New Orleans. Where Every Day is Fat Tuesday

  Days are measured in New Orleans by the number of hours it takes your stomach to digest enough to allow you to go to the next meal. At lunch you discuss, over burps, where you’ll go for dinner. At dinner, as you loosen the top button on your jeans, you ponder how much you’ll be able to shovel in your face at breakfast. And all the while you promise yourself, and anyone in earshot, that you’ll work it off just as soon as you arrive home. Of course you will. This is the unfortunate side effect of being in one of the world’s best cities for food. On ... [Read More]

Getting to Guangzhou… barely

  There is a greater genetic difference between a dolphin and a porpoise than between a human being and a chimpanzee. This might help explain the apelike behavior of the buffoons at the Tianjin airport, seemingly determined to ensure we missed our flight to Guangzhou. My whirlwind business trip through four Chinese cities this week included what was to have been a quick 24-hour stopover in Tianjin, China’s fourth-largest city and a leading business hub. (More than half of the Fortune 500 Global companies have branch offices here.) Though a heavily industrial city, we hoped we could steal a couple of spare hours to roam around as tourists. We ... [Read More]

Careful what you eat in the land of the Nine Dragons

  You might think your biggest culinary concern in China would be your hosts serving you a still-alive animal or foul-smelling fungus. Not so much. Perhaps you think that by avoiding street vendors in favor of established restaurants you’re more likely to find foods that won’t make you sick. Uh-uh. Though China works hard to suppress news damaging to its image, do a little research and you’ll learn that the biggest health threat in Chinese eateries is “gutter oil,” which, believe it or not, is even fouler than it sounds. Cooking oil is like gold in China, where virtually every recipe requires a wok full of it, and goes for a ... [Read More]

Shark fins and chicken testicles

Many Asian cultures place great importance on visitor’s willingness to eat any local food presented to them. Knowing this, and always wanting to make a good impression, I’ve never refused anything offered, which is why on past trips I’ve downed without hesitation live bugs, snake pancreas (cut from the still-alive scaled beast at my table) and steaming yellow crab brains, among other things. Today, I broke my cardinal rule, refusing, I believe for the first time, to eat the proffered local delicacy. My refusal wasn’t based on any assumed revulsion for the taste or texture of the food in question. Quite the opposite – by all accounts the ... [Read More]

Demonstrations, Dragon Hill and dinner in a tent.

  Soo and I strolled out of our hotel last night and into the middle of what looked for all the world to be a war zone. We were surrounded by thousands of police, fully armored in their riot gear and ready for battle. We hadn’t the slightest clue what was going on. Soo, a sensible woman, was in favor of getting ourselves elsewhere – any elsewhere would do – but that seemed like so much less fun then wading into the troops deployed right in front of us. I mean, how often does somebody deposit an army on your doorstep? We wound our way around and through ... [Read More]

Occupy Pyongyang!

You think income inequality in America is bad? Come visit North Korea. Yes, we have some significant issues with the concentration of wealth in America. But the North Korean 99% would kill to have our problems. America’s poor get excited over things like McDonald’s adding the McRibb back to the menu and the iPod coming in sparkly new colors. In North Korea 33% of the population is undernourished, and few have ever seen an iPod. In America citizens can come together in massive protests, demanding change and equality, generally unmolested by the police. Those few protesters who, from time to time, are arrested, are generally released within 24 hours In ... [Read More]

Niagara Falls — coming soon to a town near you?

    Why is water beautiful? That human beings find water almost hypnotically alluring is something we all just seem to accept without question. People across the globe, from disparate countries, religions and ethnic groups, all find the substance covering 70% of our planet's surface irresistible. We want to live near it, vacation in it and will travel great distances just to admire it. Being no different than the rest of humanity, Soo and I happily traveled a great distance to admire the 5.7 million liters of water cascading every second over the limestone cliffs at Niagara Falls. We set off from Toronto for the two-hour train ride to Niagara, ... [Read More]

Size matters in the Canary Islands

   I arrived in the Tenerife, largest of the Canary Islands, to the following message from my colleague in Barcelona: "Mr. Jones! I think you made my eruption!" I couldn't think of any way to translate that into something I wanted to hear, so I declined to respond. Sometime later I received the following correction: "Sorry, I meant the eruption! You hear about volcano?" This made me simultaneously relieved and nervous. It turned out that just as Soo and I were arriving in the Canary Islands an underwater volcano erupted, near the Island of El Hierro, forcing the evacuation of more than 600 local resisdents. (El Hierro hasn't had the easiest of ... [Read More]

Adventures in Traveling

  There are a lot of airlines on earth. Some are good (Delta, Qantas), some are excellent (Emirates, Singapore), and some are utter crap. Sliding futilely into the latter position I present Vueling, a low-budget Spanish airline duking it out with Air India for the top spot on my ranking of world’s worst ways to fly. On what should have been a quick, easy domestic flight from Barcelona to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Vueling instead set about mashing up our journey from the first opportunity, and never let up. Once at the airport Soo and I proceeded to the Iberia desk, since we had Iberia tickets. Some readers ... [Read More]

Style, service and sangrias in Spain

  It's easy to like Barcelona (pronounced Barthalona by the locals. Truly – I spent my first two days here convinced everyone had a lisp.) I decided upon arriving in Catalonia's capital city that it was my duty to sample Spain's native drink in as many places as possible. (This perhaps has less to do with the fact that it’s Spanish that it does with my fondness for sampling drinks – tequila in Mexico, grappa in Italy, vodka, well, everywhere. You get the idea.) And I wondered if being full of sangria would, among other things, help me understand the bizarre and wonderful style of Gaudi, the 19th-century architect whose ... [Read More]