Food in Prague

We were less impressed with the food in Prague than the scenery. Goulash seems to be the national dish, yet our favorite meals were at a Thai restaurant. However, the beer was perfect. I believe I drank six brands in three days, including two at a brew pub. Throw in a few very long walks for me and some excellent coffee and desserts for H, and you have an ideal vacation. It was one of my favorites of all time. 

Budweiser - the original - not the US copy

Our first meal

The goulash was OK, but the potato thing at the bottom of the plate was not appealing - so bland and starchy.

Our hotel breakfast - very satisfying

Bread and beer - a hearty combination

Excellent red curry - yes, in Prague. For some reason there are many Thai restaurants and massage places all around the city.

Lovely bread and dessert shop

Much like baumkuchen, this treat is baked while rolling (see the dough in the background)

Prague, Prag, Praha (you get the idea)

I haven't been to Prague since 1993. 19 years is a long time between visits for any place, but the Velvet Revolution, in which Czechoslovakia became democratic (breaking from the Socialist sphere of Soviet influence), had only occurred in 1989, and the Czech Republic (where Prague rests) had just split with Slovakia in January of 1993. A lot has changed, but the city is still beautiful, at least to me. The front desk staff at our hotel didn't see it that way.

On our way out the door one morning we noticed a light drizzle and the darkness that hinted at a long dreary day. We stopped at the front desk to ask T for some assistance.

"This may be a long shot, but do you happen to loan umbrellas?"

"Yes, we do." His voice rose at the end with a cadence that indicated English was not his first language, but that we was comfortable enough to joke in it.

He pulled two umbrellas from behind the desk and slowly opened them to test how well they were working. The first worked well. He closed it and handed it to me.

"Where are you from, T?", I asked, curious to know where his brand of English originated.

"Czech Republic," he answered, as he inspected the second umbrella. "I am from here in the Czech Republic."

The umbrella was slightly broken. He peered deep into the heart of it, sizing up its faults. "Dirty, disgusting and old."

I almost felt sorry for the device that surely had kept many people dry during its life, but which had seen better days.

"What, the umbrella?" I asked.

"No, Prague, the Czech Republic. My country is dirty, disgusting and old."

In a certain light Prague is certainly all of that. However, for many tourists, the dirt represents the centuries of dust that gives this place its charm. The dirt adds authenticity. It hints at dark times under the Nazis and Soviets, and it undermines any claims of Prague as a theme park, cleaned up just for tourist enjoyment. Disgusting? Is he referring to the seamy underbelly that one imagines to be all around? The “casinos” that operate 24 hours a day behind heavy doors and blacked-out glass? The overwhelming presence of groups of men from what appears to be Russia, Poland or the Baltic regions?

Old – no one can deny that Prague is old. But, again, this is what draws so many from around the world. Prague may have been on the adventurous backpacker’s itinerary twenty years ago. Now it is filled with groups of high school and middle school groups from around Europe. Groups of adults of all ages follow guides holding flags and colorful umbrellas, speaking dozens of languages – German, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and English of the U.S. and U.K. varieties. Strangely missing were the Japanese tour groups that were so common and so frequently discussed in tourism literature from the 1980s onward. The Japanese are in Prague, but they tend to be traveling in pairs or alone. Could the Japanese be the new post-group tourists?

For T, a worldly, humorous, man in his mid-20s, I suppose his country’s age holds little attraction. For a country with so many artists and thinkers who have been globally important and innovative, there is a fine line between clinging to the past and celebrating it. 

Being from elsewhere, we celebrated the "dirty, disgusting and old" streets for three days. At times we struggled to squeeze past the masses of tourists just like us, but overall we loved the long days (sunrise at 5:00am, sunset at around 9:15pm) and the old buildings, many of them with architectural embellishments not commonly seen in most places - statuary seemingly holding up balconies, brightly-colored facades, paintings of designs and figures on a massive scale. It was a wonderful time of the year to be in a beautiful city. 

The first time H has set foot in Prague (and the Czech Republic)

On the Charles Bridge for the first time in 19 years

Some of the "dirty, disgusting and old" sites on the Charles Bridge

Throngs of tourists streaming between the Charles Bridge and the Astronomical Clock at Old Town Square.

Old Town Square (with the tourists cropped out)

Old Town Square with the tourists in the picture

A morning walk to Petrin Hill

H enjoying the morning sunshine 

Prague Castle as seen from Petrin Hill

Prague Castle at night as seen from Charles Bridge

The gate to Charles Bridge

Just some of the wonderful architecture to see around Prague

Antonin Dvorak, one of Prague's native sons, and a one-time resident of my home state, Iowa (in 1893, a century before I first visited his home)

Gorgeous figures painted on random buildings

Colorful, solid buildings everywhere

Prague is sometimes called the City of a Thousand Spires

Cooking class in Vietnam

Fish carmelizes in an earthen dish as the smell of ginger rice fills the room. A dressing of sesame oil and spices comes together before your eyes, and you pour it over a salad of fresh herbs and sweet onions. This is no restaurant, though. You've just finished making these dishes, and you will soon enjoy the freshest Vietnamese food of the trip.

We have seen cooking classes advertised while traveling before - Bali, Hanoi, Melaka. We have even heard of week-long cooking courses in Italy and France. On a recent trip to Saigon we decided to give it a shot: spend an afternoon learning to make a handful of dishes, all from fresh ingredients purchased at the local market. Then enjoy eating those dishes. What could be better? Indeed, what better way to experience a place than to take a cooking class?

We had eaten out for two days in Saigon, but on our last day we wanted to combine traveling with learning, so we could experience something new and take something home besides clothes and photographs.

There are a number of cooking schools in Saigon, all with similar names:

- http://www.saigoncookingclass.com/
- http://www.vietnamsaigoncookingclass.com/
- http://www.vietnamese-cooking-class-saigon.com/

We signed up at the last one, officially known as the Vietnam Cookery Center.

We had hoped to learn to make Pho bo, the beef noodle soup that defines Vietnamese food for many people. However, since we were only there on a Monday, this was our menu:

MONDAY :

1. 1.Beef fillet salad with tamarind sauce(Goi bo tai me)
2. 2.Sour snake- head fish soup with vegetables(Canh chua ca loc)
3. 3.Caramel snake- head fish in clay pot(Ca loc kho to)
4. 4.Steamed rice with ginger(Com hap gung)
5. Dessert: Sweet green bean soup with coconut milk(Che dau xanh)

But what a menu! We didn't think "sour snake-head fish soup" sounded appetizing, but it was incredible. The delicate ginger complemented the light texture of the fish. However, the caramelized fish with steamed ginger rice was the real highlight. I would eat it again in a heartbeat. 

Chilis, garlic, and more laid out on the table before we began.

If only the ingredients at home were so well-organized and artistically prepared.

Our interpreter (left) and chef.

1. Beef fillet salad with tamarind sauce(Goi bo tai me)

Enjoying my salad

2. Sour snake- head fish soup with vegetables(Canh chua ca loc): Don't forget the chili!

The soup, ready to serve

3. Caramel snake- head fish in clay pot(Ca loc kho to)

4. Steamed rice with ginger(Com hap gung) Fry the rice to soften it before steaming it.

Two satisfied customers

Trash or Treasure?

One person’s trash is another’s treasure.

The problem is determining the fine line between trash and treasure, and sorting through the trash to find the treasures.

In Minamata, Japan, the citizens, local government and businesspeople have reinterpreted this old adage in a quest to become Japan’s most environmentally conscious city. This means learning from its past industrial pollution to re-think how resources are produced, consumed, and recycled.

I believe the city’s most admirable effort has been to work with citizens to create a waste sorting system that is community-driven and –practiced. It involves sorting waste into 24 categories so that the various items can be easily recycled later. Certain items are collected on particulr days, and one day per month a set of recycling bins is delivered to neighborhoods, where household representatives bring waste to be sorted.

I admire this system because it forces everyone to remain in intimate contact with a purchase through a longer portion of its life cycle. In other words, because used items cannot be immediately thrown in the chute (such as in HDB flats in Singapore), people have to live with their waste, and thus live with their purchases. Consumption becomes an act of thinking through more than just the immediate use of an item, to the long-term washing, storing, and sorting of the item. Some waste is only collected once a month, so one needs to carefully wash and store a glass bottle (for instance) until collection day. Thus, people may think carefully before making purchases that will eventually inconvenience their lives as waste. The official who spoke with us at City Hall stressed that one major change in his purchases is that he no longer buys any PET bottles. They must be carefully washed, and they take up a lot of space in the house before they are collected. Therefore, they are best avoided.
  Above: Lecture at Minamata City Hall regarding its environmental efforts

The city’s other admirable shift has been its addition of a fourth R to the existing three R’s of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Minamata also encourages “Refuse” - refusing items deemed unnecessary, like superfluous packaging and excess plastic bags. While this may make it difficult for some industries to survive due to shifting consumer consciousness, like all businesses, they are expected to evolve to fit consumer demands. In other words, one should not encourage wasteful behavior just to benefit plastic bag manufacturers. If people refuse plastic bags at checkout, manufacturers eventually will evolve to make something else.

Given this spirit of four R’s - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Refuse – Minamata has encouraged not only craftspeople who creatively re-tool waste into useful items, but also industries that turn waste into the raw materials for new goods.

One of the former is Mrs. Yoshimoto, the speaker at the Minamata Disease Museum, who recycles glass into useful objects and art pieces. One of the latter is Mr. Tanaka, President of Tanaka Shop (田中商店水俣営業所). His recycling center employs around 30 people and turns Minamata’s household waste into useful things, like glass bottles that can be re-used by beer and shochu manufacturers, or ground glass that can be incorporated into asphalt to make roads safer (they sparkle at night) and more permeable to moisture.


Mr. Tanaka explaining one of his many business ventures involving previously-designated "trash," which he turns into "treasures."

Tour of the Tanaka facilities

We toured the Tanaka facility and saw how sake bottles are cleaned and inspected, before they can be returned to the bottling facilities. Mr. Tanaka also told us about a project in which wine bottles shipped from France and Germany are cleaned, refilled with sake, and returned to France and Germany. This saves disposing of the old bottles in landfills and manufacturing new bottles for the sake. Plus, it makes for a poetic loop of alcohol. It is feasible that the same bottles could endlessly run through this Europe-Japan cycle, holding wine-sake-wine-sake-wine…

Empty sake bottles before being cleaned inside and out

We enjoyed admiring the shapes and colors of the facility, relieving stress by smashing bottles (to be used in asphalt later), and listening to the refreshing perspective of Mr. Tanaka, who always stresses the business side of his venture. He is clearly not operating this business for the environment or because of a guilty conscious. He wants to make a profit, and he is constantly introducing new items to broaden the company’s reach.

Worker inspecting bottles for debris and cracks.

Clear glass bottles with imperfections. They will be broken and used for many purposes


Lynn sweeping up after smashing a bottle.

It is my hope that our NUS students will be inspired to think about recycling not solely as an altruistic endeavor, but also as a potentially profitable one. This will make the adoption of new practices easier to envision and carry out. Maybe one day Singaporeans will also consider trash to be full of treasures ready to be found and utilized.

Huis ten Bosch, Nagasaki: Jumbled Mess?

Despite having a clear theme - a 17th Century Dutch town - Huis ten bosch, the theme park in Nagasaki, Japan, has an identity crisis. When it opened, its Dutchness was enough to attract visitors - over 3 million in its best year in the mid-1990s. People were happy to simply stroll along the brick lanes admiring crenelated rooflines, or ride along the canals to reach a variety of shops and restaurants. To be clear, this theme park is more about "theme" and less about "park." The target audience was mature enough to not care about roller coasters or silly cartoon characters. Repeated economic failure has forced the park to add tenants and attractions that have no connection to the Netherlands, leading one to feel as if the whole park is a jumbled mess at times.

Take, for instance the addition several years ago of a Thriller Fantasy Park. This hodgepodge of haunted houses (and haunted public bathrooms) seems to be inspired by Michael Jackson's Thriller music video. One can step into a casket and imagine stepping out as a vampire, or be photographed behind bars in a jail cell adorned with fake spider webs. What any of this has to do with the Netherlands is beyond me. This zone has taken over the entire "neighborhood", which might be popular around Halloween, but which was completely empty during the 10 minutes I walked around.


Dracula-style coffin and outdoor jail.

Or, what about the launching in 2011 of the Thousand Sunny cruise ship, based on a popular manga/anime One Piece. The boat looks as if launched from the imagination of a child. The front of the boat imagines that the sun burns in the shape of a teddy bear's face. Onboard one finds framed still images from the program, as well as life-size reproduction statues of the main characters. The cruise is only around 30 minutes long, during which one can take photographs with one's favorite characters and enjoy the scenery. There is no connection to 17th Century Dutch life.


A fantastical vessel

 
Characters on deck


Do those eyes see a sustainable economic future for HTB?


Unspoiled coastline is a highlight of the cruise


Returning to HTB from the sea

Or, finally, the opening in 2012 of an Adventure Park that includes an aerial obstacle course and Japan's longest zip line, which flies over one of the park's otherwise placid canals. Any connection to the Netherlands? Anything?

 
Middle school students checking in for their adventure.

While all of this is harmless, it makes one wonder what the point of a theme is, especially if one can simply drape over it whatever additional, unrelated attraction one can think of.

Macpackers

What do you call a backpacker who travels the globe in search of adventure, while also searching for free Wifi?

What do you call a backpacker who wraps a dirty towel around his laptop to protect it on the bumpy bus ride to Lijiang (Yunnan, PRC)?

What do you call a backpacker who is too busy updating Facebook to read tattered novels borrowed from her International Youth Hostel in Prague?

What do you call a backpacker who carries over a thousand dollars' worth of electronic equipment in his bag, but insists on bartering for another 20 cent discount for a t-shirt in Bali?

I call it a Macpacker.


I did my backpacking in my early 20s. The summer before my sophomore year in college I spent my days staring at gummi bears and my evenings in a community theatre. I worked at a factory in Creston, Iowa that made bears, worms, and other fun-shaped candy. I worked overtime whenever possible, saving money to pay for pizzas and other college essentials. After work, my co-workers and I comprised the core cast and crew for Little Shop of Horrors. It was great fun, but I knew I needed to get away from Iowa for awhile. The summer before my junior year was somewhat improved, as it began with a tour of Europe with my chorus. However, it ended like the previous year, with me staring at gummi bears. The only difference was that I did it in Germany. On my weekends, though, I wandered Europe's great cities - Berlin, Munich, Paris, and San Sebastian, Spain, where I stayed longer. I met some backpackers along the way and longed for the adventure.

When I arrived in Hong Kong six months later to begin a study abroad program, I already knew I would spend my summer far from gummi bears. I would be a backpacker and take my time crossing China. I might even visit Tibet. The thrill was not needing to plan ahead and just going with the flow. And I traveled light. I bought a cheap, sturdy backpack in Hong Kong, before continuing to school in Hangzhou. Once school was over, I filled that pack with only the essentials - shorts, socks, underwear, t-shirts, jacket, 35mm pocket camera, 5 rolls of film, Lonely Planet, a towel, and some toiletries. I shipped my gifts home and put all I needed on my shoulders. However, I knew that if I left anything behind, if I was robbed at a hostel, or if the whole pack slipped off the roof of a bus and fell into the Yangtze River, I would not be out much. I could replace everything for less than a hundred dollars, and I would only really miss the photos I had taken.

Because this was the early 90s, of course, the idea of carrying around a computer was beyond comprehension. This was a decade before MySpace and Facebook. There were no wifi hotspots. Hell, there were no internet cafes. I had only begun to use email a few months before, when I was assigned an address by my school. I didn't actually use it. The connection speed was so slow, especially in China, that it was more satisfying to write postcards and letters to friends and loved ones. The internet still chimed when establishing a connection!

When I traveled, I sat on my bag. I used it as a pillow. I stuffed it into spaces that it barely fit. I had it taken from me and strapped to the roof of the bus. It wore into my shoulders and made my back sweat. I loved it and hated it. But I never had anything truly precious in it. Nothing breakable, and nothing really valuable.

Backpacking to me still means throwing some basic (but easily replaceable) necessities in a bag and traveling without a set itinerary. It means eating banana pancakes and pizzas at the backpacker cafes that pop up on backpacker circuits. It means bookshelves full of novels that can be simply replaced with the one you just finished. And it means sharing precious information about must-sees, great deals, and rip-offs over beer and candle light with strangers from around the world. It is a social activity that involves meeting and (dis)trusting strangers and learning about unknown places.

When I see faces lit up by computer screens in the backpacker cafes of Bali and Hanoi, I cannot help but think that these Macpackers - Backpackers carrying around laptops and iPads - have a vastly different experience from what I had. Of course, I am just being nostalgic, but I think something fundamental shifts when a computer and a wifi connection enter the Backpacker world. One can maintain daily contact with home, preventing some of the sense of separation/liberation that I felt. One no longer has to rely as much on the travel advice of strangers and can instead look at online forums for news. I suppose it serves the same function, as a forum for the sharing of information. However, the method lacks an interpersonal element. Is there as much flirting, joking, swapping of horror stories, and sharing of childhood memories over another beer?

And personally, I constantly would be worried about my belongings being stolen. As soon as you pull out a laptop at a cafe, everyone around knows you are carrying something very valuable. I guess all those backpackers with expensive cameras used to feel that way. I still remember traveling a few weeks with a woman from France, whom I met in a cafe. Realizing I didn't have the money to visit Tibet, she convinced me to visit the Giant Buddha at Leshan instead. She had a professional Nikon camera, but she had scratched it and taped it to make it look old and damaged. One cannot do the same with a laptop.

Yes, something about travel is changing. Backpackers are becoming Macpackers, and it is significantly altering the technologies, expectations, and experiences of independent travel.

Happy Holidays!

It's that time of the year - time to wish everyone a Happy New Year and to share some memories from 2011. We will spare you the cheesy letter. We hope to share some fantastic memories with you in 2012!

Disneyland in June with L. and W.

Bridgewater, Iowa's defunct Doris' Department Store - Hisako with our nephew, X, in June.

San Francisco in July with Hisako's parents.

Enjoying Auckland, New Zealand, in November with B.

Hisako with an alpaca friend in New Zealand in November.