Somewhere in the course of cooking a new dish, you have a eureka! experience, a mental bang moment where it all comes together and you realize that you indeed have before you your goal, the dish imagined. During a technical sauce-making class at the cooking school La Cuisine Paris (indeed in Paris), I had six…
A beautiful and pristine alpine lake, a small island in the center capped by a perfect little church, a medieval castle perched dramatically on a cliff face above it, all surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Crimey, I don’t know what’s happened to me. I don’t usually write using such trite, stock phrases, but Slovenia’s Lake Bled…
“Hello!?” the older blonde woman behind one of the many counters in Vienna’s Naschmarkt is saying to me, her voice dripping with sarcasm in that particular manner that means, “You are not acting correctly and thus let me draw attention to your misbehavior.” We had been standing in front of her counter in the market…
Everything seems to be only five or ten kilometers apart in Istria. All day, when I looked at my next destination on the map, it always seemed to be about ten clicks away, as the bird flies. Driving, however, wasn’t much harder. In the northern part of Croatia’s Istria peninsula, one could hop to a…
I drove into the one main turning circle in the tiny town of Svetvinčenat, in the Istria Peninsula in the very northern part of coastal Croatia. The rental car’s GPS was spouting instructions about turning left, right, or perhaps upward, quickly, but I could tell I was as central as one could be here, and…
Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho (or Kabukicho) is often described as a red-light district and I suppose it is, but it resembles famous ones like Amsterdam almost not at all. Kabuki-cho is not people hanging out inviting you in; in fact, you may not get in a place at all, and may not understand the system if you do.
The driving rain poured outside and I was wet sitting inside. I had jet lag and was feeling sick, shaken, and not good in the stomach. The two couples on either side of me were eating ungodly amounts of food, entire wheels of cheese, meat plates, steaks, quantities that made my system tremble. If…
Once upon a time, the Hungarians stumbled upon a type of chili pepper that could be dried out and ground, with variations from sweet to fiery. Any culture that does that has something going for it. They of course weren’t alone, since much of the world had discovered chilies by then, and they were also…
There’s no city in the world that will make you feel small like Tokyo does. The city is inconceivably massive, and that could be why the Japanese love their tiny, tiny establishments, snug places that always involve drinking, usually involve some eating, and that make Tokyo so interesting. I have spent several nights haunting a…
Segovia, Spain hits all the notes for a good day trip: small town just an hour away from Madrid the big city, feels utterly different, and contains striking sights one can’t find in Madrid. Segovia is hardly undiscovered, but not nearly so crowded as other day-tripper-places such as Toledo, which is so packed with tacky…
For utterly understandable reasons, the main attraction in the oh little town of Bethlehem is the Church of the Nativity, built right over the birthplace of You Know Who. That’s the only reason people visit. You may wonder, as I did, is there any other reason to go there, and thus is it worth the…
You cannot escape forever having a layover in Frankfurt. Either you’ve done it, or it’s coming. If you’ve done it, you’ll eventually do it again. Frankfurt airport is the fourth-busiest in Europe, but it feels like the first. It’s smack in the center of Western Europe and the hub for everyplace you want to be…
