Learning a language can be one of the most rewarding experiences ever—and it does take work.

There’s no avoiding putting in the time, studying the vocabulary, and practicing the grammar but there are ways to make it fun and expedite the learning process.

With well over a thousand years of history, the Czechs have only been doing their own thing for twenty-eight short years. This landlocked country in the heart of Europe, filled with rolling, green hills, castles, pork sausage, and good beer — pilsners being invented in and named after Pilsen, Czech Republic — is as historic as it is beautiful, and the future is looking up.

The Czech Republic isn’t an economic powerhouse at the moment, not quite cracking the top ten in the EU, but doesn’t have the debt problems that plague many other European nations. …

Anthony Bourdain actively hated on vegans and vegetarians at any opportunity and constantly talked about the beauty of pork, so, being a hardcore vegan loony, why is he my hero?

I get asked this question often and the first thing is that he was an influence on me way before I went vegan. Personally, I’ve been obsessed with the man since I was around 17. I bought a flat-screen television on my sixteenth birthday, shortly after we had moved to a new house and FINALLY got cable TV. (Yes, we grew up without cable.) Those high school years, with my…

Slivovice is the clear plum liquor that is — unofficially — the official drink of Moravia in the Czech Republic. Well, it’s the unofficial beverage in many places in Central and Eastern Europe. One could make the argument, however, that Moravia, and in particular the eastern, Wallachian region, is the king of the hill.

There may be small counties in Poland, Slovakia, or Serbia that could do it this well, but there’s strong evidence to suggest that nobody is doing it better than the Wallahians.

I recently went to that region of the Czech Republic to distill it. I helped…

In my junior year of high school, I was in carpentry class. I was lucky to go to one of those awesome, public schools in small-town America where everyone was on a first-name basis, most of the teachers doubled as coaches in some capacity, and we still had woodshop and metal shop classes.

The Introduction to Woodworking class was about half female students but all the other shop-related classes, were complete boys’ clubs, with half the class hiding chewing tobacco in their lip and others secretly using the lathe to make pipes to smoke weed.

Many of the students worked…

Growing up in Upper Michigan the winters were unbearably long. Thanks to the Great Lakes, they’re longer winters than in much of Canada. They’re — trick-or-treating with snow pants under your costume and Memorial Day Parades with melting, sand-covered snowbanks on the street — long.

A winter that takes up most of the year inevitably creates a painfully short summer and that means a short, hectic wedding season.

We grew up in a tight-knit church and had an extremely large family, so there were always weddings. Way too many of my childhood summer Saturdays were spent back in church, listening…

Gray wispy clouds mute the tone of the thirsty yellow grass, crunching under his well-worn boots. Where did you go? Keeping his head low in his collar, he scans the stones near the large, solitary oak, its remaining leaves pinching on for dear life. He remembered it was close, but not the color, and the field is sprinkled with hundreds. A family survives making these stones, carving and engraving each one with a special message, two special days. One day loved ones come to circle the stones in mourning, dressed in the shadows of grief. That’s the last time he…

Throughout high school and college, my friends and I worked at a pizzeria cooking and delivering food. It was a fun experience and got us all into cooking as a hobby but the delivering could get weird.

We’d drive to super rural cabins and have to trudge down long driveways in knee-deep snow. People sometimes didn’t have the money and tried to barter. We’d often deliver to our old high school or, even worse, to our university. We’d bring food to crowded bars, shouting, having to ask every drunk patron if they ordered pizza. …