One of the most rewarding aspects of living in another country is the little cultural moments in your daily routine.

In Japan, we had to think really hard about taking out the trash.

In the Netherlands, we made a point to stop and pick up the occasional six-pack at one of the local beer breweries in South Limburg — Alfa Brouwerij.

There were other local places making beer, of course.

The folks at Gulpener Bierbrouwerij sponsored a fun volksmarch near my village; how can you argue with a glass of good beer after a breezy 5K hike?

Still, we ended up at Alfa because it was located on a thoroughfare we used a lot.

I think about them in the winter because that’s the time of year for their yummy, heavy-duty, darker brews like Super Dortmunder (”the strongest bottom-fermentation beer in the Netherlands” with alcohol at 7.5% - whew) and Bokbier, which is made in the fall for winter consumption.

On their Web site, Alfa takes great pride in how they use their brewery’s own spring water:

“To guarantee that no more beer is brewed than the permitted limit [of spring water useage] each individual bottle of Alfa beer has been numbered since March 1995. There are only 10 certified springs in the Netherlands – the ‘Alfa spring’ is the only one of them that is used for making beer.”

The breweries in Europe are also big on promotional glasses sold with pack of beer. You can find this sort of thing in the U.S., but usually only at liquor stores and not that often.

At the Alfa brewery, my six-pack of Super Dortmunder could be purchased with a special glass that was designed to accentuate the drinking experience of that particular beer, just like specialized wine glasses.

As you can see from the photo, some of my Alfa glasses are looking a bit tatty from being jammed in the dishwasher instead of handwashed.

I raise a glass to all local breweries, wherever they are, and ask that our beer drinking readers patronize their own hometown or regional establishment. It helps to make a place special.

Technorati tags: travel, the Netherlands, beer, bier, beer making, Alfa Brouwerij, Limburg, Dutch brewery

While I was spending time navigating Tokyo with a ‘tween awhile back, my daughter and I attempted a half-day climb of Mt. Fuji.

Although it didn’t end the way we’d planned, we both still enjoyed the challenge, so I wrote a guest post about climbing Fuji-san for Away.com.

They are part of a network that includes Outside magazine online and GORP, short for Great Outdoor Recreation Pages.

The climbing season for Fuji is July and August.

If you’re in Japan for any length of time during those months, and you are in decent physical condition, I recommend attempting to summit. 

If you just want a quick ”touch and go” on the mountain, take a bus to the Fifth Station, walk around a little and skip the sore legs. :)

Mt. Fuji is a little over an hour southwest of Tokyo.

Here’s the weekly roundup of useful and fun travel tips and info….

North and South America

**   Follow Gene Pembroke as he blogs for Conde Nast Traveler’s Perrin Post about his now-in-progress trip to Antarctica.  Latest post:  The Southernmost Bar in the World.

**  Are you a nature lover and photographer?  Stay with my friend Mike Murphy at his Central Texas casita, Los Madrones.  Springtime is coming to Texas….eventually.

**  Gosh, can Thomas Swick write (he’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor.) I recommend one of his latest:  Still waters run deep in the (Florida) Everglades.  There are all sorts of lovely places in Florida (like shell paradise Sanibel Island) that are less well known than the Disney properties.  It makes me crazy, though, to see articles about Orlando that mostly talk about places that are NOT in Orlando (like Wekiwa Springs State Park and Cocoa Beach.)  Grrr….

**  From the Frommer’s travel forums, readers describe a perfect day in San Francisco.

**  In Arizona, view the night sky at Kitt Peak Observatory.

**  Follow the trail: of B&Bs celebrating Black History Month, of culinary adventures (especially if you end up at Maryland’s venerable Inn at Little Washington,) of Mardi Gras in the U.S. (even in Missouri) and nine bookstores worth a tourist stop.

Europe

**  Ah, Paris.  Two good links - “stupid, ill-prepared English chicks” attack the city (from the UK’s Guardian) and sage advice about a Paris museum pass from the Fly Away Cafe. Want more?  Meet the Paris bloggers.

Near East

**  So, what are they wearing in Azerbaijan?  (Thanks to Global Voices Online’s Onnik Krikorian for pointing me to this blog.)

Asia/Australia

**  Most military people that I know took a tour of the DMZ (De-Militarized Zone) if they were stationed in South Korea.  Here’s a CNN.com description of what to expect on a DMZ tour. 

**  Very cool; the Boston Red Sox will open their season in Japan.  Dice-K!

**  Check out the top 10 hotels in Kuala Lumpur, or even more local scoop from CJCM at the Kuala Lumpur is Home blog. 

**  It’s exhausting, but somebody had to do it: the blog-by-blog guide to Tokyo.

General/Worldwide

**  From the UK’s Times Online, the world’s best cycling holidays.  You can also travel the “ocean blue” by cargo vessel.  Cargo cruising is certainly different than your average cruise ship.

**  Finally, yes, I’ve noticed that Valentine’s Day is approaching.  Here are links to gay romantic breaks, romantic hotels for 2 and cities for seduction.  Or you could just stay at the historic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego CA.

There’s a little secret I keep to myself, roosting here in the Hudson River valley among migrants from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx: I don’t like New York City.

There, it’s out. Such a relief! But it’s not something I can say out loud among my neighbors. Most of them have never been anywhere else but Florida. Most of them will probably never have a reason to apply for a passport. To New Yorkers, life in New York City is the zenith of existence. I would say it’s the nadir, but I reserve that for Boston.

People tend to think of New York as one of the most — if not the most — cosmopolitan places on the planet. And it is, it is. In a way. Or maybe it was, once, and now the Little Italy and Chinatown districts just feel a little too much like a theme park. Little Russia (or Little Odessa, depending on where you’re from originally), I admit, still feels authentic. I go there to practice my Russian because English gets me nowhere. But when critics use the term “navel-gazing New Yorker,” you have to understand that they’re not just being caustic. New Yorkers — and yes, I generalize here, but I’m only talking about my experience — have an astounding lack of curiosity about the outside world. It baffles me. When I came back from two months in Moscow a few winters ago, my acquaintances (educated people who’d actually traveled a bit) tried really hard to be interested. I could see their brains working at it. Clunk, thunk, what can I ask that will show I am not only interested, but educated and aware? They meant well and I let them off the hook.

Everything here is seen through a prism of New York City, the center of the known universe. For an independent-minded person (read: crotchety snob from the rural Rockies), it’s frustrating. I am a writer. I live near New York. So obviously I came to New York to become a writer. Nope. I came because my husband’s company transferred him here. Truth is, I wish I could get away from New York to be a writer. There’s something stifling about the place, its self-feeding creativity, an endless loop crushed under the weight of writers and musicians and actors past, who all came to the city to release their creative juices. Nothing in the art world ever seems to be new here, just endless variations on the old, the shocking, the absurd.

It’s a weird feeling, being a Westerner on the US’s East Coast. It’s a different world. When I moved to Boston, the culture shock was such as I’d never experienced in any other country. It felt far more foreign. In New York, it’s more as if the rest of the country is just a vast rolling wasteland, as if I and the place I came from don’t exist except in panoramic Hollywood shots about cowboys.

The East/West US divide isn’t something people write about much, maybe because West Coasters really do migrate to New York because they love it, and the ones who don’t either stay put or migrate further West. But there are big differences that shouldn’t be boiled down to city versus country platitudes. New Yorkers really don’t know how to slow down, not the ones I’ve met. If they do relax, it’s with the feeling that they’re ticking an activity off a list: “Relaxed by beach this week; will get back to nature by visiting an organic farm next week.” All the time holding themselves, slightly tense for the next expected movement — to a new gallery opening or visiting their favorite soon-to-be-closed restaurant. It’s a lifestyle that evokes pity in me whenever I go home, to a place where life really is a little slower and people have an interest in where you’ve come from and where you’ve been because they assume that their back yard doesn’t hold it all.

I’ve lived here, sixty miles northwest of New York City, for over five years. And while I’ve visited many other countries in that time and bonded with new places and run either home to Montana or to the Scottish Highlands several times, I have to drag myself to the nearby metropolis because I’d really rather stay home. People who love New York to the point of cliché baffle me. Yes, it’s a big city, with diverse people from all over the world. But Sydney is a better melting pot. Moscow and Tokyo are more vibrant and energetic. London is more cultured. San Francisco has better food. Almost anywhere is more attractive.

But this is my role as a traveler, right? To understand the people of a place, to understand the place itself. I’m on a mission for the next couple years: to discover a love of New York. If I can’t make the effort to fathom the fascination of outsiders and the navel-gazing of my neighbors, I can’t call myself a travel writer.

I’ll start next week with revisiting the few places in Manhatten I really do like: the Public Research Library on Fifth Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Grand Central Terminal. But after that it’s time to branch out. I’m going to figure out what makes this bloody place tick if it bores me to death.

I’ll just say this straight out, so there’s no confusion: The World Without Us is not a depressing book.

Well, not entirely.

Called “one of the grandest thought experiments of our time” by revered nature/place writer Bill McKibben, The World Without Us sidesteps the calls to action over issues such as global warming and chemical manufacturing, and instead takes us to a place that no human will ever visit: a world in which the entire species has simply disappeared. Not done ourselves in through boiling the place or nuking one another or ingesting too many miniscule plastic grocery bag particles, but just gone.

What would happen? To answer the question, Weisman travels to places that represent the forefront of Industrial Revolution technology, and to places that are the last preserves of what the world looked like without our insatiable need to dominate nature and create waste.

Weisman walks into the Bialowieza Puszcza forest in Poland, virtually the only original ancient forest left in Europe, under constant threat from development. There, he asks how the forests would recover and reclaim their land without humans to constantly cut them back. He flies over Gambe Stream National Park in Tanzania, tracking the paths of elephants whose territory is shrinking in the face of housing development and an explosion of rose farming (note to self: being a person who prefers animals to people, I am never buying flower shop roses again).

He crosses Europe, notes the return of wildlife to the Chernobyl region, pokes around the miles of chemical and gasoline refining plants near Houston (awesome in their massiveness and arrogance), plans out the demise of the Panama Canal without people to maintain its locks, gives readers a glimpse of the precarious and unkown battle of New York City’s workers to keep the megalopolis’s head above water every time it rains, and floats to the great whirlpool of the Pacific where the planet’s millions of plastic grocery sacks, Styrofoam containers, Ziplock sandwich bags, and snippets of clingfilm end up — in short, the Earth’s plastic sewer.

Weisman did not intend this book to be a travel book. It is, as Bill McKibben described, a thought experiment. What will happen to balance out wildlife without the constant sprawl of human suburbs? How long will evolution take to develop a microbe that eats the plastic grocery bags that we each use by the thousands every year with abandon? What happens to a human body in a hermetically sealed, decay-proof coffin? (Answer: I’d rather rot under a tree, thanks.) But it succeeds in doing what the best of travel stories have always done. That is, to make us look at specks of our world in a different light — in this case, the light of what our wasteful natures hath wrought, and how long it would take to unwrought it if nobody were here to shoot the endangered tigers or fix our roofs.

The World Without Us is superbly written and endlessly fascinating. It takes us to corners of the world with little to tell but stories of past existence and the destruction unfettered wilfullness leads to. And how futile our industrial energy becomes when set against our own existence.

It’s a pity that the wilderness it ultimately shows us is one that will never appear in a glossy travel magazine.

(On the book’s website, Weisman has set up a GoogleEarth tour to virtually visit most of the places he traveled to. Along with the usual GoogleEarth perspective, the links give a little history and information about each location.)