Any visitor to Zagreb will know the the main cathedral as it towers over all of the city. What most will know is that the eastern tower has been under renovation for years. I have a photo of scaffolding back in 2004 and I suspect that it was happening long before then. With my most recent visit, I was curious to see if the work was still being done. As it turns out, it’s not. They’ve now moved on the the western tower that you see in the photo above on the right. Seems that this church will be forever under construction.

Beyond seeing it sans-crane, my real goal some day is to actually go up in one of those towers for the view. I have no idea how you go about this and asking the priest during mass really pissed him off for some reason. I assume it was the camera, shorts, and bag of pornography I’d just picked up. Probably shouldn’t have taken those in to a church now that I think about it.

When in southeastern Europe, I hit the meat and hit it hard. Of course that’s a bit of a misnomer as I generally go apeshit about the meat in all of southern Europe where the pig is a saintly animal, worshiped nearly daily via ingestion. But it’s in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and pretty much everywhere that a Slavic language is spoken in this region where something magical happens to dead animals when once cooked in that they glow.

My most recent trip was really for the wines at the Zagreb Wine Gourmet Weekend, but via many meals, I took in a worthy slew of carnage. A cousin in Slovenia took me to a Bosnian joint in Ljubljana that was excellent for their ćevapčići which I have loved for years. Friends took me to another meat-centric venue called, Bistro Mitnica in the Črnomerec neighborhood of Zagreb. It was also excellent, but quite different in that it was Serbian style with more pork and this hearty stew that was good and proclaimed to be “spicy” although I found it to be just a bit peppy. The kajmak was some of the best I’ve ever had though.

Then, one day on my own, I came across a meat and grill joint in Zagreb at the corner of Vlaška ulica and Trg Josipa Langa, just across from a staircase that went up the side of a hill. It’s a random spot across the street from a tram stop. The ćevapčići was fully beef, which is usually a no-no in my book, but damn if they weren’t delicious. The name of the place was something like B&G and the owner was this fellow who had lived for 25 years in Chicago and spoke English. Had I known about it earlier, I probably would have eaten there more often. It’s a little known fact that while in the US, bus stations and other points of embarkation typically have terrible food, in the Balkans they hold local gems. For instance, the kebab joint across the street from Ljubljana’s main train station or the restaurant two block up from Zagreb’s main train station that sits on Strossmayerov Trg where I had a kick ass dish of cheese štrukli.

Still, for the win, the best meat dishes (and especially ćevapčići and burek) are to be found in Sarajevo. But, if you look around, you can find a tasty hunk of dead flesh most anywhere. Just watch out for the islands though. The worst ćevapčići I ever had were in Stari Grad on Hvar, served with a very weak ajvar. Yes, not all grilled meats are created equal.

On recent trips to Zagreb and Ljubljana (admittedly nominally “Balkan”), it was thrilling and no end of encouraging to see that since my last visit several years ago, both cities have gotten massively more bike friendly. This is a trend happening in many large cities around the world (yes, even the US), but it’s helped a great deal in these two towns due to a) owning a car being insanely expensive b) buying gas for said car if it’s owned being even more expensive and c) parking for expensive car with expensive gas being non-existent. But, that’s only part of it.

Much like I had previously seen in Varaždin, people are more encouraged to use a bicycle when the distances needing to be traversed are relatively flat. Zagreb does this well in the lower town, although the upper requires legs honed in San Francisco. Ljubljana is pretty much all flat unless you feel the need to bike up to the castle in some Monty Python-esque attack on the fortification. With requisite flatness, if you do simple things like tossing up bike lanes all over the place, it encourages people to bike even more. It gives the illusion, if not the actually fact that there is a dedicated space for bicycles on the road and they don’t have to battle with cars… as much.

The devil is indeed in the details with these sorts of things and one big failing of Zagreb is that while they’ve made it a great deal easier to get around town on a bike, they’ve forgotten that once you get somewhere, you sorta need a place to park it. As such, people come up with the whackiest places to chain up their bikes. The Slovenians in Ljubljana have it much easier though as the powers that be saw fit to toss up bike racks all over the town center. They also have a bike sharing system like Vélib’ and Barcelona’s Bicing. Needless to say, the bike policies of Ljubljana are full 21st century, while Zagreb is somewhere back in the early 1990′s, much like their turbo folk pop.

If there’s one thing that Catalans love more than planning independence from Spain for 2014, bitching about their own “autonomous region” government, checking to make sure they’ve been billed properly, and hunting for mushrooms, then it’s hunting for wild asparagus or “espàrrecs de marge”.

Up to a week after a rainstorm in the Spring, you will see people out, eyes to the ground and usually a brace of skinny asparagus spears in one hand. The more well-prepared put them in a basket, or at the very least, a cone of newspaper. For anyone who sees these for the first time, they might ask, “Why are wild asparagus so skinny?” It’s not that they’re skinny, but that they get picked prior to growing to the 1cm diameter we’re used to in the stores. Fatter spears can be found, but they are most assuredly rare.

The key to finding wild asparagus is that they tend to like areas out of the direct sun, with a bit of an inclination to them, and preferably forested. Given that they’ll generally look like a small twig, they’re easy to miss and one needs to keep a sharp eye.

As to the flavor? Naturally, they’re more rich than what you find in a supermarket–isn’t everything? That, the price of free, and the general tradition keeps Catalans of all walks of life out, with their eyes to the ground in March and April, hunting for these wayward spears.

The last part of that was in respect to a running joke amongst bar owner friends that the NIMBYs in San Francisco were convinced that they harbored hookers in their establishments. The first part of that statement was in regard to two events that happened on the same night, nearly simultaneously.

It was a night at la Cantina where they were celebrating the Chilean drink, Pisco. Newfound Pisco Sour fan and I headed down there to partake of the cocktail happenings. Unfortunately, we realized that upon arrival, most of the Financial District had as well. That’s not actually the whole truth though as they were seemingly unaware of the festivities and were more interested in the general boozing, brah.

Tossed on top of this heap of white collar on blue shirt, striped shirt on jeans, and hoodie over French cut shirts was a bartender that I refer to as Tom Booz. Maybe you’ve seen him. He’s not terribly tall, wears a homohawk that’s three years out of fashion (although he may have switched to a Beiber blow at this late date), and he makes drinks like he’s masturbating to stop the world from coming to an end mixed with a delightful essence of Tom Cruise in Cocktail.

I made the mistake of ordering a Pisco Sour from him, which he proceeded to toss in a shaker and pummel in the air. I’m not sure if it was the shaking or the hardcore, pornstar grimace on his face, but I swear that he exuded enough kinetic energy from his efforts that the lights in the bar shone just a bit brighter while he delved in to the depths of his obviously astute mixology.

While Tom was busy shaking his money maker, out of the corner of my eye, one of the stripe-shirted ones was making the moves on a girl. He was fat in that stock trader kind of fat that makes you think when he’s not buying low and selling high, he’s obviously drinking beer. Tonight, he was drinking cocktails as you don’t go to la Cantina for beer.

While one of his meaty paws was firmly grasping a low ball glass of dubious alcoholic proportions, the other was casually, and oh-so-slyly smoothing its way down the back of some Chinese-American girl, deftly dressed in corresponding Financial District attire; the keyring fob to a BMW visibly peeking out of her purse.

Stripe-shirted smooth guy caught me watching his slick, articulate moves down the girl’s back and we immediately had a quick conversation of glances.

“Yeah… is what I’m doing doing wrong? I mean, I’m buying her drinks in the hopes to screw her. Is that wrong?”

“Ultimately, perhaps not, as this is human nature. But, she’s not that hot.”

“I know…”

“And kinda chunky.”

“I know… but she’s Asian and that means hot in San Francisco. I mean, if my friends catch me banging her, they won’t laugh at me like they would if she were the same 6 [5] in the form of a white girl.”

“Your candor is admirable. No, I still don’t approve, but please proceed as I’d like to see where this goes and write about it on my very popular blog.”

It was at this point that Tom had finished my drink and delivered it with what equated to a Bronze Medal dismount from the pommel horse. I paid and gave him a dollar tip which was mostly out of pity for his haircut than feeling a need to leave a tip on a $12 cocktail by Union Square.

Of course, upon first sip, I was horribly disappointed, like when John Kerry became the Democratic nominee in 2004. I tried another sip. I tried to suck it all down and get every cent I paid for this squalid cocktail down in to my liver for future processing but it wouldn’t work. It was crap.

I placed the half-drank Pisco Sour on the bar. My Pisco Punch drinking companion who was faring as well as I was did the same and we walked out, never to return and only be reminded of it when in polite company and it became necessary to emphasize la Cantina for what it is: turd.

Despite my traveling to far-off lands, I’ve rarely had a case of food poisoning on the road. Actually, I’ve only had one that comes to mind after eating at the Alliance Française in Abengourou, Ivory Coast. I was the unlucky victim to having eaten what were otherwise delicious meatballs the day after a power cut from which their freezer hadn’t restarted. So it goes. I was much happier having that very fast heave-fest that the day or two my more steel-stomached ally experienced in eating the Swedish meatballs at the Ikea in Sacramento, California.

And that’s really the thing of it. All of my episodes with a meal hell-bent on making me one with the “thunder bucket” were in the “civilized” world. I think I’ve been taken down at least four times in San Francisco alone. I attribute some of this to having what is probably a stomach made of tissue paper from having drank horrid irrigation water as child–nobody mentioned to my city folk parents that what came out of the tap was not potable when they bought the farm. But, it’s also the fact that people are dirty (like dudes with a half meter beard making my food in San Francisco) and the more advanced a society is, the more it stores its foods, and the less fresh items are eaten. Food storage, while in days of yore had its merits, is now rancid.

Take for example, eggs. It takes some time to get used to them not being refrigerated in Europe. But, in the end you think, “Fuck it, it’s getting cooked/boiled/poached, so who cares?” The problem arises though when you mistakenly buy hardboiled eggs in the supermarket. Why on earth would anyone buy hardboiled eggs? To put it succinctly, I don’t fucking know unless there is a huge degree of foreigners who don’t understand that they’re hardboiled and buy them. That and people could just be lazy as all hell.

My foray in to Spanish hardboiled eggs promptly ended with a worship of the porcelain Buddha, throughout the night, without my stomach needing any call to prayer to show bare my neck to the almighty lord of gastroenteritis. Needless to say, I won’t be making that mistake again and I’m still, as of now, mystified as to why these are even being sold. Sure, I’ve bought them as a snack before, like in Ghana where street vendors have them, but they’re fresh there. Actually, all over Africa they have hardboiled eggs to buy and many a loved one and friend have basically lived off them without issue. They haven’t been sitting on a shelf all day and I’ve never had a problem buying those hardboiled eggs, just those in the fine establishment of Mercadona.

On that note, I think it’s time to go cook up the wild asparagus I just picked for lunch and make an omelet with some fresh, farm eggs.

The photo above is one in a series about the Kinshasa Symphony by Vincent Boist

So, you’re living in San Francisco. Congratulations! I don’t anymore, but when I did I was one of the writers for The Tender, the Tenderloin’s #1 News Source™. It was both rewarding and frustrating as hell at the same time. I didn’t get paid to write it but it did become popular and was a worthwhile experience. I’d suggest that you write your own local blog, but if you do, there are things to take in to consideration.

First, you need to focus. I don’t mean just geographically, but also topically. Humor is more popular with San Franciscans that serious. Also, hedonism. Writing about food and drink will always get eyeballs. Writing about the Mission will get you eyeballs as the Mission loves talking about the Mission, but it’s a crowded room at this point. Also, toss in a random article about neighborhoods and microhoods. San Franciscans prematurely ejaculate when they get the chance to debate hood politics.

But, even if you can write at the level of a Nobel laureate, if you don’t get links from other sites, no one is probably going to see it. This is of course a double edged sword as in the beginning it will be great but then you’ll realize that how these sites stay in business is to scrape your content and if you have enough of your own momentum and reader base, it will get annoying as you won’t be getting paid (see below).

The Linkers

SFist gets oodles of traffic and they do link roundups daily. The key is to either have an article that is odd (“Naked yoga guy punched in nuts by Willie Brown!”) or a scoop that is immediately topical which will most likely have something to do with SF city government or something about gay life (“Olague bitch slaps Kim at BoS meeting. Weiner: I like to watch”). Of course, until you get on their radar (ie they follow your feed) you’ll need to nudge them with a tip about the article. Keep in mind that Brock, Andrew, Leanne, and Jay are nudged all the time and so you might get ignored in the beginning. Don’t take it personally, just keep at it in a friendly manner.

Laughing Squid also has pornstar amounts of traffic loads. Probably a bit harder to get up on there as they don’t do roundups like SFist, but if you breach their perimeter spam tip defense and get a listing, the masses will arrive. As to the best content to toss at them, again, unique SF things, similar to what you’d send to SFist, although if it’s a bit artsy and creative in nature, they will probably like it better.

SFgate gets no end of traffic, but they will never link off to anything you write. Hell, they can barely even afford to spellcheck articles before they go up. Your best bet there is to create an account or two to comment with and leave a link to your articles in the comments section when they’re related. They have really weird policies though and might delete the link, but it’s fucking scary how much traffic it will toss your way. Scarier still is that they somehow stay in business. One spot that will get your decent traffic though is Inside Scoop if what you have is food-related and my interactions with Paolo were always positive.

Eater SF is where you want your food and drink links to appear. Carolyn is insanely hungry for links and content scraping so if it’s the least bit new, she’ll put it up in a round up or even make a small “article” out of it. One horribly annoying thing is that you’ll always see your content phrased in a form like “As Eater has been following…” or “Based on tips to Eater” in order for them to somewhat “own” your content. Again, in the beginning traffic from Eater can be helpful, but as time goes on, it’s more of a burden than anything else.

Curbed SF is similar to Eater in style and if you write anything related to property news (“Old Victorian burns down”, “Hippie crack den to be torn down for mixed use apartment building”) you can send it there. Curbed has a similar model as Eater as they’re both part of the same company. The downside with Curbed is that it’s very easy for the editor Sally to blacklist you. You’ll never know why and honestly, once you’ve got your own consistent reader base, it’s a blessing in disguise.

Grub Street San Francisco is similar to Eater. You won’t get as many clickthrus though which is unfortunate as I quite like Grub Street. If you email the editor Jay (yeah, same Jay as at SFist) about a new article, he’s a pretty fair dude in how he puts stuff up and cites the source. Again, it’s gotta be food and drink related.

Muni Diaries are the good people of Eugenia and Jeff. If you have an article that’s Muni-related, send them a tip. They’ll likely post it and without any bullshit or drama.

Uptown Almanac is there for when you have something really offbeat. Kevin is a funny dude and he likes funny, rough shit. If you send him a tip about a new ice cream pop up in Hayes Valley, he will probably tell you to fuck off, as would I. Or, you might luck out and he’ll write an article calling you a dumbass.

SF Weekly has a couple of thriving blog sections. Send them tips about your articles and you’ll probably get picked up in round ups, especially for Foodie.

Leave no trace

The sites above are all decent to get links. Not decent are ones like 7×7 which seems to be completely run by blonde intern girls from the Marina. How that piece of shit “publication” is still around blows my mind. Try and stay off their radar as at best, they will see one of your articles, maybe like it, and then write up their own article without citing you as the original source. That’s the way they roll. Also sucky are the likes of San Francisco magazine, SF Appeal (“It’s not a blog, it’s a news source!”), and Tablehopper. Don’t bother with them as they’ve got their own deal going on which won’t help you in the least.

Connectshuns

You can find other like-minded SF blogger folks at Huffington Posts’s list but that’s a little of out date. Kevin at Uptown Almanac tries to round up all the local bloggers for a super secret, super sexy happy hour every now and again, so contact him and let him know how much oral sex you’d love to give him to be invited. He might let you in.

Also, make sure to start up a Twitter account and Facebook page for your blog for branding purposes as well as to publicly deride anyone who rips off your articles or calls you an asshole. After all, everyone knows there’s nothing better than to witness a flame war on Twitter…

Money, money, money

You will not be making any; money that is. No matter how well you write, how fresh your content, and how sexy you might be, you will not make any money from a local blog in San Francisco. You pretty much do it for your own enjoyment, which is something that has its ups and downs.

If you want, from the start put up some Google AdSense on your site in a non-annoying manner. That will probably rake in $15 a year. Don’t bother with sponsored articles as these will be met with scorn and people thinking you’ve sold out despite the fact you don’t get paid to blog. Also, trying to work with local businesses to advertise on your local blog is a lost cause. They’re much happier paying Chronicle ad rates with no way to measure success.

In truth, if you want to look at it this way, it can be something of a resume piece. I got a few paid articles from putting in time at The Tender. The other main writer and one that was short term also got some paid work. But, from the blog directly, you won’t earn a damned thing, so go in to it realizing that and maintain that attitude as it will help when your first “who the fuck to you think you are?” comment from a troll comes rolling in.

Otherwise, good luck. San Francisco needs a new batch of bloggers as a lot of us from the “old guard” have moved on and if people have to depend on “traditional media” for news in that town, then things are gonna get pretty unfresh pretty quick.

It infuriates me to the point of exhaustion and pure frustration when campaigns such the one that Invisible Children is running develop legs and become popular. In this instance, they’ve put up a 27 minute video about the evils of Joseph Kony. If the name isn’t familiar, he’s a piece of crap from Uganda who has been using child soldiers to fight wars and has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on a slew of serious war crimes.

Of course none of that matters really because a group of whiteys from the US decided to make a little film to raise awareness about Joseph Kony. I’ve watched said film and it’s painful. It’s like a “Have you seen this warlord?” campaign on a milk carton in case you happen to spot him in the parking lot while picking up that weeks groceries. “Oh, but they’re just trying to do good in the world.” Not really. They feel guilt for being white, privileged to some degree, and being from the US and thus needing to create a non-profit that pretty much just “raises awareness” and does little else. There is no state building mechanism in what they do and if there were at some point, the citizens of whatever state they were working to fix should move to a neighboring one as these guys are typical of Whites in Shining Armor. I can’t even get in to all the details of this lest I write through the night. But, it’s simple: white people in the US donate to make themselves feel better. They don’t give a damn about the recipients as long as they get a newsletter with smiling dark-skinned children that shows their money “at work”.

Why would I say this about Invisible Children? Watch the video. Pay attention to how the narrator has made himself and family the real focus of the video from the beginning. Pay attention to how the narrator interacts with the Africans. He always talks down to them as if they were children, no matter their age. Pay attention to key phrases such as “something in my heart told me”. All of this comes up time and again when you’re dealing with white people from the US and their approach to Africa. There is no sense of equality, only of being a savior.

What gives me the right to criticize them, after all, they’re “doing something”, right? My right to criticize is the same as their right to make this in the first place. But, people need to understand that just “doing something” is the worst thing you can possibly do. Would you “just build a skyscraper”? Would you “just perform open heart surgery”? Obviously not, so why on earth are Americans “just doing something” when it comes to Africa? We have no business doing this. Our business should be first in foremost to fix both our local and national problems. For instance, the narrator is shocked to see all these homeless children in Uganda. Um, they’re in the US too. We’ve some really serious problems.

All of this, to use the skyscraper analogy is like deciding to build a 50 story building. One day, you run down to a random building site you know nothing about. You dump money there. You work on it over a three day weekend, or even a summer, then run off. A year later, you’re shocked that it never got finished. It’s a horrible approach to everything charity-related and the fact that the vast majority of people can’t see this makes me numb.

Absolutely no problem that faces the world today has an immediate fix. The work is long term, hard, and a hell of a lot more invested than retweeting a YouTube link.

Rarely do I get excited about cleaning products, but that was before I met the bayeta. This thing is best described as all that’s awesome in sponge crossed with all that’s awesome in a paper towel minus all that sucks in a regular towel. They’re of a sponge material, but only maybe half a centimeter thick at most.

When I first encountered them, I didn’t that much of them. Of course that’s when I started using them. They wipe up everything. They can have it all get squeezed out and then wipe up some more. That one above is above three months old and used daily.

Sadly, they’re getting harder to find in Spain. At only 1€ or so for a three pack, they would last forever and I guess that’s the problem in that people weren’t buying enough of them. Now, they’re trying to get people to switch over to this newer cloth type thing. And by switch, I mean, they’re trying to not sell the bayeta anymore.

At first, this photo of a stop by Obama in San Francisco’s Chinatown didn’t seem like too much to me. Then, I looked at it closer and realized that I had missed a serious what the fuck moment. Look at that dude in the window just above the frowning black-suited Secret Service guy’s shoulder. What’s up with him? Did he see Obama on a Jumbotron or something? I mean, the man is right there, in front of him, giving Chinese fertility handshakes (trust me, they’re much better than the milkshakes) to any and all. San Franciscans are damned weird.