On the Road (4): Eatin'

Maybe best not to eat like this all the time, but you can really eat well on the road. Thanks to smartphones and Yelp, we never had to settle for fast food or drive-thrus when we were out. We had one lunch at a barbecue spot on our first snowy afternoon in Manheim, Pennsylvania. We had a late dinner at Hilbilly Willy's, in a half-empty strip mall near Chattanooga. There was Little Dooey in Starkville, which sadly still had a campaign banner for Mitt Romney up in the dining room, right next to a giant t.v. showing LSU's spring football practices. 

In New Orleans we ate gumbo twice a day, tore into fried oyster po’ boys at Mahony's, and spent a long rainy afternoon on Magazine Street pulling apart a giant sack of crawfish at Tracey's. There were red beans and rice, and jambalaya, and just one lonesome, forgettable Hurricane, grabbed on the go after a night at Preservation Hall.

Ribs with fried okra at Hillbilly Willy's, Chattanooga, TN

Some world-famous beignets at Cafe du Monde.

Fresh crawfish at Big Fisherman Seafood on Magazine Street in New Orleans.

Our national beverage. By the vat, at the Little Dooey, Starkville, Mississippi.

On the Road (3): New Orleans

Jackson Square

Café du Monde is just across the street from Jackson Square, on just the other side of the flood wall from the Mississippi River at the end of the French Market. It’s famous, and has a huge multilingual line of visitors stretching down the street to prove it. And rightly so: their plates of beignets — fried dough served in a dust bowl of powdered sugar — are a treat, and even their chicory-laced cafe au lait has a specific charm (that chicory is there as a coffee extender, as local historians and guidebooks will tell you). The place is as New Orleans as it gets, but it can’t escape being a part of the great big globalized world — most of the waitstaff are Vietnamese ladies. Probably not as it was in the old days.

I’ve been to New Orleans three times now — in 1993, 2001, and 2015 — and it remains every bit the great American city we think it is. But like any living place, it’s changing, and thanks to its unique topography it’s changing fast. I didn’t now what it would like now. Would it feel like it’s still on its sickbed, after surviving a near fatal blow just a few years ago? Would it still feel like a convention center adjacent to a permanent frat party, as it is to so many visitors? Or has it moved on to become a consciously dying oddity with the grace of Venice? or a hollowed-out theme park of gumbo and old-timey jazz? The greatness of the place is there is a little of all of that.

My memories from that first trip remain very vivid. I went over winter break while in college to meet up with some Southern friends I’d met the summer before in Washington. I remember eating crawfish for the first time, and going to Bourbon Street and enjoying the idea of being an adult for awhile and ordering a beverage without a hassle. I saw the Mississippi River for the first time there.

That second trip I went for a conference, which was much less fun. I remember going out to slightly better restaurants, walking around alone, dropping by Preservation Hall a few times, spending long hours during the day in impossibly long meetings.

This trip with the family, I felt like we had to touch all the basics for the sake of our daughter. The tourist economy of the city is doing great. I don’t remember ever seeing quite so many people there. Getting to Preservation Hall was almost an ordeal — not just because I spent the set with my daughter on my shoulders because we were stuck against the back wall. The set was more dutiful than inspired, but the line to get in was astonishing. 

Never mind the line, Preservation Hall is still worth it

There is still a great deal to see, and we took an architectural tour of the Quarter to get a sense of the layers of design of the city. Along the way we managed to avoid Bourbon Street altogether, and spent an evening on Frenchmen Street listening to music and going to an open-air art market. It feels alive and healthy, and the pockets of despair visitors like us found were very familiar — the spectacularly drunk, the panhandlers, the squatters, the various fellows you see walking a bit too fast and looking around too much who are clearly up to something.

We stayed a little bit uptown, in a neighborhood that straddles the very posh Garden District and the quite more pedestrian Irish Channel districts. Giant old trees pushed their roots through the sidewalk, and the potholes and scarred pavement was astonishing. It felt like a city falling apart from the ground up.

We tried our best to get a little bit off the beaten path, and were well-rewarded when we did. The most eye-opening place we visited was the Backstreet Cultural Museum, in the lower reaches of Tremé, which is an old funeral home that has become an overflowing collection of items documenting the city’s rich and misunderstood African-American social traditions. It includes a selection of the intricate and complicated costumes of the various tribes of Mardi Gras Indians, and artifacts and items from the city’s Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and specific traditions like second-line dancing. 

Mardi Gras Indian costumes at the Backstreet Cultural Museum

This is a part of life in the city that is considerably more difficult to understand for outsiders, and in many ways the museum raised way more questions than it answered. This even though we had a wonderful guide, one of the founders of the museum who helped us make sense of the costumes and photos and newspaper clippings. As an experiment in anthropology it is an amazing place — a look at how a living culture choose to represent itself to outsider in an honest and astounding way.

As I said, I didn’t know what New Orleans we’d find — I’d imagined a place once again pulling open and forced to welcome all, a place that couldn’t afford to remain the quaint museum of esoteric culture it was before the catastrophe. It’s a bit of everything, as it always has been when at its best.

Old beside older

On the Road (1): Getting there

Outside Lexington, Virginia

I’m often surprised and amused when I realize that I’ve seen more of eastern Europe than of the United States outside the little corner where I’m from and where I’ve spent most of my life. It’s something I’ve long wanted to correct, which is why my wife and I have long talked about setting off and spending some time driving around the rest of the country. We finally got around to it last month, inspired by an awful long winter up here cooped up, and a curiosity about what’s going on down South. 

Over ten days, we covered 3,434 miles and 13 states — not a bad tally to rack up in a 2005 Subaru Forester. Along the way we drove through the gamut of North American climate zones. We drove slowly through a substantial snowstorm in Pennsylvania, which obliged us to take the side roads through Amish country to avoid accident traffic on the interstate. We got through a huge downpour in the Florida Panhandle, and another weird flurry storm in Tennessee of all places. But the best parts were the hints of spring we found — perhaps fewer than we’d have liked, but they were there all the same.

March snow, Pennsylvania

We did a good job of taking breaks along the way, although we had a plan to stick to and couldn’t be as open-ended as a proper road trip demands. So alas, we drove right by the Shenandoah battlefields and right under Lookout Mountain without taking a look around. Those weren’t the only regrets.

The idea of the open road is a deep part of being an American. It began with the idea of pushing out, away from the coasts and the familiar and into a new world (I’ll gently set aside the obvious problem of who you might be pushing aside to do so, or who you might be bringing with you as coerced labor). It is an idea so strong it rebounded back on itself when our ancestors finally ran out of horizon to flee into.

I brought along with me my old, beat copy of On the Road, a book I’d valued since high school, when road trips were just a funny idea about a kind of thing I’d do when I was grown up and my own person. The book is so much about the kind of desperate wandering and searching that would land you an Adderall prescription nowadays, but beneath it is an acute awareness of the sadness and disappointment of life. That all these moments of travel and experience have a fleeting value, but don’t change much about human nature and what is mournful about it.

There was that idea in my head, but the real lessons of making such a trip have to be that there is just something grand about having your psychogeography broken down like that. Every now and then when you drive out of the driveway to the grocery store or work, you wonder what it would be like to just keep going. Where would you find yourself? what gas station off what road would you have to stop and look around? The great beauty of a road trip is that you begin to answer those questions.

I had that sense on the Thursday evening when we left, as I set the trip odometer to zero and imagined just what I would see over that dashboard over the next few days. The familiar old Hudson, the wide Susquehanna, the Smokey Mountains, the orderly farms of Tennessee, the heliosphere on the Knoxville skyline, the red earth of Alabama, the scrubby tropics of the Panhandle, the ocean mists of the Gulf of Mexico, the endless bayou on the way into New Orleans.

Near Andalusia, Alabama

You realize along the way that despite great variations — between slopes and rises, farms and cities, forests and fields — that it really is all connected. That the lines and labels of a map, or the views from Google Earth, aren’t the reality of what the land is.

And then you start thinking about all the people on it, and you see fewer and fewer license plates like your own on the highway. We were astonished at the number of crucifixes you see by the side of the road — both the giant constructions outside certain megachurches and the temporary, humble ones set up for Lent. I was amazed that for huge swathes of the trip the only things on the radio — the only things — were Christian radio (usually talking about abortion. What is your world like if you spend that much time thinking about it?) or “today’s country,” a reliable swirl of cultural references (cold beer, girls with southern accents, the value of weekends, overhearing a child praying, admiration for an elderly veteran, trucks). How can we make a a nation when we’re this far apart?

Chattanooga, Tennessee

For a northeastern travel makes you realize how alone we are. Living a paltry three hours from Times Square or Fenway Park makes you realize how compact this part of the world is, which is something I didn’t appreciate enough before.

This is the first installment of a few posts about the trip. Stay tuned!

The sea, Destin, Florida

Rain in July

A passing shower this evening over our garden.

The stones of San Juan

The way these things work, I didn't get to see a lot of San Juan — let alone Puerto Rico — when we passed through last month. We spent most of our day climbing around the fortress at San Cristobal. For fans of fortifications, like me, this is plenty fun — even if I had to play up the pirate attack angle to keep my daughter's attention. Here's are the coastal defenses of the old city, looking over toward El Morro and the entrance to the bay.

Around the Homosassa River

Had a few weeks of heavy work (eh, freelancing), and am now down south in Florida for a visit. Today spent the afternoon on an airboat poking around the Homosassa River, seeing the inlets and islands out around that patch of the Gulf Coast.  

By any other name... still a bad idea

Croatia has a vibrant and diverse wine culture. Among my favorites from Istria is teran, a kind of red-to-black, dry wine that from the right vineyard is sublime.

But Croatians have this insane quirk, which I think is specific to them, of serving wine mixed with Coke, over ice. This summer, I learned that this madness has a name, "Bambus" (they also serve wine with Fanta, which is a "Miš-Maš"). 

I'm just, shaking my head.

Pictures from a drive down South

Last month, I had the chance to drive from Florida back up to Massachusetts. I've never really been to the South — still haven't, but at least now I've gone through it. Here are a few snapshots of what I saw.

I flew from Albany to Orlando, leaving on a grey rainy day. We flew high over the overcast skies, and there is a moment when you pop down and Florida appears. There's the blue ocean, the perfectly flat land, the geometric patterns humans have carved on it. You see in an eyeful that it is a different place.

The first leg of the trip was on Route 301 in north Florida, one of those great old highways that predate the interstates and have a roadside culture that is rapidly fading away. It is hard today to imagine why a road stand that specialized in oranges and orange-related goods would convince someone to stop, but once upon a time this meant something. 

A real fault lines of American culture today, expressed in the arrangement of SEC paraphernalia at a truck stop near St. Mary's, Georgia.

Had never heard of Huddle House before, but there is something delusional and bold about the slogan "Best Food Yet."

The buffet at Duke's Barbecue in Walterboro, SC. It may not look like much, but it's one of my favorite restaurants.

All you can eat pork and fried stuff, with buckets of sweet tea. This is what makes America great.

What else makes America great: Fireworks!

 Wildflowers in North Carolina.

When I lived in Washington, I didn't have a car and lived a fairly happy pedestrian life. Everyone I knew with a car complained about it constantly — especially if they lived in Northern Virginia. Here's just your ordinary midday traffic on the Beltway.

One nice thing about a very long winter

Prospect Mountain, Vermont. March 19, 2013

Images from a train across the Ukraine

Eastern Ukraine, Sept. 29, 2011

There are places on earth that no matter how hard I try I can't really see on their own terms. So when I was on a train rolling across the Ukraine a year ago, heading from one part of my life to another, I didn't really see the little farms and towns of an impoverished, distant corner of Europe. Most of what I saw was history and ghosts.

This is the first anniversary of that trip, when we left Moscow's Kievskaya Vokzal in the evening, and a day and a half later we arrived at Budapest's Keleti Station. Along the way we had little to do but stare out the window at the scene unfolding.

Travelling by train is a great way to see a place, but a limited one for experiencing it. You have no power to linger over something interesting, or to engage with the people you see and expose yourself to the possibility of a surprise or a challenge. You are alone with your thoughts, which you have no choice but to confront, and have the time to fill the landscape with something like that linear narrative that we so often prefer.

This part of the world, the opening of the steppes of Eurasia, perhaps gets such a reputation because there is a sameness to it. Along the way are farms, large and small, usually with cattle grazing precariously close to the tracks. There are gardens, well-tended in a rough and practical way, and little houses often in some form of disrepair. The towns are perfectly Soviet, which is one of the weird architectural legacies of the USSR. From the Polish frontier clear across the globe to the Pacific Ocean, you'll find dotting the land the same brutal apartment blocks, the severe, ersatz neoclassical train stations, the modest commercial downtowns. There will be kiosks selling all manner of things, and more than a few Lada taxis waiting nearby. After it all, the contrast with Europe — even the rougher parts of eastern Europe — is striking.

But while life goes on, the past is always there. The images and stories of the eastern front were always right there. It is a landscape that has seen so much suffering that you can't imagine it without armies marauding back and forth, about each little copse or hill was the scene of some drama, which claimed the lives of millions upon millions within living memory. It was in my mind when we arrived in Kiev, on what I knew was the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Babi Yar massacre. I wonder how the city, the country, would remember this event, which was one of the first horrible chapters of the Holocaust, when the killing was immediate and brutal and had not yet evolved into the chilling, industrial process that is perhaps more potent in our memory. As the Yevtushenko poem described it, the silence screams.

Spalny vagon

Kiev

The land

The station at Vinnytsia

A few of the many cups of tea we drank, courtesy of RZD

L'viv station, night, Sept. 29, 2011

The fanciest McDonalds I know

Nyugati pályaudvar, July 22

The idea of there being McDonalds franchises overseas would seem at first glance to suggest the export of the same bland, homogenized, terribly unhealthy strip-mall eating culture that is making America so obese and bland. But there's a weird quirk that I don't think anyone foresaw: just about any McDonalds you go to abroad would be the best McDonalds in America. The restaurant will be clean, the staff will be cheerful, the french fries will be perfect. None of the usual nonsense of alienated labor and low standards you see in the U.S.: tables with used napkins on them, surly counter staff who want to make it clear that they despise you, and limp, cold fries that hit home the fact that this food-like item which is going to eventually kill you might as well make you miserable along the way. 

The one pictured above is at Nyugati railway station in Budapest on the Nagykörút. It was built inside what had been the station restaurant.

Nyár

Sunset tonight, after a very hot day. Tomorrow looks sweltering too.

Moscow space

Traffic and construction: looking north from Mayakovskaya Square

Every time you return to Moscow you must readjust your vision. It is a place that changes very fast, but seems to remain within the same outlines. Was that high-rise apartment block there before? is this shopping center new? was there always this much traffic on this road?

This is the consequence of barely manageable growth. The traffic gets worse by the week and the Metro is a flood-chute of humanity, streaming and stalling people from the mushroom moon colonies on the outskirts through the straining and bursting center. Muscovites resort to increasingly absurd lengths simply to live and move around.

The city gives you lots of time to think about the situation, and how civil authorities are not just helpless, but actively taking steps that history has proven will only make things worse. They build new highways, they add lanes to existing ones, the plan entire new subway lines with dozens of new stations, the acquire enormous swaths of suburban territory to accommodate increased urban growth.

Moscow is a city that aims to be New York or London, but ends up being more like Mumbai or Lagos. And it comes at the expense of the rest of the nation, especially the countryside, which is withering.

So while Moscow's progress through the phases of being a global megacity, there are signs that the investments and heavy-handed, top-down approach of the Putin years are having some effect on the urban landscape. Walking around the Center this month, it felt like visiting a familiar place where the scaffolding had come off after many long years. There are more new buildings, old ones have been renovated, and it seems like there are more long, clean views around the place.

It can't be a coincidence that this is happening during an election year, when a carefully stage-managed "transfer of power" is underway and the chorus of dissent is growing bit by bit.

Nor is it surprising that much of the new building is terrifically tacky. The long Soviet experience left a two-fold legacy on Moscow's physical space: a reverence and overvaluing of the monumental and gargantuan for its own sake, and the belief that only shameless, flashy, blinged-out, busy details and ornamentation are the only ways to communicate serious value. It's why, for example, the Ritz Carlton hotel on Tverskaya looks like it has about a million bricks more than it actually needs, and why every oligarch and high-level bureaucrat wears a platinum wristwatch the size of a tea saucer.

Anyway, some pictures:

The Central House of Artists on Krimsky Val, built in 1980, remains the most starkly astonishing example of Soviet modernism at full swagger 

The brand new Ritz Carlton, built a few years ago a stone's throw from the Kremlin on the site of the former Intourist Hotel, led me to make up a new word: "encrustulated" 

The "new" Hotel Moskva is said to be a replica of the old Stalinist one, which you may recognize from Stolichnaya vodka bottles 

Rows and rows of new apartments in the exurban expanses of Kurkino

Scenes from Victory Day season in Moscow

Victory Day (день Победы) remains one of the most important Russian holidays. Recent years have seen the celebrations return to Soviet chest-thumping, with marching phalanxes of troops, rumbling tanks and ICBMs, and fighter jet fly-bys.

But as with any big holiday, it is also an occasion for a season of kitsch.

A Victory Maypole? This collision of banners and colors was on Krimskiy Val, across the street from the entrance to Gorky Park.

For fans of military history, this huge map of the campaign was installed at Revolution Square.

"Everything is important!" — This somewhat cryptic remark is the slogan of a housing developer, which sponsored this ad near Barrikadnaya. It's a very common Victory Day theme that is disturbing: young children dressed up in WWII-era uniforms and themes. It is intended as a sign of respect, but it also wants to signal the unquestioning readiness of future generations to make horrific sacrifices.

"The Motherland Salutes You, Hero-Fried Meat Pastry!" —this poster was spotted in the window of a chebureki shop on Ulitsa Solyanka, near Kitai Gorod.