Most hotels have introduced a bunch of cost-cutting measures under the guise of “saving the environment”, but this is something I can get behind. Even the tiniest leftovers are good for making your own liquid soap.

Don’t go to Maine, it sucks.

This espresso macchiato at the Regina Palace Hotel in Stresa was the best cup of coffee I have had outside of home since, well, since the last time I’ve been to Italy.

Stresa is a tiny town just north of Milan, one of many dotting Lake Maggiore. It was for a 3-day conference with much work to do, but some observations could still be had.

• Do not rely on Uber, or any other ride share service for that matter. Taxi drivers are your friends. I am sure ride sharing is fine in Milan, but three drivers canceled my airport pickup shortly after accepting, when they saw I requested a trip to Stresa. This is just 45 minutes from Milan Malpensa, not exactly the end of the world, and the taxi driver had no issues taking me there.
• Actually, the third Uber driver never canceled: he asked me to cancel it myself as he was “having psychological problems”. I took a screenshot and wished him the best.
• I thought I would have an easier time scheduling an Uber ride back to the airport, but no. 8 hours before the 4am drive to the airport a driver was still not assigned. I canceled it and ask a cab driver if he could pick me up. He couldn’t, but a friend of his did, arriving at the hotel right on time.
• I knew I made the right decision when another hotel guest asked me if we could share the ride as I was getting into the car — his scheduled 4am Uber never showed up. So, I will repeat: skip ride sharing and take the taxi (or better yet the train, if not pressed for time or traveling before 6am).
• I stayed in a small hotel with the conference in a much bigger one close by, but both were, I realized, my favorite type of place: opulent turn-of-the century institutions with large marble staircases, very small bathrooms, somewhat musty hallways, and impeccable service. The Fairmont would be the closes US equivalent, though those are slightly more modern and at a lower level of service. In Serbia it is Hotel Moskva.
• The coffee was extraordinary at any place I had it, without the fussiness of r/espresso and other places which insist on recently-roasted premium beans and microgram scales for your shot. And not a paper cup in sight.
• Also: no coffee maker in the hotel room. High standards!
• This is a general recommendation for traveling outside of the US, not about Stresa in general, but never ever accept automatic conversion from local currency to USD when paying by car or withdrawing money at the ATM. Choose local currency and trust that the US bank will take a smaller cut than the locals… for the time being.
• The town was beautiful even with constant downpour, and I will look for excuses to come back.

Patrick Collison made a travel website:

It’s surprisingly hard to find good travel writing online. Upon landing someplace, you can peruse Wikipedia, but what else should one read? Below is a compendium of recommended pieces.

There is a single entry on “the Balkans” and it was fun to read if too simplistic. On the other hand, there are many references to Chris Arnade’s writing, so I hope that at least some of the other links are in that ballpark. (ᔥTyler Cowen)

Our two-week visit to the beaches of Montenegro was, overall, a bust.

The fault was mine. I tried to recreate the one perfect day we had there last year, on a secluded beach accessible only by boat and with crystal-clear water perfect for snorkeling but with amenities like a small cafe, working restrooms and lounge chairs. To do that, we booked a place that was minutes away from the dock closest to that beach in ⊕ Rating for Čanj: thumbs down, one star, would not go again. Čanj, a small and fairly undeveloped town.

The idea was to take the 10-minute boat ride there each day and do nothing but swim, with some rest and book reading in between laps. The reality was that:

• The beach saw a marked decline in quality since last year, owing to — I kid you not — the proprietor of the cafe getting in a fight with the person with rights to put lounge chairs on the beach, resulting in neither being available, no working restrooms, and the surrounding area being littered with used wet wipes and worse (hey, if you gotta go you gotta go).
• Not every member of our large 12-person group was fully on board with spending most of the day on a beach like that, or any beach really, seeing that they weren’t great swimmers.
• The water was absolutely freezing, even in early August, which is on one hand good because rising temperatures in the Mediterranean sea were tied to climate change, but on the other hand you really had to swim to survive and again not everyone was up for that.

And then, 6 days into our 14-day stay, there was a fire. This sent one half of our group back home to Serbia earlier than planned, and my own clan to ⊕ Rating for Ulcinj: thumbs up, five stars, will go again. Ulcinj, which was the furthest away we could have imagined to go and get away from the smoke. We spent 3 days there, and those were in fact the highlight of the trip because Ulcinj and our last-minute apartment booking were both breathtakingly beautiful. Sadly, the small town beach was a sandy muddy mess, and the larger, 12-kilometer long strip of sand was both too far away and reminded us too much of what we could get in our backyard, so we had to find an alternative for the remainder of our stay.

So we ended up at a resort. Not just any resort, but the first ever ⊕ Rating for the Montenegro Radisson: thumb horizontal, 3 stars, would only come in the off-season so unlikely it would ever happen again. Radisson in Montenegro, or rather a 10-ish or so-year-old complex of beautiful stone-encrusted seaside property that got its Radisson license this year. Not exactly the beach — it sat on a piece of rock so the main way to get into the water were ladders — but it was again crystal-clear, only slightly warmer, and with a greater variety of sea life than the one we first had in mind.

The first day was a fairy-tale ending to our trip-to-date. Sadly, we had 5 more days that all but destroyed our initial impression:

• Smoking was encouraged, by the fact that there were ashtrays everywhere and that even the employees would light up during work hours, including while setting up lounge chairs in a just-opened and otherwise completely empty pool.
• On the other hand, wearing UV-protective swimwear was discouraged. We had several requests from the staff for our 6-year-old to take the upper half of his swimsuit off. Our takeaway from this and the above was that the Radisson in Montenegro had a general pro-cancer stance.
• There exists, we were reminded during our recent trip to Valencia, a kind of effortless hospitality that makes you feel welcome and at-home without being either too pushy or too bootlicky. Unfortunately, the resort staff was not familiar with that or any other type of hospitality, being more inclined to either argue or behave like they were my old drinking buddies.

Topping everything off, our return car trip reminded us that Montenegro sorely lacks infrastructure to accommodate the number of people it receives during the summer, which is not helped by summer-time road closures for repairs. This is unfortunate, because Montenegro is a microcosmos of every possible beach you can find, from Thai island-like seclusion to Greek island wilderness to the Wildwood-level expanses of sand, all in a sub-300km stretch of coastline. If and when we ever come back, it will be on a boat.

This past June was my 15th anniversary of being a resident alien in the US, and just yesterday I have completed my longest trip to Europe since my move: eight whole weeks. Here are a few things that I missed during my (working) vacation:

• Being served clean tap water and unlimited supplies of ice by default as soon as I sit down in a restaurant, free of charge and often without even being asked.
• Not being exposed to tobacco smoke anywhere, but particularly while sitting down in a restaurant, coffee shop, pizza place, at the beach, the pool, the doctor’s office, and even the hotel room balcony.
• Air conditioning being present; and when being present actually being used; and when used not being told how bad it was for me, and how unnatural it was to require it.
• Having access to a variety of national cuisines when eating out, and a variety of ingredients from all around the world when cooking at home.
• Air travel being accessible to the majority of the population. Americans bemoan their airports as dumps compared to those in Europe and (especially) Asia, not realizing that the target audiences for the two are completely different. I would much rather live in a country where air travel is so commonplace that airports resemble bus stations more than luxury resorts.

There is more, of course, just not top of mind right now. And I could have written the counter post about things available in Europe and not in the US but for the most part people in Europe do know how well they have it in those regards (better tipping culture, fewer shootings, more walkable neighborhoods, saner size of cars, etc.) and they are happy to rub it in the Americans' faces during online interactions so there is no point in bringing it to anyone’s attention.

✈️ Travel day today, from Serbia to the US of A. From an authoritarian regime in its terminal stages to one that is just starting out.

Regardless, after 7 weeks away and living out of suitcases we can’t wait to go back home.

What I found at this newsstand in Serbia did not give me hope for the future:

• Exhibit A: an Italian Brainrot sticker book.
• Exhibit B: “How to help a child who wants to be an influencer” as a front-page headline in Serbia’s oldest daily. And no, it is not about counseling.

• The downtown has been hollowed out to the point of being unrecognizable. This is in part due to less foot traffic — the middle of July is when people tend to leave Belgrade — but the empty, broken store fronts make it worse. I am sure everyone was at one of many shopping malls, which is sad.
• File this under “things that are different from when I was a student”: hardly any newspaper stand or store open past 10pm. I had to walk quite a few blocks to get a bottle of water. On the other hand, I may be misremembering how close by things were back then.
• In general, it also looked like more of a generic Central European city than I remembered, and a shoddy one at that. I guess that means quality of life for its citizens may be better (though I doubt it) but it is of less interest if you are a tourist in the Balkans. Granted, I may be used to some things you may find interesting not being from the area.
• At dinner, a waiter lectured me on what I did wrong when putting in my order. It has been a while since I experienced this and I do not miss it at all, though I also have two weeks in Montenegro to look forward to so I’d better be prepared.
• On the flip side, the Moskva hotel had superb service and is unlike any hotel you could visit in the US. Sure, there are Hyatts and Hiltons and whatnot in Belgrade now and I am sure they too are better than their American counterparts but I doubt any can match Moskva for the Murder on the Orient Express atmosphere.
• Things overall are not nearly as bad as they were in the 1990s, but one things that is most certainly worse and obviously so is the inequality which must be worse than even in the US. Branko Milanović who is the world’s expert on inequality and Serbian by origin had a few words to say about the topic.
• In support of this, the new Terminal 2 at Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade is more Asian than Western. There were perfumes on sale there for more than $500, which you will most certainly not see at Dulles.
• This is after a single night spent there and seeing the place mostly as a tourist.