About seven or eight years ago (maybe more?), I went to the wedding of my good friends Nick and Lotta, on the Aland Islands, in the middle of the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. Before the trip I had intended to go to St. Petersburg, Russia and take the train into Finland and down to Helsinki before heading over to Aland. Unfortunately I failed to secure the proper visa to travel in Russia and I had to modify my plans (very last minute!). So I instead went to Latvia and Estonia, having heard great things about Riga and Tallin, and from Tallin I could catch a ferry direct to Aland.

I bring this up, because this trip is the first time I can remember sensing the Disneyfication of places, that felt a little surreal and just kind of fake. And I have been feeling this Disneyfication a lot on this trip... the idea that the place is not real, it does not function as a working city/ village, it exists purely for tourism, for tourists... Places that are caricatures of what they used to be.

Riga was amazing, from what I can remember of it... I caught a fever my second day and was completely out of my mind for three days/ two nights. But I remember the city being a vibrant and fun place. Then I traveled on up to Tallinn. Coming through the outskirts it still seemed to be recovering from the communist toppling. Cheap new construction, shitted out cars, grungy streets... but as soon as you crossed through the castle walls into the old town, everything was clean and new and freshly painted. They seemed like two very disparate worlds... There is the UNESCO World Heritage Site world, and then there was everything twenty feet beyond those Unesco borders.

Now I am not writing this to sound like a douchebag, because I know I am in for some disappointment if this kind of thing bothers me. It is just an observation that is probably completely misinterpreted. And these are just questions I ask myself as I go...

These musings led to a conversation with one of the proprietors at Hostal Skippy in Cesty Krumlov, which I also got the Disney vibe from. She lives in this place precisely for its connection with reality. She moved here from L.A. about eight years ago, and appreciates the fact that it is real, to her it is this Shangri-la of a community stuck in her ideal of seventies neighborliness, where it was safe for kids to just go outside and play and they weren’t concerned about who had the latest phone. Now I am not sure I buy that, but I appreciate that that is what Cesty Krumlov is to her. But it did get me thinking more about the ‘realness’ of the place... It got me thinking about good old Belmar, New Jersey. Was Belmar any less real because it had a winter population of eight thousand, and a summer population that swelled to two hundred thousand? No way! In fact, that was part of its identity. The proprietor (I never got her name... but it wasn’t Skippy) then made a nice point. During the cold and gray winter, CK can get to be a pretty lonely place. And she has really grown to enjoy going out to eat when there is a mix of people. She enjoys that change of atmosphere where things are more lively and there is such diversity roaming the streets. If the owners of a place are accommodating, if the ambience is good, if the food is good... people are going to go, locals or tourists.

OK... well that is enough of that. While I look forward to continuing this conversation... I look even more forward to getting out to Weisenstadt, Germany (over the border again). I am meeting up with Heinrich Rhein, a stone mason whom I was put in touch with by Jim Durham, the owner of Quarrastone, guys we’ve worked with on a number of projects. Heinrich is hosting me for the weekend at his farmhouse in the country, and I have no idea what’s in store, I just know that Jim says it is a can’t miss spot!