Hertz’s computers see “PE” (for “Prince Edward Island”) and mistakenly interpret “Peru.”

I’m off at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to spend the week with my colleagues at Yankee in Dublin, NH.

I’ll be there until Saturday and them I’m heading down to Boston for the night and then flying down-and-back on Sunday to New York City for a printing workshop at The Arm. Monday morning I’ll fly back to the Island.

Expect the usual range of “Air Canada is such a horrible airline,” “complaining about the pillows” and “odd things about New Englanders” posts and tweets for the next week as a result.

For a long time my favourite newspaper columnist on Prince Edward Island was Len Russo. I never completely understood where Len came from, or what he did for a living (can you make an income as a weekly columnist on PEI – if so, sign me up!). But boy could he write a column.

I met Len for the first time when he walked into Catherine Hennessey’s old house on Dorchester Street one Saturday afternoon.

I was sitting at the kitchen table talking to Catherine about something or another and Len walked in a started, unbidden, making focaccia (it was very good). And then he left.

From then on I would see Len from time to time in Catherine’s kitchen. But mostly I knew Len from his weekly column in the Eastern Graphic.

And my favourite column of Len’s was the one that appeared in the September 23, 1998 edition of the Graphic, titled All juiced up and ready to go! Publisher Paul MacNeill was kind enough to give me permission to reprint it here:

Not that long ago, PEI was still so removed from the trendy cuisine scene that you couldn’t even find a bell pepper on most rural foodstore shelves.

The leading dish at Island restaurants used to be the hot chicken sandwich swamped with gravy.

Up until the late 1960s it wasn’t unusual I’m told, for teenage girls to go with their moms to the Woolworth’s soda fountain in Charlottetown on a Friday night to order some French fries, and they would thing of this as “a night out.”

As for haute cuisine - there was a dish called the “scallop bubbly bake.”

But the times were a-changin.

One of the pathfinders who led PEI into the age of trendy cuisine was Ted Gamauf of Rustico who came upon an item called the home-made pizza pie somewhere in Maine I think Ted or a friend of his was going to college there.

Ted was so impressed with the homemade pizza pie that he pried the recipe out of the chef, and soon he was opening his own pizzeria in Charlottetown. A new era had begun. The hot chicken sandwich had competition.

Trendy food items were soon popping up on local restaurant menus: things like “garlic breadsticks” and “carrot cake” and a dish called “quiche” which people at first had more trouble pronouncing than eating. (A fellow arrived at a restaurant one time and he told the waitress to bring him some of that there kwitch. He meant quiche.)

Yes, the times were a-changin’.

Today, trendy cuisine can be found across PEI. We have our own culinary school, our own televised cooking lessons with Chef Roger on Thursday nights, our own specialty ice cream, even our own winery. Haute cuisine is available in places from from Fortune to Tyne Valley.

Many a rural gas bar nowadays sell cappuccino, and city coffee shops have discovered buttery croissants.

And now this:

A juice bar opened this summer on Lower Queen Street in Charlottetown. It has just 14 seats and offers pure-blended juices made from a list of fruits and vegetables that reads like an agriculture report from the Caribbean.

It is run by two young people named Wayne and Karen who look as if they just stepped off a surfboard. They are trim and sunny and healthy-looking, not to mention glowing with Vitamin C.

The juice bar is called Just Juicin’. And if you happen to ask Wayne what this juicin’ is all about …beware, the fellow goes evangelical.

“It’s a California thing,” he says. “It’s just hittin’ in Toronto…”

(And PEI as well, it seems.)

As he delivers the pitch, it becomes clear that what we’re talking about here is healthy living.

“Health is wealth,” Wayne says. “It’s very important for people to start taking ownership of…”

All right, already! Hallelujah! Pour me some pure­blended juice!

He hands me a cup with a dome-shaped lid and a straw, and I drink the concoction down.

We’ve come a long way from the days of the hot chicken sandwich.

Just Juicin’ has come and gone, of course, and the latest incarnation of the space on Lower Queen Street that it once occupied is the new Zen Sushi restaurant. With that, and the four Taiwanese tea houses, the two Korean restaurants, and the three Asian grocery stores, I doubt Len would recognize today’s Prince Edward Island.

(A side-note about process: I remember the column clearly, but has no notion of when it ran. So I went to the Province of PEI Corporations directory and found that Just Juicin’ was originally registered in 1998. I then went up to the Robertson Library at UPEI at started scrolling through the microfilm of the Eastern Graphic starting in 1998; didn’t take me too long to get to the September 23 issue. I then used their nifty digital microfilm scanner to scan the column, emailed it to myself using GMail and, when I got back to the office, ran the Google Docs OCR machine over it to extract the text)

Can someone explain to me the logistics and economics of Halifax radio station advertising that’s inserted into selected cable channels – CNN and Peachtree seem to have it the most – in place of ads from the networks themselves?

Back in 1984 I had the pleasure of spending several years working part-time with Dr. Chris McGowan at the Royal Ontario Museum. Chris retired recently, and he’s now penned a book for children called Abacus:

Abacus is an adventure story in which 12-year-old AP, who’s into science, travels through time with Kate, his 15-year-old sister. Kate thinks her geeky brother is a waste of space, but when he uses science to get them out of trouble, she starts changing her mind. Their journeys take them to medieval England, the Wild West, and to ancient Egypt, where AP’s science is seen as magic. And stalking them on every trip is a hooded stranger whose attacks show he’ll do anything to stop them.

I’ve just ordered a copy (it fits well with Oliver’s current interest in both time travel and dinosaurs).

There’s a story about my great-grandfather Ed Caswell in this week’s Cochrane Times-Post. The story begins:

As we mark the centennial of Cochrane’s incorporation this year, there are many builders, business leaders, parents, and politicians who could be celebrated and cited as critical to the town’s creation and endurance. When we recognize that the town’s survival through the gritty early years was really a function of the collective efforts of many seemingly ordinary people, it becomes particularly difficult to point to a single hero. There were many. But if we had to pick one exemplary fellow to represent the group, Ed Caswell would be a good choice.

What if the parking meters in Charlottetown were smarter?

A two-day visit to the city of Wolfsburg in northern Germany was the “you’re going to Wolfsburg… why?” highlight of our school break vacation last month.

So, why?

Because if you’re looking around Europe for activities for kids who like interactive museums you inevitably end up finding phaeno, the Zaha Hadid-designed science centre that’s at the heart of the city. Our pump was already primed for phaeno; when I read on the Arrival page of its website that “It’s just 90 footsteps from Wolfsburg rail station to phæno. 47 steps from the bus stop. It’s the equivalent of 3,800 paces from the A39 motorway exit to the underground car park. From there it’s another 27 paces to the main entrance.” I was sold.

And once you start reading more about Wolfsburg, a day at phaeno inevitably leads to a day across the railway tracks at the Volkswagen theme park cum brand experience Autostadt.

So Wolfsburg it was to be.

We arrived on the train from Düsseldorf in the mid-afternoon on Friday. Given our rich hotel tastes for the following week in Berlin, I booked three nights at the youth hostel (at €43 a night for a private room, breakfast included, it was a great deal). It turned out to be a pleasurable, if somewhat spartan, experience: the staff were great, the room, with bunk beds and a sink, was comfortable, warm, and clean, the washrooms across the hall were sparkling clean; the breakfast wasn’t lavish, but it was enough to get us going. And how can you not like a place that features foosball, pool and ping pong tables.

Staying at a hostel was not without its hoops: there were no towels provided, for example (rectified by a quick trip to the Müller department store downtown on our first night), I had to leave my driver’s license as a deposit against the front door key, and we had to bus our own tables in the breakfast room. But it was hardly the prison-like existence we feared it might be.

For supper we headed to the Lika Grill, a restaurant I stumbled across by using the “explore” feature of Nokia Maps on my [[Nokia N95]]. My grandfather was born in the Croatian province of Lika, so this seemed pre-destined.

We had a huge meal of ćevapčići – more meat that I’d eaten in the previous six months combined – that brought back memories of my 1972 trip with my brother and parents to Croatia where ćevapčići was what we ate every night (my mother having convinced we picky eaters that it was “just like hamburgers”). As it happens, the parents of one of the the proprietors lives in Burlington, Ontario, so we had lots of “it’s a small world” to talk about as we were on our way out.

Saturday we headed off to phaeno first-thing and we ended up spending 8 hours there and were never bored.

The building is stunning: a fluid, jauntily-angled building that’s entirely without right angles.

The exhibits – there are 300 of them – range from the expected “build an arch and walk over it” that you find in many science centres, to unusual ones like “play ping pong with your brain waves” that truly rocked my world. There’s a science lab where we looked at Oliver’s cheek cells under a microscope, an “age machine” where you can see what you’ll like like as an old woman, a talking robot, a stop-motion Lego animation machine, and much, much more. The restaurant is family-optimized (we had fresh-made pizza, litchi drink and chocolate pudding; doesn’t get much better than that for Oliver), and everything is in both German and English. We’ve been to a lot of science centres – I went to high school in one – and phaeno is the best we’ve ever encountered.

Saturday night we were tired and happy and after a quick meal of Vietnamese food downtown we fell fast asleep in our hostel home.

Sunday morning it was off to Autostadt. If you’ve experienced the “concept stores” that brands like Nokia and Nike have established in larger cities, and can imagine that phenomenon spread out over many acres and involving cars rather than shoes, than you’ve a lead on understanding what Autostadt is.

Wolfsburg is a Volkswagen company town: it’s a city of 120,000 people with more than 40,000 of them working for VW. You notice this not only from the VW factory campus that looms large over the city as you step of the train, but also from the cars on the streets of the city: almost every single one was a VW. And those that weren’t were Audis, SEATs, or other VW-owned brands.

Autostadt is a sprawling collection of exhibition halls, restaurants, architect-designed brand-themed pavillions (one for each VW Group brand: Bugati, SEAT, Škoda, VW, Lamborghini, Audi) all set in a patchwork of lagoons and canals.

And we spent the day there.

Oliver got his “driver’s license” in the Fahrschule (tiny VW Beetles with video screens that lead kids through the basics of the rules of the road), we saw a 360-degree film shot in Iceland about “risk” and an planetarium-like film about “seasons,” saw examples of every year in automotive history in the auto museum, bought Japanese snacks from a Japanese vending machine, sat inside a Audi R8 and a Škoda Roomster, rode up the 20 storey Car Tower, got shaken around in a VW-themed “Mission to Mars”-like simulator and had coffee and cake in a café overlooking the place where Germans can come and pick up their factory-fresh VW.

Autostadt is weird and perhaps not entirely explainable in words. While its certainly “about cars” – and there are plenty of cars around – it’s even more about “brand” and the fact that I own a VW and am likely in the exact heart of the VW demographic likely made me perhaps more susceptible to the allures of the place.

One way or the other, though, it was lots of fun and I’d highly recommend the experience, especially if you share the demographic with me.

For supper we headed up to the same street where we’d eaten at Lika Grill two nights before and found Taj Mahal, a very nice Indian restaurant with an extremely accommodating host. And then it was back again to the hostel to rest up for the travel day on Monday.

Monday morning we were up early, stripped the bedding off our beds (per hostel protocol), had a quick breakfast and were at the train station for the 9:55 train to Berlin.

[[Oliver]] and I had a wonderful four days in Berlin last week. From our base at Casa Camper we ferreted out all manner of maximum fun, either by random chance, through Google Local on Oliver’s Nintendo DSi (he found us a great sushi place to eat on our first night), or using berlin.unlike on my iPod Touch.  Keywords “Berlin für Kinder” proved quite useful. Here’s are the highlights of what we found.

Kindermuseum MACHmit!

Hidden away inside a church in Prenzlauer Berg just 10 minutes walk from the Rosenthaler Platz U-bahn station, MACHmit is obscured from the regular tourism literature by promoting itself entirely in German. And it is a museum entirely in German, from the entrance kiosk through the signage. But a combination of gesticulation and common sense got us through, and it was a wonderful experience.

Housed in a cavernous former church, MACHmit has a ground floor of cultural exhibits – an igloo, a yurt, a model druggist, a hospital room – along with (to my delight) a complete working letterpress print shop (not working, alas, due to illness of the printer on the day we were there). The volume of the church is consumed by a 3 dimensional maze slash climbing gym slash rabbit warren that’s three stories tall and able to hold oodles of kids (think Mcdonald’s playland but made out of wood and way, way more fun). Behind the climbing structure is a light-filled café for the parents to sit and read the paper over beer or coffee while their children climb.

We ended up spending a few hours at MACHmit and it was, I think, the highlight of our trip to Berlin.

Science Center Spectrum

Part of the Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin (the science and technology museum), Spectrum is a standalone building located across the courtyard from the main building holding the usual planes, trains and rocketships. Over four floors they’ve a nice, compact, well-designed set of the sort of science and technology exhibits you’ll see at places like the Ontario Science Centre and the Exploratorium – simple machines, sound vision, astronomy – along with some unusual ones like sections devoted to rotography and surveillance.  Admission to Spectrum is included in the ticket for the larger museum (which is in itself an interesting way to spend some time, especially for its full print shop and paper-making demonstrations; the planes and the trains, however, are easily passed by unless you’re into that kind of thing). The museum is a short walk from the Möckernbrücke U-bahn.

Ritter Sport Chocolate World

The new “concept store” for the square Ritter Sport chocolate brand that’s spread around the world. The initial pull here was the promise of a 75 minute Chocoworkshop for kids, the limitations of which I appreciated:

The idea at the RITTER SPORT CHOCOWORKSHOP is to give children plenty of room to exercise their very own creativity. This is best accomplished when they are accompanied by peers and without the presence of mom, dad, grandma, grandpa or uncles – and naturally, under expert educational guidance. Please understand that adults therefore only have very limited access to the “children’s realm”, for example as school class chaperones.

Alas the workshops were fully booked (you can book online on their website, but the final portions of the process are in German, so have Google Translate handy).

We did, however, enjoy the tiny (Ritter Sport-focused) chocolate museum, the chocolate shop, and especially the “two croissants accompanied by any Ritter Sport chocolate flavour you desire, melted.”  At the front of the shop there’s a “design your own Ritter Sport chocolate bar” area that we only spotted on our way out the door. So a reason to return.

Museum für Kommunikation Berlin

This “museum for communication” operated by the post office is pleasantly free of the “and then came the horses” complete survey of postal history that we’ve found in other postal museums (yes, we’ve been to a lot of postal museums; yes, we are weird) and is instead a sort of visual symphony celebrating communications through the lens of the post office, with a smattering of old post boxes and franks.

By far and away the highlight of the museum, however, are the three autonomous robots that inhabit the cavernous piazza of the ground floor of the building. One will have a conversation with you, one chases around a large orange ball, and so on. I’ve no idea what the topical relevance of the robots are, but they are very neat and we had a lot of fun chasing them around.

Kreuzberg Museum

Located in the heart of the Kreuzberg neighbourhood, this is a locally-focused museum with exhibits on the district, on immigration, on urban design, and, again to my surprise and delight, containing a fully operational letterpress shop offering workshops for kids. The museum is spread over four floors, and has the same rough-and-ready flavour that the neighbourhood has. The highlight of the museum is the cardboard model of the neighbourhood, with Viewmasters tethered to interesting points and showing historical images of the scenes in the model. Admission is free and it’s an excellent way to anchor a wander through Kreuzberg.

Kinderbauernhof

We found this tiny child-focused farm while wandering through Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg near sunset. The park is huge, and contains football fields, several playgrounds, forested areas with walking trails and bicycle paths. On our way out of the park we spotted the sign for the farm and then spent a very pleasant 30 minutes wandering around with the ponies, goats, sheep, and ducks.

There’s more to the farm than meets the eye: they offer a homework club, bicycle repair workshop, cooking workshops, an “intercultural garden,” and waffles on Sunday. This is the kind of thing that every neighbourhood needs.

Berlin itself…

Berlin itself is simply interesting to walk around. From our base in Mitte, for example, it was a few blocks to an excellent magazine store (with a great selection of kids books and magazines that kept Oliver entertained), an amazing stationary store, and innumerable places, hidden away around alleys and in courtyards, to get a coffee or a snack or a meal.