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.

I've never been so happy to see a cockroach. There it was scurrying across the floor near my feet, around the empty snack food wrappers. It meant I was on the Saigon-bound train from Nha Trang. Which also meant it would (hopefully) skid into the steamy Vietnamese metropolis somewhere around 4:15am and give me about an hour to jump in a taxi, point it to the airport, and (barely) make my flight back to New York. Hopefully. This was a future chain of events that had to be perfectly synchronized in a Rube Goldbergian fashion. But at this point, I almost didn't care. One near miracle had already occurred today. Would it be divinely gluttonous of me to ask for two?

The day started like the 13 others I'd spent in Vietnam. Crawl out of bed, quaff three or four sugar-laced coffees, and then stroll down to the local market to consume as much as my stomach would allow (pho, chao, spring rolls, more pho). This was my last day here, ending my first trip to Vietnam. I came here to write an article on Saigon and then spent the last week traveling around the country, heading up to Hoi An and then, with Gadling's own Jeremy Kressmann, down to Qui Nhon and Nha Trang, where we ate and drank and rode backs through a leper colony and somehow ended up driving around with strangers in clunky cars late at night.

The day I was leaving Nha Trang, I got myself to the airport early enough to sip coffee in the business class lounge (it was the only ticket available for this Vietnam Airlines flight). My friend Richard Sterling--the so-called "Indiana Jones of gastronomy"--had a big night planned for my last evening in Vietnam: he was going to take me on an adventurous eating tour of Saigon. Then I was going to get approximately two hours of sleep before getting my flight home. I couldn't wait.

Movies and novels often begin by showing the protagonist having what seems like a normal day. They get up, they drink coffee, they take their kids to school, whatever. And then, as the formula usually goes, something happens. Something extraordinary. Usually something bad. In the biz it's called the "inciting incident." My real-life inciting incident occurred somewhere in the middle of my second cup of coffee in the airport lounge.

There's a quiet revolution underway in Champagne. A grape-accented battle against the goliaths of the bubble-laced industry. It's called terroir, that mostly untranslatable French word that refers to the influence of soil and weather on wine (it's also creeping into the food world too).

Big Champagne doesn't really have any terroir. It's one soiled little not-so-secret aspect of the Champagne industry: that the grapes used by the big guys --- Moët & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot, for example --- don't come from just one vineyard. They come from all over the Champagne region, as many as 1,000 different places. Which is fine. Champagne like Veuve are great thanks to technique. But, like wine, if you want to really taste the influence of the area (or how the terroir has shaped the taste), it's not going to happen.

That is, until now.

The winding road to Hanover, Pennsylvania passes the kind of pastoral beauty reserved for bad hotel paintings: bulbous barns, red chipped paint clinging to the exterior, sit rustically unloved in the middle of pasture, as a sunburst of fall foliage illuminates the background. Billboards announce an upcoming convention dedicated to scrapbooking. In town, old ladies hold up signs at intersections that read "Pray to end abortion!" The town of 15,000 is the home of Utz potato chips and Snyder's of Hanover pretzels. Apparently, the whoopie pie was invented here. Hanover, I'm told, is the Snack Capital of the World. Or at least Pennsylvania.

Thomas Jefferson spent the night here once. And Abraham Lincoln stopped long enough to talk to the townsfolk from his train (no word if any potato chips or pretzels were eaten or trafficked).

There are other reasons to come to Hanover besides engrossing oneself in the exciting art of scrapbooking and getting fat on snack food. I turned up in town recently to meet chef Andrew Little. When I heard he was cooking up something called New Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine at restaurant (and B&B) Sheppard Mansion I just had to see (and taste) what that was.

Walk past the miniature brick house with a Smart Car-sized bomb sticking out of it, stroll right by the gift shop selling t-shirts of WWE wrestlers and Pocahantas, and plop yourself down in the sofa-lined reception hall of the Memorial Museum. Here a docent will eventually arrive and encourage you to relax a bit, have a smoke and, oh by the way, would you like a cup of tea?

This isn't any normal museum in any normal city. This is Kuwait City, capital of the wealthy diminutive desert state that most Americans know thanks to the first Gulf War in 1991, in which the US-led team reversed Saddam Hussain's invasion of the country.

Which is the topic of the Memorial Museum, a name the belies the not-so-subtle message. The sign at the front is less innocuous: Not to Forget Museum: Saddam Hussain Regime Crimes.

You might be wondering: So? (to summarize former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney when recently reminded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--thus killing any original justification for the 2003 war). Ask the docent why you shouldn't forget the Not to Forget Museum and you'll likely be told there are a couple good reasons: Kuwait is currently celebrating two major anniversaries. The 50th year of independence (from the British) and the 20th year since the end of Iraq's short occupation of their country. The previous day from the "lookout sphere" atop the Kuwaiti Tower, a photo exhibition showed some of the Iraqi-led destruction of the area. One photo of some concrete rubble was captioned: "Even the air conditioning control center was harmed by the barbaric invaders." When you're attacking a country in 120-degree heat, the first thing you apparently attempt to take out is the air conditioning.

People don't come to Kuwait to drink alcohol. Nor do they come to eat pork. They also don't arrive expecting to see pitbulls, to smoke marijuana, to watch Michael's Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, or to look at any sort of pornography. It's all banned in Kuwait (with harsh penalties for lawbreakers).

For tourists who hate being around other tourists, this desert country is an oasis: there are no tourists traps because, well, there really are no tourists here. Every place is an off-the-radar local spot.

It's not surprise, then, that another aspect that's not pulling people to Kuwait is the food. That's because if you ask a local, as I did during a recent visit to this conservative and diminutive Middle Eastern state on the Gulf of Arabia, your question about the local cuisine will be greeted with a shrug. That is, until a Lebanese friend who lives in Kuwait City (one of the initial shruggers) called her boyfriend who called another friend who recommended one of the small handful of Kuwaiti restaurants in town.

In most countries, there are ethnic restaurants and then there are restaurants serving the default local cuisine. Here in Kuwait, however, it's the other way around. One has to seek out a Kuwaiti restaurant; otherwise, you end up at a Lebanese place (which is the best of the best when it comes to eating in the Middle East), as I did at the excellent at Burj Al Hamam or Italian or Spanish (I had very good versions of both at the in-house restaurants in the new Hotel Missoni). Or perhaps one of the many unfortunate American chain restaurants (Applbee's, TGI Friday's, Ruby Tuesday) that have set up shop here.

I had walked for an hour in the northern Bohemian spa town Karlovy Vary looking for a place to eat. I have a general rule when I'm in these tourist-crammed towns: no hotel restaurants and no obvious tourist trap eateries, of which this town formerly known as Carlsbad has plenty. I walked along the babbling Tepla River reciting the words to the Joni Mitchell's heartbreaking "River," a song I haven't been able to get out of my head lately. I strolled until the prettied-up 19th-century buildings faded into grim 20th-century Communist-era apartment blocks and the over-priced restaurants morphed into pubs where the night's main entertainment was two dogs wildly humping each other in the corner as bar patrons gleefully rooted them on (well, at least at one of the places I popped my head into).

As darkness began to envelope the town, I turned back toward the center and walked until I found a pub with a sign for Platan, an excellent south Bohemian beer, a rare sight here among the signs for Pilsner Urquell and Budweiser (the Czech variety). I stopped in to the five-table pub. There were no amorous hounds inside; just quiet-talking couples taking up all the tables but one. I sat down, ordered a beer and a klobasa and dove into a book, figuring I'd settle in for another melancholy evening of sipping better-than-average beer and reading about Burma. Within a few minutes, though, three middle-aged women joined me at the table. They didn't speak English, so they began asking me questions in Czech. Where was I from? How did I speak Czech? Do I have children?

They laughed at my bad jokes and feigned interest in what I had to say about my life. Finally, I was able to ask something: "What brings you to Karlovy Vary?" All three of the ladies put their hands to their chest and said, in unison, "We're sick."

My heart sunk, but I should have known better. It's the reason why most people come to Karlovy Vary. After all, for centuries everyone from the rich and royal to the ordinary have been gravitating here to "take the waters," which flow liberally from fountains throughout the colonnaded center of town. The mineral waters are said to have curative properties and today people the world over limp around Karlovy Vary, drinking from the natural springs in between spa treatment appointments.

There's a specter haunting Central Europe. A very quaffable, sweet-tasting specter, that is. And no, it's not absinthe. This bibulously inspired drink is only around for a few weeks in September. Which means there's much debauchery happening right now in the center of Europe. If, like me, you're in the Czech capital this week, you'll understand when I say that it's the most dangerous beverage in Prague.

Meet Burcak [pronounced Bur-chahk], a Central European phenomenon where vintners take a batch of the young wine just after the grapes have been crushed, add sugar, and let it ferment a bit. The result is something that's no longer grape juice yet not exactly wine. And it tastes dangerously close to an addictive juice concoction, which nearly ensures a hangover in the morning. As far as I can tell, it's only available in the Czech Republic and Austria (in the latter it's called sturm)

The word "burcak" is just starting to pop up in Prague right now, scrawled across chalkboards that hang outside wine bars. So if you're in or heading to Central Europe, don't miss the small window with which burcak is available. Burcak purists, however, will tell you it's best drunk in southern Moravia, the main wine region of the Czech Republic, particularly in the town of Znojmo.

The last time I took a trip to the region, it was as if some alien intoxicant had overtaken an entire town. When my Czech friend Libor and I pulled into Mikulov, a small castle-topped town on the Czech-Austrian border, there were guys weaving down the tiny cobbled lanes, women vomiting into rubbish bins on the main square, and couples passionately disrobing each other behind trees. What was going on?