The Lingonberries are in the forrest with the Husvagn

On my second visit to Sweden I have been instructed by a real Swede on what to look for. The key is understanding that the Swedes are basically unsophisticated hicks.
This is their favorite summer activity, driving their husvagn (camper) to a big trailer park in the countryside and spending weeks with their family. Even though the whole countryside is open and you are able to camp on any land, even private land, as long as you don't disturb the owner, people prefer these crowded sites.

Here is another redneck pastime of the swedes.
This is called snus. The guy next to me on the plane dipped it the whole flight back. That tool is called a prismaster. He used it to get the right size and shape dip. I didn't realize he was dipping until he took out the prismaster, because they don't spit. They swallow the juice. Even the most backwoods country boy in Texas wouldn't do that. Here is the selection, I don't see Copenhagen or Skoal but I see where they get their names.
And what do they really eat here? Here it is, the real national dish of Sweden. Korv.
It comes complete with ketchup, mustard and dried onions. It is terrible. The swedes go crazy for it.

Summer in Berlin can only mean one thing

Ramadan?

No. Get your lunar and solar calenders straight. It is pretty lonely during the day in these Turkish restaurants in Berlin though. I am keeping my position on döner no matter what kendi says. This is from a place called Imren in a Turkish part of Kruezberg, which is supposed to have the best dürüm döner. It is still just not that good.

They do have other good middle eastern food here though. There are a lot of vegetarians so you can get stuff like this. This is from a place called knofi which is very popular and has dozens of spreads to choose from.

So, what does summer mean? Fried chicken?

No again. They love chicken in Berlin. This place is called Henne and is wildly popular, but it isn't a seasonal thing. I thought it was very overrated btw.

Does it mean public nudity?

This is a diorama from a museum on East Germany that claims nearly everyone went on nudist holidays. I still saw it in evidence today as men were completely nude in the public park the Tiergarten. However, this can´t be the answer because as readers of this blog know I am too shy to take photos of fully nude strange men (in public at least).

Does it mean recreational boating?
No again. I was obviously taking a picture not of the boatists but of the marker for the spot where the founder of German Communism was thrown into a canal after being murdered with rifle butts to the head by government supported right wing militias in 1919. It is nice to see these people are not letting that bring them down and are enjoying a nice sunny afternoon.

Does it mean smoked fish sandwiches?

Another popular berlin treat, but I think that is more of a winter snack.

How about spicy food?
This is seemingly the most popular currywurst place in Berlin. But, I should have pointed out before that the currywurst isn't really spicy. They just dump more chilly powder on it if you want, before they cover it in what seems like ketchup.
Sorry you can see more the fries here but the sausage is covered in ketchup anyway.

No, summer in Berlin is obviously all about the girly beer cocktails.

I didn´t put it in my gose, but in Berlin they don't give you a choice. The beer here is so bad that to have something interesting you have to resort to the raspberry (red) or woodruff (green) syrup. The beer they put it in is actually pretty good. It is called Berliner Weisse and is sour and not like any weissebeir you would get in Bavaria. It isn't all that sour, but no one drinks it straight. You can´t even get it that way unless you are prepared to fight with the waiter in german. I did drink a few bottles of it while I wrote this blog though. It is only made by one company, Kindl, and only comes in bottles. Also, if you want to get really girly you can put blue curacao or even coke into it. I didn´t.

Speaking of girly, if I needed one image to wrap up the absurdity that the theme of this blog gets me into. Here it is.

Click on it if you can't read the tattoo.

This woman is running on the far left ticket for parliament. I originally thought it came off as sexist, until I realized it was her real picture. Now I have no idea what to think. The slogan is "pants full of arse in the parliament". That is an idiom in german that means boldness. At least it isn't as boring as all the posters with the people's faces on them. Regardless, I think the socialists are making great campaign choices in this largely muslim district.

Franconia´s Jerusalem

A cab driver told me that they've called Bamberg Franconia's Jerusalem since the crusades. He said it was because it was a beautiful as Jerusalem.

It is pretty, but when I started seeing things like this,

and this,

I had to wonder, especially considering how Jews were treated in this part of Germany during the crusades. But this isn´t Worms, Speyer, or Mainz so I had to look into it.

It turns out the hexagram has been used by brewers almost as long as it has been used by Jews, dating to the 14th century. The two have nothing to do with each other and those were just breweries. That is just fine considering that is why I came here in the first place.

German beer is usually bad, of course. Bamberg may be one of the few exceptions. It has eight centuries-old breweries and they actually make interesting beer. The beer above was just called ungespundet or unfiltered. It must have been a lager but it was surprisingly good for one. All these beer gardens were attached to small breweries like this one called Mahr´s. The most famous beer from Bamberg is the dreaded Rauchbier (smoked beer).

It shows you how far the German´s will go to get flavor into their beer that they stupidly made tasteless with the Reinheitsgebot. This is a märzen flavored with smoke. You can also get smoked weizen and even lagers that aren´t smoked but pick up the flavor from the equipment. Not as gross as I´ve had smoked beer in the U. S.

What do they eat with this smoked beer. Well they call them baggers in Germany, but they look a lot like latkas to me.

The far east

Germany might seem uninteresting compared to some of the places we've been on this trip, but I am going to the deep east. Saxony (along with Thüringen) is the traditional heart of the German left. Here is a gymnastics festival in Leipzig from the 1970s.

This is an election year in Germany and the left is still strong in the east. Here is a rally for the far left party Die Linke I happened upon while I was there.

The speaker was the former head of the PDS (former communists) Gregor Gysi. He was outed as an informant for East Germany's secret police the Stasi a few years ago, but he still has a large following.

Saxony is also a center of the far right. The neo-fascist anti-immigrant party the NPD won ten percent in the last elections. I orignally thought this was one of their posters which translated as away with the brown "muck." You can see from the drawing what they mean by muck.

That was unbelievably offensive, even for Germany. On a second reading, I think it is anti NPD and says "no voice for the NPD." Brown is what they are, brown shirts or Nazis. They did have some interesting graffiti on this poster for the leftist candtidate.
I'm not sure how well they understand Obama's politics to align him with the far left here, but I guess they have their reasons for disliking him.

They do have a lot of brown people here, in any case. Turkish food is popular. They eat something like a burrito called dürüm (it is fun being on this german typewriter).
This place was actually good for what it was and had a line out the door. I didn´t love it, though, because döner is not that good. Sorry kendi.
I don´t remember seeing this in Turkey, so I´m not sure how authentic it is either. However, döner (or gyro) is a modern invention with the mid-century advent of that machine that heats it on the side. In that case, does Turkish-German cuisine from the 1950s and 60s have as much authenticity as Turkish cuisine from Turkey which came along at the same time?

Speaking of brown people, the other thing that is popular here is currywurst, which is a sliced-up sausage covered in spicy sauce. Here is a menu with names (in English?) for how hot you want it, like with Buffalo wings. What is up with the most mild?
The real attraction of Leipzig is the beer. One beer, at least, gose which is a traditional style that exists only in Leipzig. It may be related to Belgian gueuze and is sour for a German beer so that these losers usually drink it with syrup made from raspberries or woodruff. I couldn't bring myself to order either of those, eventhough they would have made for much better pictures as they make it a bright red or green.
Even in Leipzig, gose has only recently started being brewed again and only at two places. One of those places, Bayerischer Bahnhof, actually puts coriander and salt in the beer. This might be the only place in Germany where you can buy a german made product labeled beer that has ingredients in it other that the four allowed by law (notice how I am always the first person at the beer hall).

The more I learn about that law the worse the whole idea sounds. I understand there is an escape clause in it for local specialties, but nowhere other than here takes advantage of that. If anything, they need a law here, and in other parts of Germany, that allows for underground water pipes.

Farewell to Budapest

We are leaving Budapest after nearly a month in Hungary. So here are a few final observations on the food.
As you can see from the sign this place is a Slovak beer hall. The waiter explained, though, that while they do have some Slovak food they are in no way Slovak. Under communism, when the restaurant opened, new businesses were given their names by the government. A place would be called Vienna Restaurant or New York Coffeehouse, and the managers were stuck with the name but it didn't necessarily relate to what the place served. Something tells me this tradition lives on with names given by clueless owners. We went to a place the other day called Ladino in the Jewish quarter, but the food had nothing to do with Saphardic Jewish cuisine. Here Kendra and I are inside the "Slovak" place.
She claims she makes that face in all the pictures on this blog, not because she drinks too much, but because the flash makes her close her eyes.

The New York Times ran a piece on Budapest just before we got here called "Save or Splurge." Save involved spending $250 a day and splurge $1000 a day. Obviously we would have trouble staying within either budget, but we went to the restaurant they suggested under splurge anyway. Costes, where the chef trained under molecular gastronomist Ferran Adria, does upscale versions of some Hungarian classics. Here is the cold fruit soup made with fresh plums and missing the typical whipped cream.
Here is a subtler version of the common pasta with fresh ewe's milk cheese.
This is nice considering the dish is typically a fatty mess like this one we had a few weeks ago.
The place runs out of Hungarian ideas pretty quickly though and goes Spanish, like with the duck with pumpkin and figs.
We enjoyed everything, perhaps because after two months in Eastern Europe we needed a more refined dining experience. You can see that Kendra and her brother had a great time.
Well, that is all for Hungary. Here I am saying goodbye to my comrades at the airport.

Apologies to our Albanian friends

Serbia has a bad image, ethnic cleansing-wise. But, we found in Subotica a diverse town complete with a mosque,
and a beautiful synagogue.
Ok, the synagogue is abandoned, but that wasn't due to the Serbs.

Subotica is technically in Vojvodina, but now that the term Yugoslavia isn't used, that is an autonomous province within Serbia.

There is a large Hungarian population here too, as this was part of historic St. Stephen's Hungary. The market speaks to that. Here I am walking past the paprika.
This is a squash called patiszon, which is very popular in Hungary served breaded and fried.
This is the poppy seed paste that is so commonly (and not deliciously, as far as we're concerned) used in making pastries in this part of the world.
We, of course, ate the most obvious Serb dishes.
This is a cevapi sandwich. Cevapi or cevapcici (the diminutive) are hand-formed, grilled links of minced meat. The best part of these stands, where they grill them, is you can go nuts with the toppings.
I don't think Serbs go overboard quite as much as we did. It can get a little messy to eat.
Finally, as far as burek goes, it wasn't that good here.
We prefer the Albanian burek we get at Tony and Tina's on Arthur Ave. in the Bronx.