I’m doing the usual traveler’s thing: While I’m in one place, I’m thinking of another.

So, now that the cold wind of a Beijing below freezing is blowing around me, I am feeling reminded of Austria’s Pannonian East, and thinking back to the time I spent in the Baltics, in Riga, Latvia.

Strange place it was, somehow still backwards and somehow jumping ahead in some respects because of that, somehow with a rather unexciting kitchen, but all the more attentive to all the bounty that nature could offer.

And it all comes together at the Centraltirgus, the central market that is hosted in and around the former Zeppelin hangars of the town: