5 best fast food chains around the world

by Jessica Festa on

While fast food often gets a bad rep, you can’t expect to eat all of your meals sitting in down in slow food restaurants. And, when traveling abroad, you will sometimes find that fast food doesn’t always necessarily mean greasy fries and fattening burgers. Travelers can make their quick dining experiences worthwhile by visiting these five delicious and budget-friendly fast food restaurants, located all over the world.

Giraffas
Brazil

This chain has over 350 restaurants spread across the country and over 30 years of experience. It’s no wonder then that they’re considered one of the best, even handing out steel knives and forks for guests as well as open plates instead of cardboard boxes for those not taking their food to go. And, have you ever heard of ordering Filet Mignon from a fast food joint? Now you have.

Mr.Lee
China

Unlike the greasy Chinese fast food restaurants that many Westerners are used to, Mr.Lee serves lighter options, such as California Chicken, a cold meal drizzled with red and green sauce, and Beef Noodle Soup, made with a unique recipe that can be customized with various spices and sauces according to the customer’s tastes. If you’re having your soup to stay, you can expect to be served in a ceramic bowl instead of styrofoam or plastic.

Nordsee
Germany (and other European locations)

If you look at their website, this certainly doesn’t look like a fast-food restaurant. With an emphasis on sustainable, healthy cuisine, you can expect dishes such as Alaska pollack, grilled salmon, and sushi, all with drink recommendations to accompany your meal. For example, ordering a salmon fillet should be accompanied by a glass of light red wine.

Teremok
Russia

This chain has 111 restaurants and 80 street stalls in Russia, featuring items you wouldn’t normally see on a fast-food menu. According to Sean O’Neill at BudgetTravel.com, you can get salads, soups, and porridges, as well as their most popular item, blinis. If you’ve never heard of a blini, it’s a thin pancake shaped like a triangle and wrapped around the customer’s choice of a sweet or savory filling. For example, salmon roe and red caviar are two filling favorites at this eatery. Teremok also features a low-alcoholic beverage known as kvass, which is prepared using rye flour with malt or sometimes honey beer.

Steers
South Africa

While their feature items may be burgers, these are unlike the burgers that are served at most fast food restaurants. In fact, when McDonald’s first arrived in South Africa in 1995, locals scoffed at the puny 3 ounce meat patties. In South Africa, where red meat is a food favorite, they have Steers, which offers a delicious and filling 7 ounce burger made of 100% pure beef. If you’re still hungry, you can order triple stacker burgers with fresh toppings and full racks of ribs.

Maldives in Peril: From the SLOWLIFE symposium

by Jon Bowermaster on

There is no place more apt to engage in heavy-hitting conversation about the future of Planet Ocean than the heart of the small island nation of the Maldives.

It is a place many have heard of but few could pick out on a map. Made up of twelve hundred islands and atolls, most pancake flat, the highest reaches no more than five feet above sea level making the Maldives the lowest country on earth. Only two hundred of the islands are inhabited by roughly 320,000 people. It is an always hot, exceedingly beautiful, Muslim country stretching about 600 miles from north to south in the heart of the Indian Ocean off the tip of Sri Lanka.

In terms less geographic the Maldives is also ground zero for assessing the impacts of climate change. As the earth’s temperature continues to heat up, impacting sea surface temperatures in particular, the Maldives is at incredible risk of both rising sea levels and increased frequency and violence of storms.

No politician in the world has taken a bigger role in trying to ramp up interest in efforts to slow climate change (except perhaps Al Gore), than the Maldives’ young president, Mohammed Nasheed.

This past weekend an invested crowd of thinkers and doers, including President Nasheed and several members of his cabinet, gathered on the small island of Kunfunadhoo, home to the Six Senses resort Soneva Fushi. This was the third annual S.L.O.W.L.I.F.E Symposium organized by Six Senses CEO Sonu Shivadsani and his wife Eva. The barefoot conference brought together climate change environmentalists like the UK’s Jonathan Porritt, Tim Smits and Jeremy Leggett, renewable energy and island nation leaders from as far away as Reunion and Bali, ocean mariners including Fabien Cousteau and some incredibly dedicated headline-makers (Richard Branson and the actors Edward Norton and Daryl Hannah). The subject of three days of talks was: What can we do fast, before it’s too late.

Topics ranged from how small island nations can become energy independent, how to protect marine biodiversity, how to engage local communities in ambitious carbon reduction plans and the challenge of adapting transportation in a low-carbon economy.

It’s clear there are no easy answers. Soon after arriving by float plane on Saturday morning President Nasheed delivered a harsh message. “Carbon dioxide emissions are going to kill us,” he said. “Here in the Maldives our goal of becoming carbon neutral is not to scare the world, but simply to make a step in the right direction.”

While Nasheed leads an effort to make the Maldives the first carbon neutral country on the planet, by 2020, there are other good things going on here on the Laccadive Sea. They’ve banned shark fishing, tuna are only caught by pole and the Baa Atoll has been declared a UNESCO Biosphere.

The Maldives, with few natural resources but a growing population and energy demands, is on the forefront of taking itself permanently off the grid. It’s clear the problems are not a lack of knowledge and information — cures to the problems of renewable energy via solar, creating clean drinking water and wastewater treatment are known. But what the Maldivian government officials reiterated throughout the weekend is that access to money makes implementing all that knowledge and information extremely difficult.

In the past year the government has put its political energy behind its hope of becoming the first carbon neutral nation. By 2020 it hopes to generate 60 percent of its electricity from solar, without raising the cost of power to its consumers. It has introduced a new import regime by the Transport Ministry to ensure that in the future electric cars will be a third of the price of conventional gasoline cars. And it has pledged to spend two percent of its national income on renewable energy deployment in the country. If that figure were matched worldwide, we would be collectively spending $1.25 trillion a year rather than the $260 billion we spend today on renewable energy sources.

Worrying to all island nations of course is that CO2 in the world’s atmosphere is not declining but growing, as development and growth continue to mount globally. The goal of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million — what scientists regard as the safe limit for humans — may fast becoming an unreachable goal, since it has already risen to above 392 ppm.

One industry that prospers in the Maldives of course is tourism. Nearly 1 million visitors a year, including increasing numbers from China and India, fly into the capital city of Male each year and jump out to various island resorts by float plane or small boat. Taxes on resort development — and potentially new tariffs on visitors to support renewable energy projects — are the lifeblood of the Maldivian economy.

(Tomorrow, up close and personal with Mohammed Nasheed, the Maldives’ Green President.)

[image credit: Fiona Steward (above) and Adrian Olson (below)]

Great Himalaya Trail now open in Nepal in southern Asia

by Jessica Festa on

The Great Himalaya Trail is officially open for visitors in Nepal in southern Asia. This trail, which stretches from Taplejung in the east to Humla in the west near the border of Tibet, is one of the longest and highest hiking routes in the world.

The goal of creating this trail is to boost tourism in Nepal and portray the country as the perfect destination for adventure seekers. During the 1,700 kilometer trek, hikers will not only experience nature but also a variety of cultures, as the five month or longer trip encompasses 16 different districts. For hikers who do not want to spend that much time hiking straight through the trail, it can also be done in sections, with each bit offering a different type of landscape to experience.

The Great Himalaya Trail is a great active adventure addition for Nepal, as it is already home to 8 of the world’s 14 highest peaks (all over 8,000 meters), including Mount Everest. For a list of companies that you can sign-up with to complete the trek, click here.

What’s in a name? On pronouncing difficult country names

by Rolf Potts on

When I traveled through Southeast Asia some years ago, I was amazed by the number of fellow backpackers who ridiculed me whenever I pronounced the “s” in Laos. Apparently, I was supposed to pronounce it “Lao,” just like locals do.

The thing is, those same “s”-dropping travelers never insisted on calling Bangkok by its proper name (“Krung Thep Maha Nakhon”) when they were in Thailand — and when they recalled journeys to East Asia, they mentioned Japan and Korea, not “Nihon-koku” and “Daehan Minguk”. But Laos was “Lao,” and anyone with the temerity to pronounce the “s” ran the risk of being branded a travel-greenhorn in the backpacker haunts of Vang Vieng and Muang Sing.

Oddly enough, Laos seems to be the only place where backpackers are rigid fundamentalists when it comes to nation-state pronunciation. Rarely do you find such tenacious commitment to cultural-linguistic accuracy in the travel cliques of Misr (Egypt), Shqipërisë (Albania), or Suomi (Finland). (One possible exception might be Latin America, where otherwise normal patter among English-speaking travelers is frequently offset with trilled r’s and h-sounding g’s when mentioning places like Honduras and Argentina.)

What makes Laos an exception? Since the Westernized pronunciation is just one consonant away from the local pronunciation, my guess is lazy opportunism among backpackers hoping to showcase their cultural knowledge. Whereas referring to Morocco as “al-Maghrebia” or Greenland as “Kalaallit Nunaat” would make you seem like a jackass show-off to fellow travelers, calling Laos “Lao” allows you to avoid confusing your compatriots while still insinuating that you’ve been in-country long enough to pronounce the place as locals do. Hence, in the goofy realm of backpacker pecking order (where displays of cultural expertise reign supreme, yet all pretensions must be subtle), Laos-pronunciation is the perfect shorthand for distinguishing salty wanderers from newbies.Interestingly, Laos provides a good example for how complicated things can get when dissecting the names of nation-states. The “s” in Laos, for example, dates back to the late 1800’s, when a number of largely autonomous, mainly Lao-speaking kingdoms (including Luang Prabang, Vientiane and Champasak) were united under French colonial rule. The “s” was silent in French pronunciation, and only came into spoken use when Anglophones intoned it according to their own rules (much as we do when pronouncing “Paris”). Perhaps the most famous mispronunciation of “Laos” came in 1962, when President Kennedy called the nation “Lay-oss” — reportedly out of apprehension that the American people would resist sending military aid to a country that sounded like the singular of “lice.”

Though it could be easy to write off the “s” in Laos as an insidious remnant of Western imperialism, place-names in Europe are similarly indicative of bygone intrusions. When a Cardiff-born traveler refers to himself as “Welsh,” he is actually using a Germanic word that means “foreigner” (as opposed to the Celtic word for Welsh, “Cymry,” which means “compatriot”). Similarly, the official Laotian name for Laos — “Meuang Lao” — probably sounds a tad strange to the 31% of native-born citizens (including the Hmong, Dao, and Khmu) who are not ethnically Lao.

British historian Norman Davies has noted that place-names aren’t necessarily a fixed concept. “They change over time,” he wrote in his 1996 book Europe: A History. “And they vary according to the language and the perspective of the people who use them. They are the intellectual property of their users, and as such have caused endless conflicts. They can be the object of propaganda, of tendentious wrangling, of rigid censorship, even of wars. In reality, where several variants exist, one cannot speak of correct or incorrect forms.”

This in mind, I’ve decided I won’t worry too much about the “correct” way to pronounce Laos. Outside of backpacker circles, I’ve found that native Laotians don’t mind when I pronounce the “s” in Laos — just like citizens of ” Ellīnikī́ Dīmokratía” understand when I make reference to “Greece,” and residents of “Al Mamlaka al Urduniya al Hashemiyah” don’t scold me for calling their country “Jordan.” Were I conversing in Lao or Greek or Arabic this might be a different matter — but host cultures tend to understand that non-fluent outsiders have their own names for things. When I’m asked by local people to use local pronunciations (or when it makes communication easier) I’m happy to drop my Westernized vocabulary for something more culturally correct. This is, in fact, a normal part of the travel-education process.

I suppose it’s also part of the travel process to foist that linguistic correctness on other travelers, but this can sometimes get obnoxious. Just as rose by any other name would smell as sweet, Laos will remain of terrific place to travel, regardless of whether or not you pronounce the “s” in the company of your fellow backpackers.

[flickr image via Ian @ The Paperboy]

Traveler Q & A: Pavia Rosati

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Pavia Rosati is the founder of Fathom, a recently debuted travel website. Fathom is smart and beautifully designed. It’s full of exciting short briefs about various destinations across the globe.

Rosati, as you’ll see from her answers below, is an experienced editor and an avid traveler. Her enthusiasm for Fathom’s subject matter is palpable and infectious. We love Fathom and can’t wait to see how it’s going to develop.

Q: Good day, Pavia Rosati, and welcome. How would you describe your occupation?

A: I am the founder and CEO of Fathom, a new travel website. It’s my job to help connect you to places and experiences you didn’t know you were going to love.

Q: Tell us about Fathom.

A: Fathom cuts through the clutter of the online travel space with stories and destination guides that are as practical as they are inspiring. People typically go to a travel website for one of two reasons: They know they’re going to London, and they need to know where to stay and what to do. Or they think, “I have two weeks off…I like nature…Where should I go?” Fathom addresses both needs through two main sections: Guides and Postcards. Guides have quick information about the basics: hotels, sites, restaurants, and itineraries. Postcards are inspiring travel stories organized around the passion points of travel with a “I Travel for the …” theme: I Travel for the Food, I Travel for the Thrill, I Travel for the Kids. We aren’t motivated by what’s expensive or what’s trendy. We’re interested in what’s special and what’s awesome. Sometimes that’s a three-Michelin star lunch at Le Meurice; sometimes it’s a five-euro falafel at L’As du Fallafel.

Q: What are you trying to do with Fathom that hasn’t been done by other travel sites?

A: I wanted to create the one-stop travel website that I could never find. You know how the best travel guide is the email you get from a friend who lives there, detailing what you need to do and know? That’s the spirit that motivates us. I used to spend 80 hours researching dozens of sites to boil my findings down to an essential nugget of information. Fathom aims to deliver that nugget. I don’t want to wade through a list of 200 shops in Buenos Aires; I want 20 that are amazing. I want to know what locals know. I want pre-edited links to the best articles, websites, and online resources. Perhaps most importantly, Fathom recommendations are not driven by a mega travel agency’s vast and impersonal database; our recommendations are personal and special.

Q: How do you anticipate Fathom developing? For example, will the city guides grow in number?

A: Absolutely. It’s a big world, and we want to get everywhere. Postcards are updated continually, and we will launch several new guides every month. Reader feedback will be critical: We’ve had a lot of requests for Amsterdam since launching, so look for that soon. We want more Postcards from Fathom readers, a community we call the travel-proud. This fall, we’ll launch Boutique, with our favorite travel products; Traveler Profiles, based on the popular Fathom Questionnaires; and My Itineraries, so readers can save the places they want to go.

Q: How did your decade at Daily Candy prepare you for this endeavor?

A: First and foremost, it’s where I met my partner, Jeralyn Gerba, Fathom’s editorial director. We had one priority at DailyCandy: We had to delight our readers every day. To achieve this, we had to be trustworthy, we had to recommend quality places, and we had to deliver information readers wanted in a way they wanted it. And it helped if we had a great time doing it. These are excellent editorial priorities. By the way, before DailyCandy, I spent four years running the Entertainment Channel at AOL. That taught me a thing or two about building and serving a big audience.Q: Enough shop talk. When you’re not traveling, you split your time between New York and London. Care to share a secret hometown place or activity in either metropolis?

A: My life tends to revolve around what’s in front of me at the dinner table. In New York City, the bar at Tocqueville feels like a hidden escape, and breakfast at Balthazar feels like homeroom. At the end of the day, I always want to eat everything on the menu at L’Artusi. In London, I love Del Parc in Tufnell Park (of all places!), where two men cook and serve delicious Spanish/North African small plates from a closet-sized kitchen in the middle of the tiny dining room. And I love Moro, but who doesn’t?

Q: What are your favorite places to travel?

A: Sometimes I travel to feel familiar in a foreign setting. I could spend every weekend at Lo Scoglio on the Amalfi Coast and never tire of it. Similarly, I lived in Paris in college, and going back is like visiting an old friend. Other times, I travel for the difference and the discovery. Recent revelations include desolate and dramatic Salta, in northwest Argentina, and Sri Lanka, where I spent an incredible day on Taprobane Island. I loved Syria, and I hope it can recover from its political tumult and be the great country it should be.

Q: Where are you planning to travel next? And where are you dying to go?

A: Oh, the never-ending list. The wish list for the next few months includes Lake Austin Spa, Bighorn Revelstoke, Cartagena, and Portugal’s Douro Valley. I was married last year and am hoping for an eventual honeymoon in Chile. It’s my great embarrassment that I’ve never been to Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. Zambia. Shanghai and Hong Kong. I’m obsessed with the Canadian Maritime Provinces. And in case my husband reads this, yes, honey, I’m dying to go to Tokyo, too.

Q: Where do you have no interest in ever visiting?

A: Cuba. I think I missed it. Though if an opportunity presented itself, of course I’d go. I’m curious about everything.

Q: Give us a travel tip or secret. Or five.

A: 1. Never eat airplane food. 2. You won’t use 50 percent of the stuff you’re packing, so leave it at home. 3. Find a local market to get a real flavor for a place. 4. It’s easier to go away than you think it is. And it’s always worth it. 5. I watch the sunrise on the last morning of every trip I take. I’m not suggesting that you do this; I am suggesting that you invent a travel ritual that you can share with yourself everywhere you go.

Q: What’s next for Pavia Rosati?

A: More sunrises in new places, and sharing them on Fathom.

Did you enjoy this Q&A? Check out previous Gadling Q&As with travelers like Jodi Ettenberg, Zora O’Neill, and Philippe Sibelly.

[Image: Jimmy Gilroy]