Looking for good food? Try Chow.com

Chowhound started as a small message board where people discussed food. It was purchased by CNet about a year ago and relaunched as Chow.com. The website has been glossed up a bit, but thankfully the best feature (the message boards) has remained intact.

There is lively discussion about everything from chain restaurants in Arizona to street food in Southwestern China. The message board participants are an educated bunch and I found the site to be useful during my recent Round the World Trip. In fact, a couple of my more memorable dining experiences were a result of the Chowhound.

Enjoy, and please let me know if you find anything good on there.

Getting around New York City with Hopstop

If for some reason you live in New York and haven't heard about Hopstop, it is one of the more useful websites for living in the city.

Simply enter your starting and ending address a la Google maps and Hopstop will pull up the best route on the Subway to get from Point A to Point B. You can specify whether you would like more transfers or more walking, and you can even calculate how much a taxi ride would cost for the same trip. Additionally, you can use Hopstop with your PDA or with SMS.

It isn't just New York that has Hopstop. Boston, Chicago, San Fran and DC also in the mix. There a couple other versions (Long Island and Jersey) in beta at the moment.

Hopstop is great, although it can't help you much if there is a monsoon in the city like there was this morning.

What's going on with Fungwah?

I like to consider myself one of the original Fungwah bus riders. I have been taking the Fungwah since it was a mere $10 (now its $15) and long before they had a spot in South Station in Boston. I had some interesting rides; one included being pulled over on Route 95 with a busload of 30 people, another involved a driver brushing up on his English for the entire four hour trip.

But nothing compares to my trip on Friday. I made it on the 3:30 bus where the branding of the bus was conspicuously absent. I didn't think too much of it until I sat down and took a look around. This clearly wasn't a "Chinese" bus as there was a USSR flag and signed poster of the Olympic hockey team. Hmmm... Things got even more interesting when our bus driver (named Boris) arrived in his leather vest that had such things as an American flag, his name tag, and Route 66 patch sewn on.

Boris wasn't the friendliest of fellows telling his passengers that we would arrive "verry verry verry late." He pulled over in the middle of Connecticut for no apparent reason, yelled at people if they stood up, and passed about a mile of traffic before squeezing himself in to merge onto Route 84. Boris also refused to turn the AC off and was working about two cellphones and his CB radio (in Russian). He finally acquiesced to stop for a break about 4 and a half hours into the trip. When we did stop and I inquired to how long it would take, he refused to give a range. Five and a half hours after leaving NY we arrived. His final dispatch on the loudspeaker, "Arriving South Station, Boston. Next stop, New York," as if some of us were going to make the return trip with him.

Pulling into South Station, the Fungwah employees seemed thrilled to see Boris, as if there were a 50/50 chance that he would show.

Just another trip on the Fungwah.