Final morning in Hradec Králové

I'm typing this right before I get on a train to leave Hradec Králové— my home in the Czech Republic since February— and I'm sending myself off with a gluten-free cream puff from Bazalka. Very short post— and it's almost impossible to capture that transitional moment of leaving anyhow. So, it's off to the next adventure...

Enjoying the vegan buffet in Prague

I think the all-vegan Loving Hut in Prague slowly became one of my favorite restaurants— and a great reason to hop a train to the city. Between the selection of gluten-free and raw cakes, to their simple and tasty veggie and tofu combinations, there hasn’t been a trip to Prague where I haven’t eaten at...

Bubble and squeak (vegetarian and wheat-free)

I first had bubble and squeak in a restaurant in the Heathrow airport, and was totally charmed by it’s simplicity and heartiness. Also, the name. Ever since I had read Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett, I had been curious about bubble and squeak. How had a food earned such an odd moniker? What’s great about...

In defense of the food descriptions in Game of Thrones and Murakami’s books

Warning: mild spoilers for Game of Thrones and 1Q84. Question: are food descriptions necessary, or just dead weight in a book? After finishing Haruki Murakami’s latest, and reading a few book reviews of 1Q84, I’m reminded of complaints about the food descriptions in Game of Thrones. While on different ends of the literary spectrum, both...

Relaxing in Dresden, with vegan Vietnamese soup

My latest method of dealing with stress: swim a lot and go to a country that speaks German, so I can order food and talk to taxi drivers without any hand gestures or writing things down. And Dresden fit this criteria perfectly, and also gave me time to reflect on both European history and my...

Bratislava, Slovakia: unexpectedly lovely

Bratislava was unexpectedly beautiful— for a capitol city I had not heard of before, I was charmed. Perhaps because it’s in the shadow of the more well known Prague and Budapest, finding Bratislava seemed like finding something unexpected and hidden. My first night there, I wandered into Old Town, and found a stage set up...

Velvet Divorce: on drinking both fernet stock and borovička

Last night, I drank both the Czech Republic’s and Slovakia’s national drinks— fernet stock and borovička— and thought about both political history and my parent’s divorce. My folks split up in the early 1990s, the years the maps were changing— the time of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the official Czechoslovakia...