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Beijing Duck
When I picked an identifying image for Beer For Strange Climates 60 posts ago, I recalled the mysterious yet everyman’s beer I had to wash down a memorable meal in Beijing several years back. That meal? Beijing Duck–the most famous of China’s exported cuisine. You probably know it as Peking Duck stateside, but that name…
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One Flag Over Jakarta
An amusement park feels somewhat beside the point after you’ve driven through a single rush hour in Jakarta. I stayed for a week during a rainy November several years past, working with a core team of aviation educators and the various authorities to establish an outline for better pilot training in Indonesia. During that week,…
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Ground Burger, Saldanha
We attack shopping at El Corte Inglês like it’s a major international expedition, which it is: We’re strangers in a strange land. It’s going into foreign territory to leave our quiet town and subject ourselves to the Mall. It takes planning, fortitude—and surely a reward at the end. For me, that’s twice now we’ve landed…
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Time Stop: Açores
Nothing prepares you for the scale of the Açores islands. A short, two-hour flight from Lisbon (or twice that from Boston), and you’re there—this impossibly green flotilla of masted ships clinging loosely to each other in the midst of the Atlantic. Only Terceira (“third” in Portuguese) is vaguely round. The remainder of the archipelago form…
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Belgians Near Barcelos
We drove past a handful of tavernas, looking for something a bit more than what we called the “one-bulb bar,” dimly lit by a single florescent light hanging on a twisty wire, with a grim trio of customers inevitably looking over dark mustaches and glasses of beer at our passing. We’ve actually spent a fine…
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A Redbird Shiner Bock
The life of a traveler means you’re often far from friends, and it’s keenly felt when they’ve gathered and you’re missing out on the party. Our aviation family’s a close knit one, with some of the smartest, funniest, somewhat dysfunctional functional people I know—but when we get together, we come up with great ideas. They…
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Leos From My Thai Tailor
The rain comes on without notice in Bangkok, so we ducked out into the street to wave down one of the glitter-colored tuk-tuks weaving into a line nearby. Our mission, should our driver choose to accept the 200 baht we offered? Find a tailor, and order up some shirts. I was new to bespoke business…
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Down To The Duque
Lisbon’s jam-packed with tourists, so they say, but I’ve made it to September, and have found that when you stay clear of the places people say “you should see,” and focus on the neighborhoods—“what you want to see,” the crowds fall away. On a calm Saturday afternoon, in the sleepy time between lunch and happy…
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Cheeseburger Day
As the United States goes, our most impactful export can’t be Coca-Cola, KFC, or even the mighty 747. No, arguably much better, I nominate the cheeseburger. The base sandwich may have originated somewhere else, but we drove its utter ubiquitousness—as well as its multiplicity of toppings and forms. In honor of what Twitter proclaimed to…
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Hurricane Season
The wind kicks up to 20 knots or so where we sit on the shady patio overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I take a compass heading to point us to Key West, and pull up my Aero Wx app that shows the METARs and TAFs—the weather reports and forecasts—for a slew of Florida airports. The siege…
