this isn’t the thread to talk about rural decline, but i think visiting rural counties for travel is still very much alive and does not look worse than before. yeah, there are many food deserts, so you may be limited by willingness to camp or cook, but in general almost every state (PA excluded) has a pretty sizeable tourism area/industry that saw its funding increase. so that semi-local lakeside campground, or wine festival, or u-pick farms and fruitstands are still well worth checking out.
i’m jk. i’m sure PA has some of that somewhere, although i’ve never done anything except driving past the llws park and the hershey factory. i stopped to eat near bucknell once i think.
I split my time between the city and the country, so I can definitely see the benefits of both. I think the worst places are the in between spots, the stagnant-to-declining towns that bridge the urban/rural divide. Those places somehow manage to capture the worst of both worlds, with neither the charm or recreation of the country nor the commercial and cosmopolitan benefits of the city.
This is generally true, but some of those spots have been getting very interesting lately as the cost of living pushes people out of major cities. They can be a lot less demographically homogeneous and economically stagnant than you might expect at first glance. I love stumbling upon some old mill town thinking it’s going to be full of junkies and sadness, and it is, but there’s also 3 pupuserias in town and a large mosque.
Gotta admit that I do wonder what the next Portland will be. I imagine it’s gonna be some obscure town nobody’s ever heard of in the middle of nothing that’ll suddenly get a bunch of turquoise shops and belt buckle designers and you’ll be like, “Oh, we should go there for our next vacation!”
Well, I just found the best place for bagels in Europe.
Been all over the continent and had bagels wherever I could find them and every place does the same thing: mold dough into a bagel shape, bake, and call it a bagel. It’s been an extended quest because it is the one thing that I haven’t been able to find an equivalent for.
Ezra’s Bagels in Prague does it right. Unlike the other places in Europe I’ve been to, they boil the bagels before baking them to the point where you can actually taste the moisture in them. The people who own and operate it are New Yorkers themselves. So, they know their stuff. It’s not exactly like a New York bagel but it still tastes great and is absolutely the closest I’ve had to one. Just a plain bagel with homemade cream cheese made me nostalgic.
If it wasn’t so far from where I lived, I’d go there more often.
When I first lived in Japan over 20 years ago there wasn’t a bagel to be found in the country. Fast forward to today and there are entire bagel speciality stores, although most are still more soft bread and not a true bagel texture. Still, progress!
Well I’m an idiot, I didn’t know there was some covid form you have to upload for the Indian government. I got to the airport 2 hours early, it took 55 minutes to get to the check in counter (it closes 1 hour before the flight) when I was made aware I didn’t have this form. You can do it online, but for uploads it won’t accept jpgs, only pdf, and then you have resize it bc the file sizes are too large, and it’s all on this clunky website that’s shit on mobile. Shockingly I couldn’t do it in time, same with about a dozen other people, so that was a $350 mistake. Will try again tomorrow!
I assume you’re leaving for India? What do they want - vaxx card?
One of the most surreal UI experiences I’ve ever had was trying to buy a train ticket online in India. Like if it was just broken that’s one thing. You figure something broke, and it will get fixed in time. But it was so weird, and so buggy, and yet still somehow actually worked after an hour of fighting with it. Which means it’s always like that. Crazy.
India loves shit like that. I bet that covid form stays forever - employment for 100s of bureacrats!
I had to scramble around town to find a doctor/test lab willing to sign off on the Japanese government form certifying a negative test. A few car trips and $125 later, mission accomplished. Test result uploaded to the government’s Fast Track app, which should hopefully expedite a painfully slow re-entry process at the airport upon arrival.
