told them it was too little for what they wanted and refused the assignment. Now, a year or so later, it seems that they managed to get some words from me into their pages anyway.

Here’s a sentence from my article on Prague dining which ran in the New York Times of September 16, 2007:

“Czech cooking, however, has long been viewed as the lone downside, as if Prague’s delicious buffet of castles, concerts and cobblestones simply had to have a counterbalance.”

Here’s how that outdated article from travel writer Sarah Woods put it in December of 2008:

“For it wasn’t that long ago, that Prague epitomised the bad old days of Czech dining, which has been viewed as the nation’s lone downside – a counterbalance to all the castle towers and medieval cobblestone streets.”

Here’s a comment from August 25, 2008, on ivebeenthere.co.uk (which also sounds like my work):

“Nestled in a faded 18th century Baroque building below Prague Castle, the restaurant serves excellent modern European food.”

Here’s how that December 2008 article put it:

“…located in a faded 18th-Century Baroque building below Prague Castle,” Pálffy Palác serves “a menu of excellent modern European food.”

There are other similarities as well (the article’s description of la Degustation also seems to be a simple reworking from my story), but I don’t have enough interest to copy every standout turn of phrase and paste it into Google — a procedure, you’d have to imagine, that must be very similar to how this article was created.

It looks like two cases of getting what you pay for. Pay a low price for your tickets? There’s a good chance your flight will be canceled. Offer little more than unsalted peanuts for travel features? The articles in your magazine just might be cut-and-paste, cribbed-up hack jobs where some of the recommended spots closed down many months ago.

As always, buyer beware.

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.

Your dating chances are probably pretty good at the Siddharta Café, too. Functioning as the hotel lounge and day bar, it occupies a voluminous space with 10-meter sculpted ceilings and a live DJ at almost all times. One wall has dozens of Buddha statues in multicolored cubbyholes climbing to the ceiling. Praguers from a generation back might remember the space as the Marquis de Sade, an infamous den of iniquity and questionable structural integrity. (It never collapsed, though apparently it came close several times.) The space was said to have housed a bordello a century or so ago, which lent it an air of old Prague lustiness.

Though the grand opening is not for a couple of days, the hotel has been taking bookings since last week; at the Siddharta Café, they’ve been serving food and charging people money for it for a while. Today they had a two-course business lunch for 375 Kč, the fairly pricey local equivalent of $18, or three courses for 500 Kč, or $24. Among the starter options was a Czech bramboračka, meaning potato soup. I passed, ordering the Caesar salad with prawns instead.

No photo. Instead, imagine romaine lettuce leaves of the kind used to illustrate a gardening book from Dorling Kindersley: impossibly perfect, crisply green blades topped with big knife-flicks of Parmesan cheese. Atop those, a good half dozen shelled shrimp which had been pan-seared in butter. Standard-issue croutons mixed in with a garlicky, mustard-sharp dressing which gave way to more than a touch of anchovy in the finish. (Can a salad dressing have a finish? This one did.)

That was better than okay. And a few minutes later the sangwich showed up.

The fries looked better than they tasted: there was not enough crispiness to the outside, and the potato flesh was surprisingly sweet. They were just on the slick side of oily, several steps before “unacceptably greasy,” but still far from the Platonic ideal. The sandwich, however, was just about perfect: four crustless triangles of toasted white bread, lavished with mayo and layered with iceberg lettuce, thick-cut turkey breast, more toast, bacon, boiled egg and sliced tomatoes. The bacon occupied the sweet spot between breakfast strips and prosciutto. The boiled egg was exactly à point, an easy thing to mess up, and the turkey breast was rich and juicy. It was, as far as club sandwiches go, excellent.

This isn’t meant to be an entire review, just the first word on an interesting new café in Prague. But in a way, it says a lot about the place: they’re barely open, they still have people working on the wiring and finishing up the design, they haven’t even stocked the hotel shop, and yet the kitchen can crank out a pitch-perfect interpretation of a classic. For many restaurants, that’s not an easy task even under perfect conditions. It bodes well for the future.

A final observation: if I’m not mistaken, I was seated just across from Buddha Bar founder Raymond Visan, who seemed to be going over the final planning details for the hotel, occasionally giving instructions about the café and what needed to be fixed or changed. He looked tired, but he also looked satisfied.

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.

Countries Visited

Germany, making multiple trips to Bamberg, Regensburg and Munich.

Switzerland, just passing through, though it was fun to speak Swiss German again. (Grüezi, mitenand!)

Liechtenstein, where Nina and I stopped for the world’s most glorious fast-food view at the McDonald’s in Vaduz.

Italy, where we spent a week driving around Milan, Turin and small villages in the region, searching for and sampling the best Italian craft beers and some truly amazing food.

Austria, where we explored Innsbruck just for kicks.

Sweden, where I hung out in clubs and went to multiple concerts for three straight nights in Stockholm.

Belgium, where I visited great craft brewers in and around Brussels.

Czech Republic, including behind-the-scenes visits to the Budweiser Budvar and Pilsner Urquell breweries, a lot of time in beautiful Southern Bohemia and a long weekend gathering porcini in the Czech highlands.

Publications

The New York Times

Savoring Italy, One Beer at a Time. November 2, 2008. This travel section cover story charter the nascent beer trail and outstanding beer food in the northern Italian regions of Lombardy and Piedmont.

Stockholm: The Columbus Hotel. July 13, 2008. A quick-hit hotel review on cheap lodgings in the hipster heart of Stockholm.

Stockholm Is More Than Abba’s Town. May 11, 2008. A feature for the travel section’s music issue. Years ago, Sweden was best-known for its saccharine pop, but now it’s home to an array of edgy performers earning international acclaim.

Under Wintry Skies, a City Revealed. February 3, 2008. A feature on winter trips to the Czech capital, which give curious travelers a chance to take in the city’s attractions at a leisurely pace and with far fewer crowds.

Dining That’s Not Set to Strauss Waltzes. January 27, 2008. AKA “Choice Tables: Vienna.” A new generation of restaurateurs is updating the Austrian capital’s traditionally formal dining scene with casual restaurants in unexpected settings: inside museums, cheese shops, private homes and bookstores.

Condé Nast Traveler

Hot List Hotels: The Icon, Prague. May, 2008. A review of the newest and most high-tech design hotel in the city.

Hot List Tables: Angel, Prague. May, 2008. Restaurant review of this chic pan-Asian restaurant in Old Town.

Hot List Tables: Maze, Prague. May, 2008. A short review of Gordon Ramsay’s first restaurant on the Continent. 

Concierge.com

Reviews of hotels, restaurants, museums, boutiques, shops and sights to see for Condé Nast’s online Prague travel guide.

Imbibe

A first-person feature and photos on Starkbierzeit, Munich’s slightly secret, undertouristed, end-of-winter beer festival.

NWA WorldTraveler

“A Beer Tour of Europe,” October, 2008, a feature on beer travels in Brussels, Munich and Prague for the in-flight magazine of Northwest Airlines.

Scanorama

Wrote, assigned and edited the travel section for all 10 issues of the award-winning in-flight magazine of Scandinavian Airlines.

Beer Culture

111 posts on the Beer Culture weblog at Prague Monitor, including beer and travel stories from most of the countries listed above and interviews with some of Europe’s most famous brewers. By the end of Beer Culture’s first year, the site was receiving just under 10,000 pageviews per month.

Radio Appearances

Radio Prague, March 11, 2008, talking about how a Prague restaurant earned the first Michelin star in the former Eastern Bloc.

Deutsche Welle, May 19, 2008, again on Prague’s new Michelin star.

Radio Prague, June 26, 2008, speaking about the world-renowned quality of Czech pale lagers.

Television

Discovery Channel, December 18, 2008, in “How Stuff Works: Beer.”

Thoughts on 2009

Positive, but thinking that we’re going to have to back up our optimism and good will with effort and good work.

This post was inspired by Newley Purnell’s annual report and Alexander Basek’s Where I Went in 2008.

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.