The VA’s travel advisory service

The Vol Abroad loves dispensing advice. Lack of relevant topical knowledge is no barrier.

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A colleague is headed to Nashville for the Fan Fair (or whatever they’re calling it these days) this summer and asked me for my advice on where to stay. My time in Nashville is usually rigorously controlled and I rarely get out unsupervised by relatives who don’t really do the tourist thing. For example: Parthenon? Never been. Not even when I lived in Nashville. Printer’s Alley watering holes? A distant dream for me. A sneaky beer in a plastic SOLO cup on my cousin’s deck is as close as I’ve been.

I’m dreading the “where should I eat?” question, since I always dine at the Kinfolk Kitchen. I highly recommend it. You can always get a table, there are convenient locations all over the greater Nashville area, food’s good (amazing at some branches), company’s great, but sometimes you have to load the dishwasher.

(Hey Nashville readers, who would like to give me tips on where to eat and what to see so I can look smart?)

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Out and about last night, I met a couple of recent graduates doing the European backpacking thing.

One of them was on his way to Amsterdam, so I dispensed my usual piece of advice to prospective travellers to the Netherlands:

Don’t eat the fish soup.

(When I previously dispensed this advice to a friend of VolBro’s, he replied “So your only warning about visiting Amsterdam, a town of whores and drugs, is not to eat the fish soup?” OK, here’s more advice, don’t eat them either.)

Really – don’t eat the fish soup. I know this first hand, well second hand, since it was the Vol-in-Law who ate it. And it resulted in a catastrophic case of food poisoning. The ViL and I had a quiet lunch in Amsterdam. I had a bunch of fried stuff and felt guilty when he ordered the healthy fish soup. He wasn’t feeling too good later on that afternoon when we went to the Van Gogh museum. But we were in a group, and I wanted to see the pretty pictures, and anyway the Vol-in-Law being a Brit is normally pallorous. Who knew it was serious?

On our flight out that night back to London he started feeling really bad. He got up to use the facilities and returned to our seat about a half hour later sweating and shaking. Turns out he passed out in the bathroom. (He asked me why I hadn’t been worried over his long absence, and I had to admit that I was so engrossed in my book on internal controls and corporate governance that I didn’t notice.) Not only did he pass out in the bathroom, but he passed out mid-upchuck with his trousers around his ankles. When he came to, he discovered there was vomit all over the inside of his pants. Nothing for it, but to hitch up the britches – you can’t exactly wander pants-less on an aircraft. We got home with no further incidents, but I did have to take him to the emergency room a few days later when he came out in a horrible rash and started blathering incoherently due to an amazingly high temperature. At that point, I was seriously worried.

So when I say, don’t eat the fish soup in Amsterdam…

more Danish cartoon controversy

Fellow American blogger in London, Anglofille has some interesting views and news on the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy. The Liberal, a London magazine, apparently published at least one cartoon on their website. Warned by the Metropolitan Police that they couldn’t protect their safety, the magazine chickened out and put a square block with word censored over it – or should it be “self-censored”? This morning I couldn’t click through to the Liberal site (www.theliberal.co.uk) at all. Go check out all of what she has to say on that.

Also read her interesting commentary on who’s talking about this issue. She says:

From where I sit, it appears that the right-wing has hijacked this story in the American media. Perhaps I am wrong, and I hope I am. But I would not be surprised if liberal writers and thinkers in the States avoid taking on this story because they’re afraid to be lumped in with the right-wing. I think that many liberals are terrified to do anything that may be deemed politically incorrect.

Ouch. We don’t have to go on about it (like I’ve done), but either we value the principles of a liberal democracy or we don’t. These things are free press, free speech, freedom from unwarranted intrusion from Government.

I’ve noticed that some right-wing bloggers in Tennessee have been disappointed with the reaction from the US State Department and if they cared, the UK Foreign Office, (if you don’t care, it was the same mealy mouthed “sensitivity” crap, “wise not to publish” crap).

It’s time to point out that the Bush Administration doesn’t give a toss about civil liberties, so their po-faced sensitivity crap is just more of the same. Look at what else they do: Cindy Sheehan (who by the way, I’m not an apologist for), invited to the State of the Union address by an elected Representative is dragged out of the Capitol and arrested for wearing a t-shirt. American citizens are spied on illegally- not because we have an over-rigorous legal framework on the matter, but because the administration is too lazy and too arrogant to get easy-peasy retrospective warrants, and they’re too full of their own zeal to realize what they’re doing to the Constitution.

Republicans who value the principles of our civil society need to stand up against this – it’s already clear the Bush Administration doesn’t listen to us “liberals” (the other half of the voting population, by the way).