World Flavor

Revisiting destinations is always interesting. The first time I did that was going to Costa Rica 5 years later. Given that I had been in high school during the initial trip and had graduated from college the second time around, it wasn't surprising that I felt different, and that I saw Costa Rica differently.

But I wasn't sure what it would be like to visit Kuala Lumpur after a year had gone by. It was only a year, could I really have changed that much? Could KL?

The Petronas Towers? Still around.

The answer, it turned out, was that I personally felt very different. Seeing KL again was like reuniting with a much-loved friend. KL hadn't really changed, but I, on the other hand, had.

In the last year, I've gone from being a beginner at this whole traveling thing to a much more seasoned adventurer. I've experienced wondrous places and food. I've said goodbye to friends in South Korea and moved on to a new chapter in my life. I was broken down by theft and slowly healed to become stronger.

So from the very beginning, I felt like a new person stepping through customs. The first time, I was nervous. It was a new country, and even though I'd done my research, that seemed overwhelming. But this time, I powered to the passport control with confidence. I knew Malaysia and besides, a new country was not all that big a deal anymore.

It was thoroughly refreshing to be in a city where I didn't need to look up how to get somewhere. I wasn't hesitant before getting on the public transportation. I didn't need to worry before going into a restaurant that I couldn't decipher the menu. It made me feel like a pro, like I had come so far.

Happily, my memories of Malaysia and especially of the food were accurate and there was no disappointment there. Roti canai was still freaking delicious.

Also delicious: this garlic cheese naan.

Soon I will be seeing Italy again with new eyes – 9 years later. That should be rather interesting.

For me, revisiting KL was a happy occasion that showed me all the ways I've grown in the past year. I found that I really liked my new travel confidence and I really hope I can continue to carry it forward with me in the future.

Have you ever been back to a place you visited before?

On the path between East Railay and Phra Nang beach, there's a sign pointing left saying “lagoon” and “viewpoint.” If you look left, this is what you'll see:

We have now arrived in Budapest after a week exploring gorgeous Transylvania. Here's more on what we did.

Days in Transylvania: 6.5

Cities visited: 2, Braşov for 3 days and Sighişoara for 3.5 days

Days that it rained: 0

Highest temperature: 90 degrees Fahrenheit!

Castles visited: 1, Bran Castle. We wanted to see Peleş too but it was closed on the only days we were in town.

Tours taken: 1, a free tour of Braşov.

Horse carts seen: Many

Trunks full of live goats seen: 3 or 4 at a market in Sighişoara.

Transylvania is so mysterious and vampire-related in popular culture. Well, they do take advantage of the vampire thing in the souvenirs they sell. There are also lots of sites related (however loosely) to Vlad the Impaler (who did call himself Dracula sometimes – it means “son of the dragon” in old Romanian because his father was a member of a group of knights called the Order of the Dragon. The Impaler moniker was added posthumously, and rather deservedly as Vlad indeed impaled his enemies). Anyway, it's a gorgeous area with lots of forests and the Carpathian Mountains and plenty of bears.

I never thought I'd say this but I finally found a place where we stayed for too long. We should have spent one more day in Braşov and one less in Sighişoara, since we didn't have a car. Sighişoara is very small and there isn't much to do directly in town. And because it is so small there aren't bus connections with the stuff we were interested in seeing nearby. On the other hand, there are bus connections to several things around Braşov. Ideally for this region you should rent a car because a lot of the best sites are in little towns that aren't too far from the cities but are sort of hard to get to independently. Both of the towns we stayed in were rather touristy but both are lovely and worth a visit.

Some Transylvania prices:

• Comfy double bed room at Casa Samurai in Braşov, per night: US $26.12
• Double bed in a Couchsurfing place in Sighişoara: free!
• Return bus ticket to Bran Castle, per person: 14 RON (US $4.26)
• Entrance into Bran Castle, per person: 25 RON (US $7.61)
• One ticket on the slow train from Braşov to Sighişoara: 17.2 RON (US $5.23)
• Delicious hot dog in central Braşov: 8 RON (US $2.43)
• Dinner for two at Ceasu' Rau, a nice Romanian restaurant in Braşov: 56 RON (US $17.04)
• Dinner for two at Perla Pizzeria in Sighişoara, including dessert: 40 RON (US $12.17)

We did well on our budget in Transylvania because honestly we didn't do much that cost money. Food prices were similar to those in Bucharest, except inside the citadel in Sighişoara where they were rather inflated.

Have you been to Transylvania?

Gorgeous, rural Fuli, a tiny and ancient town near Yangshuo, China which we biked to.

Every month we have been rounding up the best things we read. April was another busy travel month. We started it off with surprise extra days in Antalya, then headed to Selçuk, Çanakkale, and back to Istanbul. Then we took the train to Sofia, Bulgaria where we spent a week living in a great apartment and cooking a bunch. After that it was a week in Bucharest, Romania, and a couple of days in Braşov.

Rachel’s Reads

Blogs

• This looks cool: Traveling Canucks rode mules down big cliffs in Hawaii.
• Cool facts about Italian food from Twenty-Something Travel.
• Very interesting read about the cult of authenticity on Tangerine & Cinnamon.
• Time Travel Turtle explores an abandoned Japanese amusement park.
• All about sloths on A Dangerous Business. I love sloths too!
• I totally want to see this Game of Thrones exhibit. Thanks, Waegook Tom.
• Fantastic post by Steph of 20 Years Hence on learning to dive.
• A Little Adrift talks tacos.
• Expat Edna reveals the funniest search terms used to find her blog.
• What it’s like to travel as a gay man, by LandLopers.

Books - I read 5 books this month, and for the most part I didn’t make the best reading choices…

• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis – At first I found the guy’s craziness interesting. Then I got pretty bored with it.
• The Drop by Michael Connelly – Mediocre crime thriller picked up at a hostel book exchange. Not bad in the mystery sense but I wish there was some depth to the characters.
• Five Star Affair by Payton Lee – Have you ever wanted to read Dwight D. Eisenhower romantic fan fiction? No? Oh, then this isn’t for you.
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green – Finally I picked a good book! I love John Green’s Crash Course World History series on YouTube and I’ve been wanting to read his young adult fiction for a while now. This book is about cancer teens falling in love, and so it is beautiful and it will break your heart.
• The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy – I thought this might be good… It’s hyped and everything. But it is just really boring.

Jeff’s Reads

Links

• I’ve been learning HTML and CSS this month at Code Academy. It’s really a great site.
• Amazing foods served outside the US at big fast food chains. No mention of Pizza Hut in Thailand where you can get 8 hot dogs in your crust.
• Very long article with everything you want to know about the past, present, and future of energy.
• One of my favorite foods is making it big in the US: Hummus.
• Man sent to jail for running a (legal) secret compartment installation business.
• Classic artworks edited to show today’s beauty ideal.
• Man standing in front of things. Highly recommended!
• Floor plans of TV show abodes.
• The next pretentious food trend: unripe strawberries. My grocer’s had those for years!
• Doing normal things in space: wringing a washcloth edition.

Books – I read 4 books this month.

• The Fall of Il Rien Books 2,3 by Martha Wells – I enjoyed these more than book one. Once the series got less depressing it also got better. I would still recommend The Books of the Raksura instead if you want to read something by Martha Wells.
• Beastly by Alex Flinn – Basically it’s a modernized teen drama version of Beauty and the Beast. I caught the movie version of it a couple months ago and decided I might as well read the book (It’s rather short). I find that the adaptation is less likely to be disappointing if you watch it first. I thought both were rather enjoyable. Recommended if you feel like an adapted fairy tale.
• The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – A tale of a man trying to get away with murder in a future full of telepaths. When I read classic sci-fi, I often find it fascinating to see where many of today’s science fiction pillars originated. It also generally seems a bit outdated and predictable. Outdated because they use obsolete technology and social norms. Predictable because author build on novel ideas for decades until they are rendered trite. I found this book an especially interesting read because it so clearly had a huge impact on one of my favorite TV shows, Babylon 5.

It's been years since I was in San Francisco (in 2009), but I still think on it fondly. The city won me over pretty quickly with its beauty and quirky charm. A great place to go in the city to watch the fog roll in is Buena Vista Park.

All you have to do is climb a whole bunch of stairs.

SF's business district

Jeff at the top of the hill.

You can even bring your cute bulldog!

The flowers were nice too.

Looking out over the Bay.

Saint Ignatius Church

More cute dogs!

The fog comes in...

It's cool that you can watch it covering the city.

San Francisco is a great place full of green spaces. Jeff and I had a great time climbing up to the top of Buena Vista Park and seeing the city from a different point of view.

Have you been to San Francisco?

Homemade macaroni and cheese, made by Rachel.

Sometime towards the end of elementary school I started reading online comics. Almost fifteen years later I’ve seen death, loss, and the impossible, given life. The highest highs and the lowest lows have been mine to savor or discard on a whim; only to come crawling back like a supplicant to my tempestuous lover. I’ve washed up on the dark shores of ennui and viewed startling vistas just barely out of my grasp. I’ve done it all. And then I’ve done it all again. Once per day.
Come with me intrepid explorers of the mind as we probe the limits of creativity. I shall regale you with tales of tales, a metastory if you will. Where we’re going you’re going to need an attention span of a few more minutes. I present to you: Some webcomics I read.

• Schlock Mercenary – Space mercenaries go on various adventures which substantially alter the political and economic climate of the galaxy. The main character is a nearly indestructible amorphous fluid. This comic has been going on for nearly 13 years and I’ve been reading it since close to the beginning. As far as I am aware, Howard Tayler hasn’t missed a single day of full color strips, even when his drawing bones were injured. There are some comics I find funnier, and some that I find more exciting, but none that are more professional and consistently good quality.
• Nedroid – It’s infrequently updated because, as I understand it, Anthony Clark has other priorities and just kinda does a comic when he feels like it. But I love it so much. Everything out of his pen appeals to my sense of humor exquisitely. I follow his tumblr too, just so I can get another little hit of his random doodles. Now that’s devotion!
• Questionable Content – This is one of the best slice of life comics out there. I like the art style, but it’s really the stories and relatable characters that make me anticipate new comics. It updates with large full color strips 5 days a week and only puts in guest comics or filler a few times a year.
• Penny Arcade – This is another one of the webcomic behemoths out there and another comic that I’ve been following for close to 15 years. They update three times a week like clockwork with three full color panels. The prime focus is on video games and despite not understanding two thirds of the references, it’s consistently hilarious. I also use it as a news source to keep me apprised of the most notable occurrences in video game news. The two creators make a living off the strip for themselves and, I believe, a small staff and they created a very successful charity and an expo that attracts over 70,000 people.
• XKCD – I see this stick figure comic shared more than any other so you might already know about it. It largely consists of one off jokes about advanced academic topics and a variety of nerd subcultures with an occasional impressive infographic thrown in. If you follow up on some of the jokes, you can often learn something too.

Comics I No Longer Read
For every comic I follow now, there are probably five that have gone by the wayside. There are all sorts of reasons I stopped though and many of these comics are worth a read. Here are some of the noteworthy ones.

• Sluggy Freelance – This was my first webcomic and I was a rabid fan of it for most of my webcomic reading career. What happened? Several years ago there was a story arc that didn’t interest me that much and the comic just kinda fell off my radar. I imagine that someday I’ll go back and pick it up again though.
• Dragon Tails – For years Tim Dawson wrote and drew one of my favorite comics. Sometime around 2004 he went from posting comics every day to only a few times a year. The last comic was in 2010.
• Girls With Slingshots – I read the entire archives in the span of a few days and had only been following the regular updates for a few months when I decided to transfer all my regularly updated sites to an RSS feed. I couldn’t find an RSS feed for this comic so I just stopped reading it.
• Megatokyo – Here’s a comic that aggravated me and has never been forgiven. It was a comic I followed in the early years that updated a few times a week. This comic is the whole reason I love comics with reliable update schedules so much. Megatokyo, which has a slow moving plot to begin with, would have an emergency ‘I don’t feel like drawing’ filler fully half the time.  I stopped reading when I could stand it no longer.
• Narbonic - This was a really great comic about mad scientists. I only stopped reading it because it finished all it’s plot lines and ended. Read it!

What webcomics do you read?

As I mentioned in the Hanoi Roundup that I never posted, and probably never will, because I deleted it forever, we actually did go to a couple of tourist attractions in Hanoi. The first two of our initially planned 5 days there were taken up by me over-occupying the bathroom in our hostel dorm room, but after that, we had a couple of days to see the sights.

The first place we went was to the lovely Temple of Literature. This Confucian temple, built in 1070, also played host to Vietnam's first university, the Imperial Academy. It also has the rare distinction of being one of the only old buildings in Hanoi not destroyed by various wars or by the French.

Today we took the train from Bucharest to Braşov. One thing to remember about Bucharest is that it's not Budapest, though they are frequently mixed up. Here's what we did there.

Days in Bucharest: 7.5

Days that it rained: 0. The weather was sunny and warm the whole time.

Stairs to our 8th floor apartment: 128. Luckily, there was an elevator, but it was old and kind of sketchy.

Tours taken: 1, by Rachel, and 2 by Jeff. We both took the Guided Bucharest free tour, and Jeff took an additional Communist Bucharest tour with the same company.

Courses in our molecular gastronomy dinner: 19 – most were just one spoonful.

Symphonic recitals attended: 1, at the Atheneum.

Number of 900-gram yogurt buckets we bought: 2, for tasty yogurt muesli bowls.

Number of parks visited: 6

Herastrau Park

Bucharest is a big eastern European city that yearns to be like the cities of Western Europe. It is changing rapidly, and still discovering itself after the fall of communism in 1989. We imagine if we visit in ten years, it will be totally different. Maybe better, but maybe not. We liked the abundant parks but didn't like that restaurants were difficult to find.

Some Bucharest prices:

• Shabby bedroom in a Soviet-era apartment block, per night: US $15
• One ride on the metro: 2 RON (US $0.60). One ride on the bus is 2.10 RON.
• 7-day unlimited metro pass: 20 RON (US $6.00) – very worth it if you're staying for a week!
• One evening movie ticket at Bucharest Mall: 27.30 RON (US $7.93)
• Entry to the Village Museum, per person: 10 RON (US $3.33)
• One ticket to a small chamber recital at the Atheneum: 30 RON (US $8.71)
• Lunch at Caru' cu Bere, Bucharest's most famous restaurant, for two: 64 RON (US $18.58)
• Dinner for two at the Artist, a molecular gastronomy restaurant: 303 RON (US $87.95)

One thing that was unusually expensive in Bucharest was bottled water at restaurants. A large bottle was usually around $3.60. Tap water is safe to drink so you are best off bringing around your own water bottle. Food can be cheaper if you eat from the hot dog carts and kebab stands, but the price of Caru' cu Bere is pretty indicative of prices in the old city. It's a great place to do some of the things you might want to do in Western Europe without spending all your money, as it's pretty affordable – or at least now before it has changed to the Euro.

Have you been to Bucharest?