Ali found me lingering on the corner of Christopher St. and Seventh Ave. S. in the West Village. Before I recently moved out of the neighborhood I'd spent eight years hailing cabs in this very spot. But no ride was probably ever as unusual (or short) as this one.

He laughed when he heard my request. That I wanted him to take me to lunch; to take me the place where he goes. I reminded him about the reputation that taxi drivers had: that they know the best cheap eats in a city. It just has to be a place you go to regularly, I told him. Ali stroked his long grey beard and said, "I know a place. I just went there this morning and had my soup."

Ali said he's originally from Istanbul but he's been driving a cab in New York for 40 years. With that kind of experience behind him, his lunch-finding credibility is huge. Before I could think about it anymore we were stopped at the curb. "That'll be $3.80," he said. Really? We were here already? Right here on McDougal St. between Bleecker and W. 3rd Sts.? I had envisioned (and was ready for) an epic ride out to, perhaps, Gravesend, Brooklyn, or Rego Park, Queens to discover an out-of-the-way gem of an eatery. But right here in my own backyard?

"That's right," Ali said. "It's very good Turkish food. Please say hi to Cem, the owner for me." Which taught me something: the ethnicity of the driver is largely going to determine where I'm taken to eat. At least in New York. I invited Ali join me, but he refused. "It's too hard to find a place to park here," he said. I paid the fare and got out. As I was walking into Turkiss, Ali rolled down his window and yelled out to me: "Get the lamb."

The man who told me my unfortunate future, did so with glee. I quickly learned he had a proclivity for sustaining the last syllable of every sentence, like a Spanish-speaking soccer play-by-play announcer after a goal, or a game show host announcing I'd just won a BRAND NEW CAR......!

"In future, you will be very unluckyyyyyyyyy," he said after recording my birthdate and looking it up in a tattered book filled with numerical codes.

I was doing a self-guided tour of Yangon, the erstwhile capital of Myanmar, as outlined in my guidebook, Lonely Planet Myanmar. The walking tour took me down a street lined with fortunetellers and palm readers. I hadn't planned on sitting down but I thought that if one of them was particularly insistent, I'd do it.

That's when Min Kyot Kyow announced himself to me. I took a seat on the bench and within seconds he was rambling on about my unfortunate fate. Astrology is taken very seriously in Myanmar. The location of the new capital, Naypyidaw, was reportedly determined by astrology.

It was my first night in Yangon, the southeast Asian metropolis formerly known as Rangoon, and I was standing in a dank, dark back street arguing with a 16-year-old boy over his fee for oral sex. Well, sort of. He had propositioned me. And while I wasn't interested, I was appalled when he told me how little he'd do it for. So I began lecturing him that he should charge more. Not that I know the going international rate for such things. I swear. It just seemed low for doing such an intimate thing to a complete stranger. Why I didn't talk him out of the nightly practice completely is beyond me. Then again, my mind at that moment was in full-on negotiating mode.

It all began when I had arrived in Myanmar two hours earlier. As I was checking in to my hotel, I was told the price of the room and pulled out my wad of $20 bills (there are no ATMs in Myanmar, so one must arrive with a bulk of cash). I put three bills down on the counter and the team at reception began scrutinizing the notes like avid baseball card collectors inspecting a Honus Wagner card. They discussed among each other, spitting out a slew of Burmese and then shaking their heads from side to side. The oldest member of the money-scrutinizing triumvirate stepped forward and informed me my money was no good. "See this," he said, pointing to the tiniest of creases in the crisp $20 bill. "No good." I protested, saying that anywhere else in the world these were perfectly valid twenty dollar bills. "You don't understand," he said. "This is Myanmar."

I have to confess: I had heard the warnings that they only exchange perfectly crisp, blemish-free American dollars here and it wasn't until the day I was leaving--having already withdrawn $500 in cash from my bank the day before--that I realized I should take it all back to the bank and get brand new bills. The problem, though, was that by the time I got around to it, the banks were closed. I had no choice but to get on my flight that night, hoping that the guidebooks and friends who had been here were grossly exaggerating.

They weren't.

He said to call him Ricky. As our taxi jerked its way through the center of Yangon, the southeast Asian metropolis formerly known as Rangoon and the recently dethroned capital of Myanmar (the erstwhile Burma), Ricky explained to me how he acquired such an unlikely name. "My Sunday school teacher gave it to me. You don't even want to know what my Burmese name is," he said, taking a sharp right turn. "Too hard to pronounce." Ricky said that despite his Sunday school attendance, he's a lifelong Buddhist and that he just attended the school to learn English. Which he seemed to pick up quite well at the expense of Jesus and Co.

A few minutes earlier, I had walked out of my hotel and there he was. "Taxi?" Maybe, I replied. But I had a special request. I was in Yangon for a few days and wanted to do another installment of Culinary Cab Confessions, a series for Gadling in which I put to test the notion that cab drivers are the best guide to a city's undiscovered and affordable restaurant gems. I presented the idea to him. "Get in," he said.

Paul was dying. At lunch. In Rome. And just around the corner from the Trevi Fountain. Which didn't seem like worst place in the world to spend the last moments of one's life. Ten minutes earlier, the waiter had put a bowl of spaghetti alle vongole in front of Paul, the steam from the pasta and mussels fogging up his glasses. So much so we didn't notice he was suddenly slumped over and passed out. But now, laid out flat on the cobblestones five feet from our table where he could get medical attention, my friend Pancho and I (along with Paul's little dog Jack) could only stand there and watch as the waiters flagged over some paramedics they'd called a few minutes earlier. "It's Paul Steffen," the waiter whispered to one of the paramedics.

He was eighty-six years, two weeks, and three days old, to be exact. I always knew the day of his death would come, probably sooner than later, and I guess in a perverse way it was fitting that he'd die over lunch.

As the last tiny fireballs shot into the tree, marking the end of this bizarrely belated Christmas celebration, my Czech friend's father, Ladia, looked at me and giggled nervously.

Was he happy we didn't burn down this bone-dry pine tree in their living room? Or was there something else I was missing. Did he know this was it--that I would be emancipating myself from this family and never be back to ease the misery of their lives? I set my deadened sparkler down on the formica coffee table and turned away from the dry Christmas tree, quickening my pace toward the front door where my jacket was hanging. I'm never coming back here, I thought. Never.

How did I get to the point where I walked out on a family that took me in for the last and final time? This was the end of my most bizarre Christmas I ever spent. The most bizarre Christmas I ever spent in late January, that is.

Lenka, a 22-year-old college student living in Prague, and a friend of a friend, had arranged a short-term apartment for me when I arrived in the Czech capital for a long stay.

Which is why I didn't mind going to Lenka's parents' house in north Bohemia my first weekend in the Czech Republic. Besides that, Lenka insisted I go. Usti nad Labem, which, translated into English, means "Usti above the Elbe River," only sounds romantic. During the three-hour ride north from Prague, we passed ruined castles perched on high cliffs and a myriad of small towns whose main feature was a bulbous Baroque-era spire. Then we arrived in Usti, where post-World-War II-era buildings--tall, concrete block apartment structures, the architectural equivalent of Soviet realism--dominate the city the way spires do in Prague. Unlike the Czech capital, Usti didn't escape World War II without damage. A few modest Baroque and neo-Gothic churches and a small 19th-century opera house dot the city, wedged between drab, functionalist shopping centers with relief sculptures of proud, barrel-chested workers. The wide river and surrounding green hills could not save Usti from looking like the love child of Dubuque and some horrible Soviet's vision of paradise.

"Prego," said the Italian woman sitting behind an elevated counter. She waved me into one of the dining rooms, bedecked with rich wood paneling and white tablecloths draped over the half dozen tables. I was given a menu, which listed the canon of Italian cuisine: sausage and polenta, spaghetti alla vongole, and a colorful and fresh-looking anti-pasta bar, among others. It would be perfectly understandable if you thought I was dining in Rome or Ravenna.

But I was, in fact, about 3,000 miles from Rome. The chaotic, but intriguing miasma of concrete, steel, and car exhaust known as Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, dwelled just outside the window of Castelli. The restaurant, opened, according to Rossella Castelli, the woman at the counter, in 1957 (though many reports have suggested 1948). It's a relic of the failed Italian occupation. The Castelli family opened the restaurant and stayed here instead of following Italian troops back home.

I didn't come to Ethiopia to eat Italian food. In New York, where I live, there's an Italian restaurant on every block, many of which are sub-mediocre quality. I lived in Italy for a few years, where I ate the cuisine every single day. Italian cuisine has managed to conquer the world, to borrow the title of a recently published book. But when I'm in a place like Ethiopia, I'm going to eat the local fare.

It wasn't until I read that Bob Geldof, member of the rock band the Boomtown Rats and the man behind LiveAid and other benefits to help eradicate famine in east Africa, said Castelli was the best Italian restaurant in the world that I decided I couldn't leave Addis Ababa without trying it.

The cab driver didn't blink when I told him what I wanted. It might have been one of the most unusual requests he'd ever had. But he didn't even look back at me or take a glance in the rearview mirror. He pointed his diminutive blue taxi up the wide boulevard and asked where I was from. As we turned on to Chechnya Street, named because of the apparent anything-goes debauchery that takes place here when the sun goes down, he turned into a de facto tour guide, pointing out the places where one might encounter a prostitute.

But I wasn't seeking thrills of a sexual nature. I wanted to eat. And to eat at a place I may never find on my own. Welcome to Culinary Cab Confessions, a short series about letting cab drivers decide where I'll be eating. There's a long-standing belief that taxi drivers hold the secret to a city's best eateries; not the upscale variety, but the affordable, no frills type; the places where we may never think of going and in neighborhoods where we might rarely venture. Wherever I'm traveling in the world or if I'm home in New York City, I'll be hopping in cabs and telling the driver to take me to wherever he--or she--likes to eat. And then I'll be writing about it. If the driver is hungry and inclined, I'm always happy to have a culinary guide to the restaurant. Lunch is on me.