Saigon Street Food, Marginalia, Layover Trips, Beatrix Potter & More: Endnotes 12 April

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

We recently ate fantastic Saigon street food. Alas, it was not actually in Vietnam — it was in Berlin at Đistrict Một. The colorful, welcoming restaurant is just a short walk from the amazing museums on Museum Island. Between devouring Egyptian relics at the Neues Museum (Hello, Nefertiti, Berlin Green Head, and Berlin Gold Hat!) and our train ride back to Prague, we stuffed ourselves with flavorful, eye-popping food. We started with Vietnamese pizza made from a crisp round of rice paper, then moved onto a pork sandwich with pickled veggies served on a neon-pink rice bun (!) and a pile of char-grilled ribs on a bed of rice with a perfectly cooked egg. We urge you to stop in there, should you find yourself in Berlin — and until then, here’s a video of the restaurant and other great eating in Berlin with the chef from Đistrict Một.

• There are some fun ideas in this post about five ways to annotate your books. Heck, yeah, Marginalia!

• I haven’t read E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India yet, but this personal essay about reading the classic 100 years after its publication.

• How Beatrix Potter Hopped Into Our Hearts. ‘An exhibition at the Morgan Library pays tribute to the illustrator’s prowess as a naturalist, storyteller, mycologist, and sheep farmer.’

• Amazing!

• Take a bite of this: the rise and fall of the Devon split. ‘Cream runs thick in Devonian blood… the small number of dishes considered to be Devonian often involve dairy, like junket topped with clotted cream, Devonian cream tea, and the Devon (or Devonshire) split: a sweetened bun filled with whipped cream and topped with a dot of strawberry jam…’

• Here are 8 places you can turn a layover into a fun part of your trip. ‘When you’re traveling great distances, you often take connecting flights to intriguing destinations without getting a real chance to experience the culture… A few airlines have been working to change that by running stopover programs. These initiatives allow travelers to tack more time on their layover at no extra charge, and sometimes even include a free or discounted hotel stay.’

• This Instagram account devoted to Italian bakery papers is eye-popping and makes me hungry for fresh bread.

• This is cool: changing fonts and page layouts in books is saving trees.

• Remember when Dave talked about the memoir West with the Night in our podcast episode about Kenya? JStor’s got a nice article about Beryl Markham, the ‘warrior of the skies.’

• Hey-oh! Here’s an ode to the Prague defenestrations. ‘Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances… Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy.’

• From the art magazine Hyperallergic: 12 Graphic Novels to Read This Spring.

• This is an amazing piece of writing and confirms all I thought about this new mega cruise ship. Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever.

• New UNESCO sites are always cause for celebration, and these 18 new Global Geoparks look amazing. ‘Created in 2015, the UNESCO Global Geopark designation aims to recognise and protect the world’s geological heritage with international significance. The latest countries to receive one or more geoparks in 2024 include Belgium, Brazil, China, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Spain.’

• Here’s a fun reading list of 6 mysteries about translators.

May your true meaning never be lost in translation.

Top image courtesy of Hiep Nguyen/Unsplash.