To be honest, I have no idea if there will ever be anymore parts to this series, but I just wanted to leave the door open to it, since I have a lot of world yet to see. I mean, let’s face it, if you had a croissant in a Parisian cafe and then you return home to have whatever croissant might be available, you’ll most likely want to spit out this foul piece of un-croissant you’ve just attempted to eat. There are any number of reasons why foreign croissants suck as bad as they do. In Spain, it’s because they obviously hate the French and to spite them, they make croissants using pork fat instead of butter. Why they don’t just go the rest of the way and try to use olive oil to completely shit upon all that is holy about the croissant is beyond me, but they suck in Spain. It’s much the same in the US where, instead of pork fat, we use some mutated series of chemicals instead of real butter and end up with a very similar, Spanish-like derivation of the croissant. Blarg.

So, what follows is an extremely short list of where to find good croissants when you are not within French borders. I hope it somehow proves useful.

Kinshasa, Congo: Hands down, it’s Patisserie Nouvelle. That link is my previous article on them and while I doubt many sane folks will be hopping a jet anytime soon just to “kick it” in Kinshasa, they have fanatically good croissants as well as pain au chocolat in that little shop.

Catalonia, Spain: I’ve tried many a croissant in this region and come to the sordid conclusion that pork fat does not a good croissant make. They’re always dry and make me wonder as to why I just don’t eat bread instead of these croissants as it would be a lot less painful. The exception are the croissants that they serve at La Plaça in Madremanya. The chef there is a smart guy who says, “If you have a good, fresh orange juice and a good croissant, your breakfast is pretty much done.” The croissants are delectable and perfect, even better than some I’ve had in France. Chef Vicenç isn’t too forthcoming about where he gets said croissants, but they are indeed made in Spain and are unsurprisingly made with butter, not pork fat. Molt bons!

San Francisco, California, USA: The immediate choice by many would be one of the many Boulange shops, but it is not to be. Boulange is okay, but it does drift in to being rather bland, flat, and if you ask for a pain au chocolat, the staff have no idea what that is. Sure, they’re better than Costco croissants (as is huffing paint), but they sure ain’t better than Pâtisserie Philippe. Unsurprisingly, Phillipe is French, which goes a long way in ensuring that not only his croissants are the best in SF, but also his pain au chocolat and quiche. It’s not a huge surprise that he was originally a chef for Boulange, who have obviously ignored all that he did there. His location down on Townsend and 7th is really out of the way, yet the fact he sells out of everything by 14:00 shows that people don’t seem to mind and find him everyday.

That’s about it for this initial list. We’ll see if I have more to write on this someday. If I make it to Haiti or Tahiti, where I heard the bread is great, it will make me wonder if the croissants follow suit and show that heavy handed colonizing overloads aren’t all that bad; at least in croissant-based endeavors.

As a note to self, I need to get around to trying Pastisseria Ochiai at c/urgell 110.

DR Congo is in the news a lot lately. Rebel General Laurent Nkunda has been firing up the warfare again in the eastern part of the country, a bit to the north of where I visited a few months ago. This history behind all of this is complex. I thinks it’s about as complex as the Yugoslavian wars, except with a helluva lot more acronyms and long names to remember. So, it’s probably worth clearing up a few things. First, if you hear ‘Congo’ in the news, it is always DRC. The other Congo is much smaller, to the north of the big one, was a French colonial, and has Brazzaville as a capital, not Kinshasa. It has problems as well, but nothing to the scale of big Congo, which was also the Belgian one by the way.

With that out of the way, it’s probably best to kick out a few links that do a much better job of explaining things than I could ever hope to. I think that my Yugoslavia explanation is pretty tight at the moment, but Congo is just too twisted up for me to break down succinctly and I feel like I’d be doing a massive disservice to the millions of people who have died in this devolving twistedness. If you do want something that’s a quicker read though, take a look at this BBC article. It doesn’t cover as much history as needed, but it gives a decent rundown for someone who wants to be a little more knowledgeable, but not annoyingly so.

For everyone who wants to really bug the crap out of people with details at your next soiree, yet offer a solid alternative to US political discussions, I turn to Wronging Rights. Their shit is in depth and I’m told they hold their liquor like coal miners. They also happen to be that rare example of the “good lawyer” working in human rights. So if you really want to dig in to Congolisciousness read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. They infuse a good deal of sarcasm in there that makes the reading not just an endless rant of dates and biznak. Party, party!

First off, any photographer, writer, musician, artist, or pizza delivery guy that goes by one name like Rankin does, is bound to be an ass and a bit out of touch with the “real” world. By “real” world, I mean the one in which people like you and I watch things called, “Real World” because our lives are so inordinately mundane. Now, these one named people love to do things to show that they do in fact “get it” and obviously Rankin has done such an event or I wouldn’t be bothering to write about him.

Twiddling his thumbs in what I’m sure is a sunny, West End breakfast nook one day, Rankin apparently got the idea to go to DR Congo and photograph people living in Mugunga refugee camp. You can take a look at the photos. They’re good photos as would be expected from a high end fashion photographer. The thought behind them was to shoot the subjects in a high fashion manner so that people could better relate to them. This is of course where the controversy started because this is asinine. They’re human beings. We can relate to them no matter what. But such is the generally inept approach toward Africa. If you feel like reading more commentary, then take a look at: Uganda Scarlett Lion, Wronging Rights, and to a lesser extent Chis Blattman. These are all excellent blogs by the way, which are worth reading on a regular basis unless of course you don’t like sarcasm, in which case, what the hell are you doing reading my blog?

In my mind, a better approach would have been for Rankin to “arm” locals in the area with cameras and help them to shoot what they see from their vantage. While the photos wouldn’t be artistic at first, they would be honest. Rankin’s work is not honest. It’s a fabrication and when something is fabricated through a camera, I can’t stand it. It’s one of the few mediums we have that allows us a window on to another time or place that we don’t immediately have access to. This is the point of it; all else is secondary. If we’re to “understand the plight” of the people living in the Kivus, then we really need to actually see people living in region and know who they are. As it is, this seems like an anthropological documentation of a foreign species. It fails on all levels except getting Rankin press and making him feel like he did some good by being there for two weeks.

Sometime back, when preparing for my maiden voyage to DR Congo, I wrote about the Bradt Congo guidebook. It has the distinction of being the only recently-printed guidebook on Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as the Republic of Congo. It’s also the only one in English that is current, being that Lonely Planet’s ‘Zaire’ guide is a bit out of date. Now that I am back from gallivanting around DR Congo, I can give the book its due.

The author, Sean Rorison has done a fine job of covering a massive area with poor transportation and next to no infrastructure. As I mentioned in the previous article, he doesn’t mess around when talking about the situation there. He goes in to great detail of all the restaurants, hotels, and history really well. The background provided in the book is a great summation of the history and current situation of DR Congo that prepares the traveler for what they are about to experience once setting foot in the country.

Of course, DR Congo it’s not for the easygoing traveler who thinks that Prague is really crazy to visit because it’s “scary” Eastern Europe. Unlike a book on say, Hawaii, Rorison doesn’t work to sell the reader the destination but actually prepare them for the trip. In essence, it does what a lot of guidebooks are missing the point of doing these days (I’m looking at you, Fodors).
It lays out pretty much everything that’s touristic to see in any of the towns, which is not that much. It also gets in to the practical aspects of getting around the country, which are not easy. This is one point that might need to be developed more in a future edition (if there is one) is that one of the only airlines that was safe to fly on, Hewa Bora, has not really ever been that safe to fly on and got a whole lot less safe in April and should not be flown on if one enjoys living.

Other basics are covered well, including hospitals (try not to go), women travelers (not advised to go solo), embassies (register with yours there), and Article 15 (a remnant of Mobutu times that is an unstated law essentially allowing mass corruption). That being said, there are a few things that could be done to spruce the book up a bit. One thing is to go in to better detail on budgeting. While costs are always changing (getting more expensive), I can’t see how you can survive in a place like Kinshasa on $40 a day. A hotel that’s at a high enough level to avoid getting scabies is a minimum of $70 a night. Food can be cheap, but one must be willing to adventure a little.

There really needs to be a bigger section on the N’Djili Airport in Kinshasa. That’s a wacky place that’s not the easiest thing to navigate. While getting better, it’s still not like any typical concept of an airport that most anyone from the US or Europe will be used to. Additionally, just getting to and from it is an ordeal that isn’t given enough print in the book. The same should be said of the airport in Bukavu, although to lesser degrees.

Another thing that would really help is to lay out itineraries in the various areas. Congo isn’t like European destinations wherein spare time can be filled by just wandering the city. It takes a long time to get anywhere and do anything there, so you really need to be pretty anal retentive when making plans, unless of course you just want to sit around in cafes watching the hustle and bustle, which will inevitably happen even if you don’t intentionally plan it.

Obviously, one can’t cover everything and it’s good to see that Rorison mentioned Patisserie Nouvelle in Kinshasa, but he missed the restaurants of Surcouf and Chantilly which are great spots. And while the coverage of Uvira is far too short, he does a good job with Bukavu and an even better job with Goma, as well as an entire section just on the Ruwenzori Park. I really enjoyed the sidebar on, “Where t-shirts go to die”, which is a good read and very true if you’re ever curious as to where your donated clothing ends up in the world.

The one gleaming thing that is nearly not covered at all are the expats. I assume that this must be the author’s and the editor’s decision, as it’s an aspect of DR Congo that is unavoidable. The book doesn’t really get in to how the UN (as well as other NGO’s) blanket the country and you will most definitely run in to expats as there are literally thousands of them in the country. I can understand that when writing a guidebook to a country that you want to talk more about the country than those who outsiders to it, but unlike expats in Spain, those in Congo are really part of the whole writhing mess that is Congo. They can also be a good source for local information for first timers to the country as well.

But in closing, despite my small nitpicks, this is a great guide to the Congos. Rorison and Bradt could have easily have done a half-assed job since they’re heading in to a region that has next to no competition, but in the end, they produced a very worthy guide that is a gleaming example of what Bradt does best in that they cover regions that are undiscovered.

Update: On Bradt’s website, I noticed that there is a section for author updates for out of date information, which is fantastic. For instance, the Serbia author has put in a good deal of data. I hope that Rorison can do this as well when he has the time.

Update 2:Well, I’ve just heard back from the author and he has clarified a few things for me. His daily cost estimates are indeed accurate based on the lowest, subsistence travel possible and one can indeed stay for $9 a night in Kinshasa if one is willing to sleep in the filthiest room ever of a “hotel” that is part of a bar. He also said that he did indeed leave out the expats intentionally as they form a sort of a parallel existence to that of actual Congo, which I have seen to be very, very true as based on my own observations.

The large, glossy-format printers that we have in the US don’t exist in DR Congo. This makes it very difficult to create large advertisements. Despite this, you see big bulletins for products everywhere. The secret to these are the signs painters; groups of very talented artists who eek out a living painting signs around the country.

The quality of these guys work is amazing. Not only do they have crap paint and brushes to work with, but they are also doing this outside in the sun and yet are duplicating the original products so well that you don’t even realize that a whole advertisement was painted by hand. Once you do realize this, the scope of the work that is done is mind blowing.

From toothpaste to beer to ads for Nokia, these guys do it all. If someone were daring enough, a documentary about this group would be fascinating. As it was, I just managed to get a few pictures of them at work and the countless billboards that are their work around town. One road in particular, which was supposed to be the road for heavy trucks, but now everyone uses, has a continuous wall between it and the railroad tracks. This wall rarely has any empty space on it as sign painters have plastered it with advertisements. You can see an example of a guy at work below.

This is just one of those small things that a person can appreciate in a country as broken as DR Congo. Artists are everywhere and somehow throughout history they always find some niche that allows them to survive.