Category: Travels
Cork bleg
Yes, Cork Ireland. What should I do and where should I eat? Your advice is most welcome, thank you in advance.
James Person’s Hawaii bleg
Could you please recommend or ask your readers’ recommendations for books about Hawaiian history and culture? I am visiting the state for the first time and like to approach my travels with a deeper understanding as you exemplify in your MR travel posts. Thank you for your time and help and especially for MR and Conversations!
Your assistance for James would be much appreciated!
Notes from Tavira, Portugal
The so-called “Lisbon earthquake” of 1755 in fact occurred near Tavira, which explains why so much of the city was rebuilt in a relatively consistent Portuguese Baroque style.
The best parts of town are scattered along the edges of the center, not in the center itself. The overall Moorish feel remains, and oranges are grown in the surrounding countryside.
There is in fact nothing to do here. That said, the town is consistently lovely and you will find few chain stores or fast food outlets. The real problem is that Portugal is depopulating, and within depopulating Portugal Tavira is itself depopulating in both absolute and relative terms. Many buildings are uninhabited and they are beginning to fall apart.
I am not sure I have seen an older town, and that includes a variety of stints in Japan.
It is very difficult to use one’s credit cards here, and it is not because they have leapfrogged to some more advanced means of payment.
For dining, I recommend the snack bar attached to the seafood market, on the far left corner as you look at the market. They serve what is perhaps the best broccoli I ever have had. It is also full of “characters,” salty men of the sea types.
More generally, I recommend the orangey snacky pastry thing, famous locally. Pork and clams is a classic regional dish, cod to me is overrated. Garbanzo beans are deployed profusely. The seafood is excellent in quality, though too often it is put in a decent but not really interesting tomato broth. It is worth a cab ride to the food market in nearby Faro, a larger town.
There are numerous Indian restaurants, but I haven’t run across a single Chinese locale, nor seen a single Chinese person here.
Visitors to Tavira do not regret it, but neither do they say “I wish I had come many years earlier!”
Patagonia, Argentina — St. Martin de los Andes
One of the lovelier spots on the planet, and with excellent food. Thise town has about 35,000 people, and architecture based on Swiss chalets and northern German churches. It is a jumping off point for exploring the surrounding countryside, but very charming in its own right. And there is no larger population center anywhere nearby!
Now I am back!
New Buenos Aires notes
My last and rather lengthy Buenos Aires notes are from 2006, still worth a read. This time my visit was much shorter, but I had three dominant impressions. First, the city seems more “normal” and less Argentine than in times past. The nicer parts of town, as you might find in or near Palermo, seemed more “Pan-Latin” than anything else, as you might find in comparable parts of Mexico City or Bogotá. More hipster. More Brooklyn even. The whole “invisible stories about weird librarians obsessed with their cats” side of the city seems weaker these days. And along similar lines, traditional Argentinean food is harder to find.
Second, the talent of Argentina has been liberated from the country itself. Argentina has more unicorns — eleven! — than any other Latin American nation, though it is not close to tops in population. Yet for the most part these unicorns exist beyond the confines of Argentina. The top talents of Argentina seem to have used the internet more effectively to integrate into global markets than the top talents of other Latin countries. In contrast, Brazilian commercial talent seems best suited to…the rules of the game in Brazil.
Third, the country no longer seems to alternate between glorious hope and extreme despair. It seems more accepted that the country is not going to solve its fiscal or monetary problems, and instead will alternate between “OK enough” periods and “uh-oh inflation is really pretty high now” periods. Currently rates of price inflation are running at about fifty percent, and the black market exchange rate is about two times as favorable for the dollar as the official exchange rate. No one seems very surprised by this, nor is there much uncertainty about how things will end, nor is there great hope that “the reformers” will solve the problems. Yet a bounceback is likely to follow as well, sooner or later. The cyclical nature of the Argentine economy seems more accepted and enshrined in expectations. And the elite are more insulated from it than ever before, through a mix of Miami-based dollar accounts and crypto, and here are some tactics for the middle class (Bloomberg).
Fortunately, the economy is growing at an annualized rate of over eleven percent, though the year before it contracted by more than ten percent. None of that will end the cycle.
Buenos Aires remains one of the very best cities in the world, most of all in their summer.
Travels
For the next three days I am likely away from internet access. There will be MR posts, but at a lower volume than usual. Fear not (or if you email me and I don’t respond), normal activity will resume soon enough. In the meantime I am just fine.
Lexington, Kentucky notes
Here they have NIMHY rather than NIMBY — “Not in my horse’s yard.” And so the city is ringed by (protected) horse farms and the suburbs are further out. This makes the downtown core denser and more coherent than you might expect, to the benefit of the visitor but perhaps not the resident?
I was struck by how much everyone complains about “the traffic.”
You may recall that Lexington was the setting for Queen’s Gambit.
Overall I would be “long” the city. Downtown has a music and theater scene, albeit on a modest scale. There is a university and a basketball team (Anthony Davis, Rex Chapman, and John Wall, among many others) and lots of health care. And lots of bourbon.
I had an excellent meal in a Peruvian restaurant, saw a plausible Honduran restaurant and also a “West Indies” chicken restaurant under construction. The local steak house was very good, and they offer a $160 wagyu cut, not my order however.
Downtown has more historical plaques than are needed, and they can’t even fit the event descriptions on a single side of the plaque. By the end of the double-sided exposition, you are not sure what they are talking about.
As is common in the Appalachian and near-Appalachian regions, the quality difference between pre-WWII and post-WWII buildings is enormous, even larger than usual.
How many people could, off the top of their heads, name the third largest city in Kentucky? Overall, Louisville is larger and more charming, but Lexington arguably is less Midwest and “more Kentucky.”
Maybe it was just coincidence, but I sure saw and heard a lot of ambulances whizzing by.
Derry notes, Northern Ireland’s second largest city
People in Derry are still talking about the 1680s…it is bad to be a “Lundy,” namely a traitor to your cause but the bar here has become a high one. You are either with them or against them.
The 17th century city wall seems fully intact, the buildings are splendid, and the green, wet, and hilly natural setting is a perfect fit. The town is long on history, short on things to do. It is perfect for a two-day trip.
I witnessed a Loyalist parade — the men were not feminized, nor did they seem happy. It is now so much “common knowledge” that Britain really does not care about them. So what is their future and with whom? Given differential birthrates, Catholics seem headed to become a majority in NI as well.
Most of the city centre is Catholic, and unlike Belfast it is not difficult to imagine Derry rather easily being swallowed up by the Republic of Ireland, some of which even lies to the north of Derry.
I went to see where Bloody Sunday occurred in 1972, and it shocked me how small the “contested territory” is/was. It feels as if you can count each and every home, and one’s mind starts wandering to the Coase Theorem and Hong Kong real estate billionaires and Special Enterprise Zones.
Real estate in Northern Ireland seems dramatically underpriced, though along a thirty-year rather than a ten-year time horizon. But should you buy closer to Belfast?
In some ways Derry reminded me of parts of West Virginia, including the Scots-Irish faces, the bygone glories, and also the “every family has an addiction” signs in the center of town.
One hundred years ago, in 1921, who would have thought that joining with the Irish Republic would lead to more prosperity than joining with Britain? Therein lies a cautionary note for us all.
The Ford F-150: An Electric Vehicle for Red America
The Ford F-150 truck has been America’s best selling vehicle for forty years! (Bubble test: Do you own one or know someone who does?) The new version, the F-150 Lightning, goes into production in 2022 and it’s electric. Even today there is still the whiff of “liberal America” around electric vehicles but what’s impressive about the Lightning isn’t that it’s electric, it’s that it’s a better truck. The Lightning, for example, can power a home and work appliances from its 11 outlets including a 240 volt outlet! Look at this brilliant ad campaign:
Security and peace of mind are invaluable during severe weather and unpredictable events. That’s why Ford helps ensure you never have to worry about being left in the dark…
Security, peace of mind, don’t be left alone in the dark…all great conservative selling points. Note the truck in the picture is powering the house and the chain saw. The husband and wife, their home and their truck, project independence, success and confidence–a power couple–even with a nod to diversity.
The Lightning is also fast with 0-60mph times in line with those of a Porsche 911 circa 2005, it has more carrying capacity (thanks to the smaller electric motors) than a similar gas vehicle, and it can tow a respectable maximum of 10,000 pounds with all the options.
The Lightning might succeed or it might fail but it won’t fail on politics, this is a vehicle a red-blooded, meat-eating skeptic of global warming could love.
Ocean Grove, New Jersey travel notes
Having not visited the New Jersey shore since I was a kid (and then a very regular visitor), I realized you cannot actually swim there with any great facility. Nor is there much to do, nor should one look forward to the food.
Nonetheless Ocean Grove is one of America’s finest collections of Victorian homes, and the town style is remarkably consistent and intact. Most of all, it is an “only in America” kind of place:
Ocean Grove was founded in 1869 as an outgrowth of the camp meeting movement in the United States, when a group of Methodist clergymen, led by William B. Osborn and Ellwood H. Stokes, formed the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to develop and operate a summer camp meeting site on the New Jersey seashore. By the early 20th century, the popular Christian meeting ground became known as the “Queen of Religious Resorts.” The community’s land is still owned by the camp meeting association and leased to individual homeowners and businesses. Ocean Grove remains the longest-active camp meeting site in the United States.
The pipe organ in the 19th century Auditorium is still one of the world’s twenty largest.
The Auditorium is closed at the moment, but they still sing gospel music on the boardwalk several times a night.
The police department building is merged together with a Methodist church, separate entrances but both under the same roof.
Ocean Grove remains a fully dry city, for the purpose of “keeping the riff-raff out,” as one waitress explained to me. To walk up the Ocean Grove boardwalk into nearby Asbury Park (Cuban and Puerto Rican and Haitian in addition to American black) remains a lesson in the economics of sudden segregation, deliberate and otherwise.
Based on my experience as a kid, I recall quite distinct “personae” for the adjacent beach towns of Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Seaside Heights, Lavalette, Belmar, Spring Lake, and Point Pleasant. This time around I did not see much cultural convergence. That said, Ocean Grove now seems less the province of the elderly and more of a quiet upscale haunt, including for gay couples. As an eight-year-old, it was my least favorite beach town on the strip. Fifty years later, it is now striking to me how much the United States is refusing to be all smoothed over and homogenized.
The merit of Mount Rushmore
I went there once, I think in 1988. To me it was a nightmare, aesthetically and otherwise. The art of the monument was “not even as good as fascism.” (Various Soviet-era memorials are far superior as well.) I am not into the whole cancelling thing, but I didn’t feel I needed to pay additional homage to a bunch of well-known presidents. The surrounding food scene appeared quite mediocre, although probably that has improved. Overall it was crowded, tacky, and unpleasant, with absolutely nothing of value to do.
The main value of the scene was to liberate space and ease congestion in other parts of the universe, so I certainly hope they never abolish it.
It’s a Good Summer to Explore America at Random
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the premise:
With my summer trips abroad canceled, I decided to be resourceful about travel. Having lived in Northern Virginia for 30 years, I asked myself a simple question: Which local trip have I still not done?
Earlier in the summer I thought I might spend time in scenic Maine, but too many of my friends from the Northeast and mid-Atlantic seemed to be planning the same. I decided a more adventurous course of action would be to get in the car with my daughter Yana and spend a three-day weekend on the road.
The column is not easily excerpted, but here is one bit:
Lunch was in Morgantown, West Virginia, but rather than visit the university, we stopped for excellent Jamaican food with jerk chicken, oxtail and plantains — better than the equivalent in the D.C. area. A tip: If you’re ever looking for great food in obscure locales, don’t just google “best restaurants Morgantown WV,” as that will yield too many mainstream options. Pick a cuisine you don’t expect them to have, and Google something like “best Haitian restaurant Morgantown WV.” Whether a Haitian restaurant comes up (it didn’t), you’ll get a more interesting selection of “best” picks. In this case we learned that a town of 30,000 people has several Caribbean restaurants, highly rated ones at that.
Five states in one day (VA, WV, MD, PA, OH) was great fun. In my view, every excellent trip has one stop or locale at its emotional and narrative heart, and for this trip is was the Native American Earthworks in Marietta, southern Ohio.
Charles Town, West Virginia
It is only about 70 minutes drive from Fairfax, VA, and yet so few go and visit — why might that be? This town is full of charm, old buildings, Civil War history, and there is a plaque to Martin R. Delany in the town center.
West Virginia is in the process of reopening (note the obscenity), but barber shops require appointments and take only one person at a time. The restaurants seem to be doing curbside only, as in Virginia, and what would you want to eat there anyway? Population density in town is low, and it feels quite safe to walk around because you don’t have to switch sides of the street to avoid people. You just have to walk at a constant pace.
In one store they will sell you toilet paper and masks. But the guy takes his mask off to sell you the masks, because he feels he needs to explain and justify the prices for the masks.
The gdp per capita of West Virginia is, surprisingly to many people, equal to about that of France. Charles Town is by no means run down, and either the center of town or the outskirts appear to be somewhat wealthier than most parts of Western Europe.
Here are eleven classic dishes you might try in West Virginia.
And there is still an opera house in town, and it was staging Sondheim’s Into the Woods until Covid came along.
Places to go in 2020
Here is the mostly dull NYT list. Here is my personal list of recommendations for you, noting I have not been to all of the below, but I am in contact with many travelers and paw through a good deal of information:
1. Pakistan, and Pakistani Kashmir. Finally it is safe, and in some way it is easier to negotiate than India. The best dairy products I have eaten in my life, and probably it is the most populous country you have not yet seen, or maybe Nigeria, but that makes the list too. Islamabad is nicer than any city in India, and watch the painter trucks on the nearby highway.
2. Eastern Bali. Still mostly unspoilt, the perfect mix of exoticism and comfort. This island is much, much more than Elizabeth Gilbert, yoga, and hippie candles.
3. Lalibela, Ethiopia. Has some of my favorite churches, beautiful vistas and super-peaceful, and the high altitude of Lalibela and Addis means you don’t have to take anti-malarials. I know a good guide there, here are my Lalibela posts. the central bank forecasts 10.8% growth for the country for next year, so Lalibela is likely to change rapidly.
4. Lagos, Nigeria. A bit dangerous, but immense fun, wonderful music every night, and not nearly as bad as you might be thinking. Africa’s most dynamic city by far and a new modern civilization in the works. Here are my earlier Lagos posts, including travel tips.
5. Odisha [Orissa], India. Sometimes called India’s most underrated cuisine, that is enough reason to go and so now it is on my list for myself.
6. Sumatra, Indonesia. Surely a good place to understand the evolution of Islam, and supposedly to be Indonesia’s best food. I hope to get there soon. First-rate textiles and lake views, I hear.
7. Warsaw, Poland. No, not a fascist country (though objectionable in some regards), and rapidly becoming the center of opportunity for eastern Europe and a major player in the European Union. First-rate food and dishes you won’t get elsewhere, at least nothing close to comparable quality. Nice for walking, don’t expect too many intact old buildings, but isn’t it thrilling to see a major part of Europe growing at four percent?
8. Baku, Azerbaijan. The world’s best seaside promenade, and wonderful textiles and food, in the Iranian direction, here are my travel notes. Feels exotic, yet safe and orderly as well.
9. Macedonia, or anywhere off the beaten track in the former Yugoslavia. Then think about the history and politics of where you are at, and then think about it some more.
10. Quito, Ecuador. One of the world’s loveliest cities, including the church, wonderful potatoes and corn for vegetarians too. There are some iPhone snatchers, but overall safe to visit. Very good day trips as well, including to the “Indian market” at Otavalo and volcano Cotopaxi.
How has Paris changed
Following my OECD visit, I have been thinking about how Paris has changed in the almost thirty years I have been going there. I came up with the following mental list:
1. It is much less of a working class city in the center.
2. Many more immigrants, most of all outside the center. The center and the periphery are now more different than in times past.
3. People smoke much, much less.
4. The residents are less Marxist, but now more “woke.”
5. English is far more widely spoken, and good French is not so much expected in casual interactions.
6. The average quality of bread is declining.
7. Michelin restaurants, in relative terms, have grown much more expensive. I recall having a meal at the Hotel Bristol, maybe six years ago, for 150 euros. A similar meal now goes for 380 euros, more than I am willing to pay.
8. The city has been remarkably economically resilient, in part because of the longstanding emphasis on services.
9. The city now has a burgeoning start-up scene.
10. I believe central Paris is now much more different from the rest of France than it used to be.
What else?