April 22, 2013

The Food Police – Episode III

Food Police Episode III from Cross-Pollinate Travel on Vimeo.

Frozen food stakeout. In this newest episode, a sous chef comes to the Special Unit ready to confess her involvement in a major crime.

See earlier episodes of the Food Police here:

Episode I – the girls of the Special Unit hear from the new head of the Food Police that tourists are being ripped off in Rome.  They set out to gather evidence and show you what to look out for.

Episode II – In this episode, The Food Police – Special Unit, are in the medieval hill-town of Orvieto, famous for its black truffles, in pursuit of a dangerous perp who’s about to commit an unthinkable crime.

March 5, 2013

The Food Police – Episode II

Food Police Episode II from Cross-Pollinate Travel on Vimeo.

In this episode, The Food Police – Special Unit, are in the medieval hill-town of Orvieto, famous for its black truffles, in pursuit of a dangerous perp who’s about to commit an unthinkable crime.

February 25, 2013

The Slow Web Movement

“The Slow Movement advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life’s pace. It began with Carlo Petrini’s protest against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome in 1986 that sparked the creation of the Slow Food organization. Over time, this developed into a subculture in other areas, such as Cittaslow (Slow Cities), Slow living, Slow Travel, and Slow Design.” – from Wikipedia.

So what does “The Slow Web” mean?

For me, the key element to The Slow Movement is that we don’t strive for slow, simply because we prefer it and think it’s better.  The movement is about doing things in the amount of time it takes to do them right, and to avoid speeding them up, thinking that faster is always better, and sacrificing the quality as a result.

If you want to make a kickass Ribollita (bean soup), you have to soak the beans overnight, then boil them for at least a few hours, checking almost constantly that it’s not drying out, but that it’s reducing enough, while not sticking to the bottom of the pan.  Cutting any of these corners to save time will yield a disaster of a soup.  The time it takes is the time it takes and it happens to be a fairly slow process.

For us, The Slow Web means using technology and the internet to be speedy and efficient, but not to replace human interactions with automated algorithms and canned responses.  Instant gratification is nice, but getting things done right is certainly better.

Taking the time to do things right.  This means waiting a few hours for a response from a human instead of an instant response from a machine that’s guessing the human’s response.  It means waiting up to a day to get a confirmation letter but knowing that once confirmed, it’s been done by human beings who have connected with each other.  It means that when you need help, there are real people and not just a page of FAQs; and that those real people, to get things done right, might need to request some patience from you and take the time to make some phone calls to resolve your problems.

We think your travel plans deserve more than an automated system.  We can’t accept someone’s plans getting ruined based on a “glitch in the system”.  You deserve that someone take the time to read your questions and comments and notes and do what’s best for you.  We do this as fast and efficiently as possible, but believe in maintaining this inherently slower approach because we believe it’s better.

February 21, 2013

The Top 10 Complaints

by Steven Brenner

Travel is not a perfect science.  The higher and more unrealistic your expectations, the easier it is to be disappointed.  Sometimes disappointment arises because people expect things to work in the place they are visiting the same way things work back home.  In regards to accommodation, the particular idiosyncrasies one has to face changes from country to country, so it’s important to understand which of these are actual problems and reflect a badly run place and which are just part of local life.  If it’s the latter, the sooner you come to understand the nature of these quirks, the better you’ll be able to accept them and not really regard them as problems.  Compiled from my 14 years of experience, the following is a list of the most common complaints we’ve received which I hope to explain and clarify here and put more into context.

1.  Where’s the bacon?  Disappointment with the Italian breakfast.

In Italy, breakfast is nothing special.  It’s a culture that eats a large lunch, and until recently much of the work force would have a number of hours available in the middle of the day to go home, prepare a meal, eat it and then relax before returning to work.  Those days are mostly a thing of the past unless you have someone at home doing the cooking, but you’ll find many of the local bars and trattorias packed full of people who are generally there for an hour or two.  With so much focus put on a mid-day meal, much less is put on breakfast as opposed to British and North American culture where a long work day with little break has pushed a focus on eating a larger meal first thing in the morning.

Culturally, breakfast just isn’t part of the equation.  A typical Italian breakfast is an espresso.  Add to that an overly sugary pastry that will leave you starving in 20 minutes (Italian pastries are NOTHING compared to a flaky, buttery croissant or pain au chocolat in France).  B&Bs and hotels, having to comply with food safety laws, unless they have their own cafe – aren’t supposed to serve anything but pre-packaged food items.  That means you might get a little pastry, maybe some dry toasts (called fette biscottate), cereal, yoghurt and maybe fruit if you’re lucky.  But if you’re a B&B owner, and have to go pre-packaged, in a market that doesn’t really eat breakfast anyway, your options are pretty limited!  Basically, assume that your breakfast is not going to be anything to write home about and you might do better spending 2-3 euro on a cappuccino and pastry at a bar – of which there will always be one nearby.  Or, go self-catering and do breakfast your own way.

2.  Hot water / plumbing problems

There’s a number of things that can go wrong here:

First is the amount, or lack of, hot water. There are two kinds of water systems here – one that works on gas and produces hot water on demand, and others that use electric boilers.  The latter will have a fixed amount of water that, once consumed, will need time to reheat.  If you have an electric boiler and many people in your apartment or using the same bathroom, that means staggering out your showers a bit, and not standing there for 20 minutes taking an indulgent shower, no matter how good it feels.  The other thing to know is that these electric boilers often have on/off switches in the bathroom that can easily be switched off accidentally.  If you’ve turned it off, you’re sure to not have hot water until you’ve turned it back on and left it for about 30 minutes.  I would say that most of the complaints for “no hot water” we receive were caused by people inadvertently turning it off!  Normally, B&Bs will have a gas water heater which provides continuous hot water, but many self-catering apartments still have electric boilers. Keep this in mind if you’re a family of 8 staying in an apartment with 1 bathroom!

Second is the plumbing in general.  Even a semi-historic building, built in the 1800′s (not that old for Italy!) were built before internal plumbing was the norm, and most B&Bs and some apartments will have had bathrooms added in a part of the apartment that is often far from the septic column.  This means having pumps or raising the floor to add an incline so the waste can run “downstream”.  Add a bit of distance to the column and a daily dose of hair in the drain and you’re bound to have some stoppage.  The key thing to remember here is that buildings and apartments that weren’t “purpose built” will never be as perfect as those that are.  If you want perfect plumbing, you need to stay in a big hotel, that was designed and constructed specifically to be a hotel.  In the city center, those are generally 5 star hotels or they are chain hotels located outside the city center (where new construction is easier to do).  Staying somewhere historic has its charm for sure, but often the price you pay is that plumbing will not be perfect.

The smell:  in the bathrooms of old buildings, it can happen that when it rains, it smells.  Not much can be done about this.

Mold:  this is connected to the whole “bathroom-built-later” problem.  Old pipes pass through concrete walls and with multiple daily showers and not enough ventilation, you get mold.  This gets cleaned off with bleach and killed, and can leave stains that look like mildew, even though the actual live mold is gone.  No matter how often it’s cleaned, it will come back and can only be covered with a fresh paint job, maybe once every year or so.  The bright side is that it’s not that your owner doesn’t care, they’re just in a losing battle with nature and the elements.

3.  Language barriers

In a perfect world, everyone would speak the same language, but back to reality!  To me, travel has been an eye opener in learning to develop the skill of  communicating in a language that is not your own, and finding a way to express kindness and flexibility and all those traits that make individuals get along, no matter how much or how little they can understand the words being said.  Don’t expect people to speak your language and understand that what might seem to you like a “lack of interest” from an accommodation owner might be that they’re shy and embarrassed about speaking English and simply lack the vocabulary to express themselves well.  It’s easy to misinterpret people who don’t speak your language.  Maybe they aren’t rude – it could be a language barrier thing.

4.  Lack of useful information

A handful of superstar accommodation owners print out all sorts of information – about the surrounding area, the apartment, what to do in case of emergencies.  I love all this stuff.  But it’s a rarity.  Why is it so hard for owners to do this?  No idea – I even offer, every year or so, to help put one together in English, and they rarely take me up on the offer.  I guess it’s hard for someone who isn’t looking in from an outsider’s perspective to know what information is necessary and what is (to them) totally obvious.  TVs work differently from country to country, but only people who travel a lot realize this.  Same goes for washing machines and lighting stoves and circuit breakers and the water heater switches I wrote about earlier.  However, not all of the owners we work with are world travelers and it’s hard for them to anticipate what things will or won’t be easily understood.  Keep in mind though that if something doesn’t work, it could also be that you don’t know how to work it – even something as basic as a television.  If something doesn’t seem to work, ask the owner to show you – more often than not it just needs some explanation, and by asking them to show you it’ll open their eyes to the fact that it’s not universally understood.

5. It’s HOT

If you’re in southern Mediterranean Europe and it’s July or August, and you’re walking around under a blazing hot sun, you have to accept that it’s going to suck a bit and you’ll be a sweaty mess.  It’s not worth getting in more of a huff about – just get over it.  The US is kind of the gold standard in air conditioning, often to the point of absurdity.  In Europe you’ll find that air conditioners are turned off when you’re not in the room (pay an energy bill here and you’ll see pretty fast why this is so!); and you’ll find that even when on full blast, it’s not going to get sub-arctic like you might want it to.  We have less kilowatts of power in Europe, especially in old buildings, and due to high costs of electricity, we are forced to use A/C units that for efficiency produce less cold.  It’ll cool things down a bit, but the reality is that we don’t control the climate – we have to live with it.

6. No international TV channels

I know for some it’s nice to come back “home” after a long day and turn on the television and go brain dead for a while.  In some countries, like France, it’s cheap to get phone, internet and cable all in one go.  In other countries, like Italy, it’s a separate cost for cable, and even then there are a limited amount of International channels (they wouldn’t be part of the standard package).  As the saying goes, “when in Rome…” – in other words, you really shouldn’t expect to watch television in your language in another country.  Maybe you’ll get a few hours of BBC international news or something – which is hardly going to help you relax!  But remember, you’re on vacation – you’re away from home and ideally away from your home-habits too.  Have a conversation instead.  Drink a glass (or a bottle) of wine.  Play cards.  Read a book.  Go back out again, get a gelato or a drink and sit somewhere and people watch.  You aren’t missing anything.

8. Beds too soft / too hard

Sometimes we’ll get feedback from multiple people about the same place that reads like the Goldilocks story.  For person A the bed was simply too hard.  For person B, it was just too soft.  For person C is was just right.  I personally like very firm.  Others like soft.  It’s a personal thing, and I think when you travel you just have to go with the flow here.

9. Dodgy power

As I mentioned earlier, electricity costs are high in Europe and the available wattage is low.  Turn on the washing machine, a few lights, and the hairdryer and you’ll blow a fuse.  It’s just the way it is.  Many apartments don’t have dryers simply because they consume too much.  In the summer, with AC, this is something that can easily be a problem.  Just realize that almost all European cities were built before the automobile and don’t have huge lines of infrastructure in place to bring the amount of power that only recently is requested/demanded to apartments.  I love how the above picture shows the utility lines just under the street passing over ancient Roman ruins.  Kind of puts things into perspective!

10.  Noise

Rome wins the prize of being the loudest of the cities we work in, and it’s no doubt a cause for some very valid complaining.  Personally, I’m used to it, and I think it’s part of the overall package – the loud, crazy Romans honking their horns and yelling at each other, or the sound of elderly Venetians banging around in their kitchens all afternoon.  And if it’s not a quaint people-produced noise, it’s the trash collection at midnight or the recycling truck dumping glass bottles at 5am.  Or the construction/renovation that starts next door (or the next building over that has a shared wall) at 7 or 8am.  Or someone in the apartment above your bedroom who leaves early for work and walks around in high heels on their tiled-floors.  Really, the list is never-ending.  Good windows can help (but are very costly) and being somewhere that’s not either on a highly trafficked street or bus line or popular with drunk, reveling foreign students can also help.  But I would be doubtful of anyone in Rome with a guarantee that their place is absolutely quiet.  It’s the equivalent of selling the Brooklyn Bridge.

If you’re prepared to handle these top complaints with some understanding and patience, your bound to have a much better trip!

February 18, 2013

Vegetarian Florence

by Linda Martinez

Recently, Steve and I had the rare opportunity to spend a couple of kid-less days in Florence.  Besides some train stopovers, I hadn’t truly visited Florence since 1995 and Steve needed to get some cross-pollinate work done – visit with some owners and inspect some new properties.  With the help of our good friend, Toni, who offered to stay with our three young daughters, we were able to have a couple of precious days away on our own.

We stayed at a cross-pollinate property, Ponte Vecchio Suite apartment.  It’s a cute and well-maintained property just a 5 minute walk from the Ponte Vecchio bridge in the Oltrarno neighborhood.  I immediately took a liking to this area which is the artisan neighborhood of Florence.  Just around the corner from Ponte Vecchio Suite we found Caffe degli Artigiani, a bar on a small, quiet piazza that I immediately dubbed “our bar” and knew we would be going there every day for our morning cappuccino.

While the apartment has a kitchenette,  Steve was on holiday from cooking and I was on holiday from washing dishes, so we knew we would be eating out for the two days we were in Florence.  Our family is vegetarian, so traveling offers an opportunity to check out the veggie offerings in the place we are visiting.  One of the on-line sources I check when going to a new city is Happy Cow, an on-line guide (they also have an app) that lets you find vegetarian, vegan, vegetarian friendly restaurants and natural food shops in that town.

Our first food break was lunch and we headed to Steve’s favorite which he discovered on a past trip to Florence,  5 e Cinque, Piazza della Passera, 1 – coincidentally in the same piazza as my new favorite coffee bar.  5 e Cinque is an organic restaurant, mostly vegetarian, but they do have meat options.  Their food is inspired by traditional dishes and ingredients from the region of Liguria.  Steve and I usually try to get two different dishes so we can share.  I got the curried chickpea polpette (polpette usually, meat, but means anything ground and then formed into balls) served on basmati rice and Steve got a farro (spelt) dish made with radicchio and a walnut pesto.  As you can see from the photo, it was so delicious that we had nearly cleaned our plates before I considered taking a photo of them!  I highly recommend – definitely a restaurant to include on any vegetarian (or even non-vegetarian) tour of Florence.

After lunch, Steve had a cross-pollinate appointment and so I decided to take a walk around the city.  I ended up heading toward the synagogue of Florence which is a beautiful building with a gorgeous green copper dome.  On my way, I had an urge for a little something sweet and a hot drink and ended up at Caffelatte also known as La Latteria which uses organic milk and offers fair trade coffees and teas.  Nothing fancy here and the place seems a bit run down, but I was excited by the cakes and treats in the cabinet and so I ordered a slice of a type of pound cake and a caffe latte.  Unfortunately, I left unimpressed.  The cake fell in that realm of many Italian pastries – looks great to the eyes, but a different story when you actually put it in your mouth.  The cake was stale and hard, but at least the caffe latte was good.

Dinner that night was at BVeg which I found out about through Georgette Jupe’s great blog, Girl in Florence.   I had a dish with polenta with layers of pureed broccoli and Steve had a soup with chickpeas and algae.  Both were delicious.

The next day, our last day in Florence, we tried to have lunch at Cuculia, via dei Serragli, 18r, but after sitting down and ordering some water, were told that there was a problem and a delay in the kitchen with the stoves lighting and since Steve had an appointment and didn’t have loads of time for lunch – we decided to pay for the water and find another place to eat.  Lucky for us, just around the corner was Vivanda, via Santa Monaca, 7r.  We both had the lunch special which was a soup and pasta dish.  We started off with a mushroom, cannellini  and cabbage soup followed by a spaghetti alla chitarra pasta with a kale pesto.  We had some great organic wine to go with it.

Our final night we went to a non-vegetarian specific restaurant, il Santo Bevitore, via di Santo Spirito, 66 for dinner.  About a year ago, Steve had been on an excellent Context Travel tour which features the artisans in this area and the docent who led that tour had told him about il Santo Bevitore and had highly recommended it.  It was a Friday night and we hadn’t made a reservation, but we arrived around 7:30pm and with our assurances to the staff that we would not be occupying the table all night and could be out by 9pm, we managed to get a table.  We started with some vegetables preserved in oil – sundried tomatoes, onions, eggplant, etc.  We had a great meal – my ribollita was not really that soupy, but tasted great.  The wait staff were all very accommodating and pleasant – we got into a great conversation with a waiter who is originally from Togo who has lived in Florence for 20+ years.  The meal was our priciest in Florence though – we paid double what we had at the other restaurants, but it was a nice little splurge our last evening there.

The next day, our train back home didn’t leave until 3pm, so we decided to try one last veggie place for lunch.  We had been visiting with Moraq – originally from Chicago who has been living in Italy for the past 18 years.  She’s the owner of the homey Casa di Barbano property on cross-pollinate and having two children, she was able to make some great suggestions of where I could get colored wigs for carnevale for our daughters.

With that errand under our belt, we headed to Libreria Brac, via dei Vagellai, 18r for lunch.  There is no signage for this bookstore/artistic space/cafe so keep an eye out for the number and the books out front.  The cafe is in the back.  Because of the size and popularity of this space, reservations are a definite must.  We didn’t have them and had to assure once again that we would be out quickly as we had a train to catch.  We decided to go with a couple of the specials they had off the menu.  Steve had soy polpette with cannellini beans in a tomato sauce and I had a buckwheat pasta with cream of peas and kale sauce.  Both were absolutely excellent and very filling.  Steve went to the kitchen afterward for a chat with the chef to see how his dish was made.  The great thing about Italy is that for the most part there isn’t this sense of secrecy in the kitchen.  You won’t get a written down recipe, but if you ask the right questions, the chefs will generally tell you what they used and how it was made.  It’s up to you to deal with portions and how to put it together

We were pleasantly surprised by how well put together both in terms of interior design and menus the vegetarian restaurants were that we visited in Florence.  Each restaurant that we went to was always packed with people and had great atmospheres.  All in all we had some wonderful meals and no complaints.  While every Italian restaurant has vegetables available (contorni) or pasta dishes that are meat-less – eating at a specifically Italian vegetarian restaurant will provide an excellent opportunity for anyone  – vegetarians and non-veggies alike – to try interesting and creative dishes using the excellent produce that is available here in Italy.

For many more recommendations on where to eat and drink in Florence I highly recommend Elizabeth Minchilli‘s smartphone app Eat Florence.

Linda maintains her own blog for our hotel, The Beehive, at http://www.the-beehive.com/blog with practical and irreverent information, observations and musings on Rome.