high altitude pasta:
om nom nom!

Tues, 14 June 2016, 6:53 pm: I think the other option was chicken (in the air as on the ground, the other option is always chicken), but here’s what we chose for dinner en route to the eastern seaboard, almost two hours in to our flight from Ft. Myers to Dusseldorf.

20160614_185316Here’s how the entire meal looked upon delivery.

20160614_185013A tip for AirBerlin’s art department: let’s add a splash of color to the logo on the thin plastic lid. What logo, you ask? Exactly. You can’t even see it. Here, squint more closely.

20160614_185019See there? The pasta pesto stays piping hot under that peel-away lid, but you can barely tell which airline is claiming credit for this high altitude achievement in culinary science.

20160614_185307Along with the roll and wedge of Brie (visible two pics up) the dinner included some manner of blueberry crumble and a side of potato salad. You can see I’m drinking a white wine and a glass of still water. Always accept multiple beverages. Passengers who don’t say yes to the water in addition to their main dinner drink regret it when they get thirsty and the drink cart doesn’t return for two hours.

I’d rate this supper as pretty good, but then I’m generally happy with meals on Europe flights in the last ten years. There are plenty of sit-down restaurants in America where the food isn’t as fresh or as tasty as in the friendly skies.

Matt August 2, 2016 Neither Here Nor There, on the plane No Comments

from Jezerce toward Karlovac

Thurs, 23 June 2016, 11:24 am: Having departed the village of Jezerce, we’ve driven through part of Plitvice Lakes National Park and are driving north toward the city of Karlovac, which within a few minutes of shooting this video we’ll pass through. Beyond that to the northeast is Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb. A street sign you’ll see in the video indicates this and also points to the east for the cities of Sisak and Vojnic.

This :52 second piece is certainly not a 2016 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Short, but I’m sharing it because it shows you the key elements of quintessentially rural Croatia: serene stretches of grass and hills, abandoned or neglected buildings, paved but narrow roads, and a distinct lack of tourists.

As this clip’s primary soundtrack you hear some (presumably) Croatian rock music on our car radio. I got excited at the rental car’s USB port below the radio controls, since I’d brought a thumb drive loaded with my preferred driving music, but the system regrettably refused to read my drive. I plugged it in repeatedly (believe me, I didn’t want to give up) but it never worked. I therefore spent a bulk of our on-the-road time on an occupation just as important as dogearing relevant pages in guidebooks: scanning in-range radio stations for tunes that didn’t suck. And that’s not a knock on Croatian musicians; at least half of the songs I vetoed were by American artists I cross the ocean to avoid. I’m so spoiled back home by my satellite radio with signal that never weakens; you don’t have to lose the second half of “Love My Way” to static and garble and a Spanish detergent commercial bleeding in. I am totally out of practice at scanning the entire FM band every ten minutes, listening for four seconds at every two decimal points on the dial.

Matt July 31, 2016 Croatia, Jezerce No Comments