Category: Travels

The biggest surprise is how many Newfoundland accents I have heard.  There truly is backwards time travel — at least into the 1980s — and it is called the West Edmonton Mall.  The real estate bubble here has yet to pop.  It's a better place to live than to visit.  There is better dim sum than anywhere near NoVa.  I have crossed all the major bridges.  During my stay the weather has been warmer and nicer than back home.  Many new hardcover books cost $32.99 in a Chapters bookstore.  I have a theory that any Thai restaurant attached to a motel is excellent.  I had a conversation with Brad Humphreys and Jane Ruseski as to why an activity must have an intrinsically competitive aspect to qualify as a sport, thus ruling out bass fishing.  "Minus 40" is about the same in either Centigrade or Fahrenheit.  Everyone has treated me very well.

I'll have a free day there Saturday.  What should I do, where should I go, and what/where should I eat?  As always I thank you in advance for the suggestions; they do guide my decision-making.

It is one of my goals to visit the fifteen or so of the largest metropolitan areas in Canada, plus (maybe) Regina and Saskatoon.

In a week's time or so I will have one day — one free day — in Lille, France.  What do you recommend?

It's one of the smaller NoVa communities and it has a coherent downtown.  For me it has a useful frame shop, tennis club, dentist, a Western Union branch, Giant (easy in and out), and it has one of the best public libraries around, all within walking distance on a single strip and one side road.  Natasha gets her massage there.  There are plenty of small shops, ethnic and otherwise.  It has the best food of any single locale in the D.C. area, including a Korean porridge shop, Korean barbecue, gloopy, disgusting Korean noodles, Korean fried chicken, a Korean tofu restaurant, a Korean bakery (the best hangout around, period, plus the best bakery around), a Korean restaurant specializing in pumpkin dishes, non-disgusting noodle houses, a Korean crab and fish and chips place (with kimchee too), at least two restaurants with "Korean-Chinese" food, and a bunch of 24-7 Korean restaurants, with varying emphases but with Yechon as having the best late night or early morning crowd.  Many of the other places stay open until 2 or 3 a.m. (you'll find many reviewed here).  The town has over 900 small businesses run by Koreans and catering mostly to Koreans.

On the strip is also the area's best Afghan restaurant, a good Peruvian chicken place, and just off the strip is an excellent Manchurian restaurant, A&J.  There is a decent community of antique shops, including a place with some good Afghan textiles.  South of 236 you can find a colony of contemporary homes, rare in most parts of Fairfax County.  Annandale has the central branch of a 60,000 student community college.  The traffic is bearable for the most part, the rents are reasonable by NoVa standards, and you have easy access to the major arteries of 495 and 395.  The schools are well above the national average.

Exxon/Mobile has a base on the edge of town.  The first (third, according to some sources) toll road in America, ever, ran through Annandale.  Mark Hamill once lived there.  It has a lovely Civil War church and a rustic barn.  Its history dates back to 1685 and it is named after a Scottish village.  Many of the people in Annandale are very physically attractive.

What's not to like?

West Annandale is more of a cultural desert than is East Annandale, though it has some Korean cafes and billiard shops.  All of Annandale is ugly, with a vague hint of unjustified pastel in the central downtown area.  The Into the Wild guy grew up there.  They did fight on the wrong side in the Civil War but that has little relevance to the current town.  The used CD shop has closed up.

The pluses outweight the minuses.  You get all that — and more — for only 50,000 people or so.  Boo to Annandale naysayers.  Hail Annandale.

From the comments:

I was thinking about the interesting contrast between Annandale which is ugly but is very livable and has wonderful services, vs. some small towns abroad I've visited which had a beautiful town square but limited and overpriced services and few really good or interesting restaurants, with everything being very expensive. Undoubtedly, some tourist visiting the latter towns and spending "summer money" in the busy clubs and cafes would feel the latter superior, and might think Annandale a wasteland. But they may not want to live in said quaint town, especially if salaries were below Virginia standard.

Maple syrup curry, which I have now seen on three restaurant menus in so many days.

Amateur crafts are extremely common, as in New Zealand.  It is a plausible claim that the blueberries here are the world's best.  Natives claim it has Canada's warmest winter.

At Peggy's Cove a ragged Scot-looking woman blew loudly into bagpipes, thereby competing for donor attention with a ragged Scot-looking woman punching an accordion and wailing, all to the detriment of the Coase theorem.

For a while George Washington held out hope that Nova Scotia would join in the rebellion against the British crown.  Later American ships attacked Lunenberg several times, starting in 1782, mostly for reasons of plunder.

In 1790 black Nova Scotians were strongly encouraged to move to what is now Sierra Leone.  There was a second "purge" of black residents in the 1960s, when the neighborhood of Africville was torn down and its residents were encouraged to leave.  Black residents were prominent in the history of Nova Scotia although it seems this is being forgotten.

Overall this is an underrated tourist destination (it is an easy direct flight from Dulles) and I recommend Lesley Choyce's Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea.

Don Boudreau is prominently represented in the Halifax museum collection.

They don't do much with it (avoid the cream sauce), but arguably Nova Scotia has the best seafood in all of NAFTA.  No way do they ship the good lobsters out.

Natasha and I lucked out with frequent flyer miles and soon we will have two lovely days in Nova Scotia, starting in Halifax but with a rental car.  What should we do?  Where should we eat?  Your thoughts would be most welcome.  I've never had a visit to Canada which was less than excellent and that includes a good fifteen trips at least.

Natasha took the photo, so you can rule her out as one of the subjects.

I had been expecting "Naples squared" when it comes to raucous, but it's peaceful.  The best dishes apply flavors of mint, orange, and pistachio to pasta and seafood.  Wrapping pumpkin in a fish slice is yummy.  How about sardines pasta, with raisin, pine nuts, and bread crumbs; capers are optional?  Imagine a counterfactual retracing of food history, piling New World ingredients on top of Arabic and medieval roots — without the French culinary interventions of the eighteenth century and beyond — and you get some notion of dining in Sicily.  Imagine Moroccan bistillah but with a fruit jam inside.

The remaining traces of Norman Sicily are mingled with Roman, Arabic and Catalonian architectural influences.  There are numerous seventeenth-century baroque oratorios.  All over you see photocopy shops, which I suppose means few homes or workplaces have printers.

The young people look like they're from Rome, the old people look like they're from New Jersey. 

When there is a traffic dispute, people yell back at the cops. 

At least two-thirds of all restaurants are closed for August, including most of the best-known places.  Yet even random eating in major public squares (usually a no-no) reveals a food culture which has to rank among the world's best, up there with Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, Bombay, and the Puebla/Oaxaca axis, among a few select others.

In a bit of time I will be there for four days.  Please tell me what I need to know, food of course included.  I'll be able to do a day trip, but mostly I'll be in Palermo.

Leave your bags strewn open in the middle of the entrance hallway.  That way you precommit to unpacking them soon and putting everything away.

This strategy does not satisfy the Wicksellian unanimity rule for collective choice.

Not everyone liked it when I suggested that vouchers have the potential to be "TARP for the elementary schools."  With New York and Los Angeles in some disarray, Chicago is arguably North America's "coolest" city right now; the new contemporary wing of the Art Institute is the best "new U.S. museum" in many years.  The Austrian-language dialogue in Brüno is the funniest part of the movie and enough to make it, despite its flaws, a comedy classic.  I should not have told my Las Vegas cabbie (while he was driving) that the real estate market there will not recover for another twenty years.  Lotus of Siam, in Las Vegas, is one of the best Thai restaurants in the United States.  In case you had forgotten, here is how to order in a good ethnic restaurant.  I haven't arrived in Mobile yet.