Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

La Nova Forquilla in Andorra

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Posted 08 Mar 2010 — by admin
Category Food, Reviews, Travel

La Nova Forquilla (“The New Fork” in Catalan) is an unassuming restaurant in Andorra La Vella. The owners did the place in a modern, monochromatic black and white style with pop art prints on the wall. And seriously, the food there was some of the best I have ever had! Let’s just put it this way — I was in Andorra for the weekend with some friends, and after going there for lunch on Saturday, we returned for dinner and again for lunch on Sunday before heading home. Forget snowboarding, people! I would go to Andorra again just for the food.

The restaurant has a small menu, only serving a set 3-course lunch and 5-course dinner with about three options for each course. I suspect they come up with what to serve based on which ingredients are available, so everything was fantastically fresh.

I couldn’t decide between the soup and the salad, so I got the salad and came back for the soup. They were both fantastic. I figured I would dip bread into the soup but I didn’t realize I would also end up using bread to mop up the rest of my salad dressing. That’s seriously how yummy everything was.

All the food arrived promptly, which is one of the benefits of having a set menu. Though I have to say they were willing to be very flexible with the menu. There was one course for which two options contained shellfish and the third was pork. I’m allergic to the former, and I don’t eat the latter. But they were happy to make a substitution for me, with absolutely no fuss at all.

My steak was cooked to perfection. I tried to eat slowly and savour every bite, but between the deliciousness and my hunger, I wolfed everything down in short order.

There was no salt at the table, neither was there any pepper. And no condiments were required. The food was just so flavourful. When our server came by, I said, “The food is…” and she cut me off. “Horrible,” she said, feigning a sad expression. We laughed.

Turned out the entire restaurant was a family business — she ran it with her husband, the head chef. “I am French and my husband is Spanish, but our children are both Andorrans,” she said. Their eldest son was the sous chef, working with his father, and their other son was attending university in Barcelona. “He wants nothing to do with the hospitality industry,” she told me with a shrug.

It did not seem possible that they had saved the best for last, but when dessert showed up it was clear that they had. Between the warm bread pudding dunked in dark melted chocolate, and the homemade lavender ice cream, I was a happy camper. Their portions were generous enough that by this point I was full, but if I’d had my druthers I would have kept on eating.

After all that, I was sure that a meal at La Nova Forquilla would break the bank. But in fact the set lunch was just €8.90 and the 5-course dinner tasting menu was €20.50. Utterly reasonable given that we left in gastronomic ecstasy, already planning future day-trips to Andorra just to eat there again.

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Why Kiva is about more than just microfinance

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Posted 17 Aug 2009 — by admin
Category Microfinance, Travel

Kiva is a website where anyone with access to Paypal can make a loan of US$25 or more, specifically to a microentrepreneur, located in any of an ever-growing number of countries. You can browse profiles of these people, learn about their businesses, find out how much they want to borrow, and then contribute towards their loan.

When they repay the loan, your money is returned to you, interest-free. In the unlikely event that they cannot make their repayments, you could lose your money. But default rates for each of their partners on the ground are listed clearly on the website, and they are usually very low. The Kiva partner that I was working with over the last few months experienced problems with fewer than 1% of its borrowers.

But Kiva is about more than just microfinance. In fact, Kiva’s motto is “Connecting people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.”

How does that work? Well, the profiles of borrowers on the Kiva website contain a story about them, little details that help you decide who you want to lend to based on some kind of connection. I spoke to a woman who wanted a microloan so she could buy and sell recyclables from her house, instead of going out to scavenge through dumpsters. This would allow her to spend more time with her 2 young children. Her loan was funded quickly, and I’d imagine some lenders were probably motivated by her desire to be more present in her children’s lives.

More than that, Kiva sends a cadre of Fellows all over the world to manage their relationships with the partner microfinance organizations that actually make the loans on the ground. These Fellows (myself included, because that’s what I’ve been doing these past few months) interview borrowers and tell their stories. Often, the impact of a loan ties into other parts of their lives.

Most recently, I saw a video about a Kiva borrower called Nermina. A war widow in Bosnia, she used her loan – funded $25 at a time by people like you and me, through Kiva – to buy a greenhouse, so she can support her kids financially. Told through the eyes of Kiva Fellow, Milena Arciszewski, Sloane Berrent calls this a “compelling, tragic and unforgettable story.”

Watching Nermina speak was like a punch in the gut. 200,000 people murdered, mostly Bosnian Muslims. The worst genocide in Europe since World War 2. I haven’t been to a museum or a memorial or any other place in which these atrocities have been documented. But I got to hear it directly from Nermina, because of her Kiva loan and my interest in microfinance.

Part of responding to any tragedy – war or poverty – is documenting stories from survivors. Providing them with capital through microfinance also helps, but I’m glad that Kiva is going above and beyond, doing its part to listen to and record the stories of people who are surviving poverty every day, and making them available to the world so we can all learn and remember. Here is the video of Nermina.

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JP’s WarungClub

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Posted 14 Aug 2009 — by admin
Category Food, Reviews, Travel

This is the first post in a series I’m hoping to write about the places in Bali that made my experience as fabulous as it was. Since the way to my heart really is through my stomach, I expect that I’ll be writing mostly about food.

One of the first places I ever ate in Bali was JP’s WarungClub. It’s right on Jl. Dhyana Pura, in Seminyak. I went into JP’s because I thought their facade was cool — even though they’re part of an unremarkable block of buildings, they have a traditional-looking roof, with ceiling fans mounted to exposed beams. They also had a large sign advertising free wireless internet, and a big 5 gallon drum of water on a dispenser outside, with which you can refill your bottle for a nominal IDR 1,000 fee (about USD 0.10). Over the course of my 10 weeks in Bali, I would spend many long hours there, refilling my Nalgene and responding to emails.

The menu at JP’s, like many other restaurants in Bali, ranges from burgers to Indonesian nasi goreng. Particularly noteworthy are their salads, which are huge and can include things like beets, chicken, avocado and arugula. I absolutely hate it when people think “salad” means “iceberg lettuce” and JP’s definitely doesn’t have that problem. Their salads are meals in and of themselves, although if you’re super hungry, I would recommend the nasi campur, instead.

The only thing at JP’s I wouldn’t recommend is the pasta. My housemate, David, ordered some penne, and it showed up overdone. Otherwise, their food is consistently decent. Their desserts are outstanding. Their apple pie is yummy, and their banana fritters with ice cream was the best banana dessert I had in Bali. As for drinks, I usually ordered water, but David says their mango lassis are to die for.

JP’s also has live music most evenings, but I was rarely there at that time because I was usually in bed by then, so I could leave for work at 7am the next day.

Perhaps the best thing about JP’s is the customer service. The first day I got there, I wouldn’t have said so — as a dark-skinned foreigner, I got seated after a Caucasian couple. I ordered before them, yet they got served first, and one of them got the same thing I did! This kept happening again and again at other venues, including the Circle K (like their local 7-Eleven). I had a word with a member of their team, and on every subsequent visit, I noticed the service improving.

On one of my final weeks in Bali, my watch went missing. A few days later, I went to eat at JP’s.

“Do you have a silver watch?” asked a server.

“I do, but it’s lost,” I told him.

“You left it here,” he said, and pulled it out of his apron.

Even if the food at JP’s were horrible, that incident alone would have been enough to turn me into a loyal customer. I was glad to have my faith in humanity restored, with ice cream on top.

A meal at JP’s will cost you anywhere from 40,000 – 100,000 IDR (about USD 4 – 10) depending on whether you choose local or western food, and whether you order dessert and drinks. I usually got away with paying 5 or 6 bucks for a good and filling meal.

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