Word: laking
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When chef Donald Berger opened his first restaurant in Hanoi six years ago, he chose the unlikely district of West Lake (or, in Vietnamese, Tay Ho). Except for rows of dog-meat restaurants, the area didn't offer much in the way of dining - certainly not of the international variety that foreign residents and travelers were starting to seek out. "There was nothing here," says Berger. "People said I was a moron." But today, West Lake is home to cafés, bars and high-end restaurants - among them top names that have relocated from the chic French Quarter...
...superintendent to lift a decades-old ban on the use of flotation devices like boogie boards on the city's waterways. (The ordinance was established to prevent accidental drownings; government officials were chiefly concerned about liability and the prospect that novice swimmers, imitating highly skilled surfers, might leap into Lake Michigan, especially in harsh winter conditions.) The move will effectively legalize surfing in the heart of the Midwest and make Chicago an unlikely beachfront in the war to extend surfing's influence across the country. (See 10 things to do in Chicago...
...robust beaches. This spring, Chicago opened its newest beach, on the South Side, and a former resident of the South Side - the city's favorite adopted son, Hawaiian-born President Barack Obama - is a surfer, although it's hard to imagine him ever taking to the shores of Lake Michigan. The city's beaches have more than a century's worth of history. In the 1890s, a group of prominent Chicagoans, including doctors and businessmen, lobbied for the creation of public beaches along Lake Michigan, in part so working-class residents would have access to clean bathing water...
Those differences, however, don't matter much to Midwestern surfers. Last December, Vince Deur, co-chair of the Surfrider Foundation's chapter here, took a group of friends to the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The air temperature was about 25 degrees. A winter storm covered much of the lake, sending fierce winds from the north to create waves nearly 2 ft. above Deur's head. "The waves," he recalls, "had some nice shape and power." "But look," he continues, "we know that in the world of great surfing, as far as quality goes, we're at the bottom...
...really make sure money stays in the community is through creating a local currency. Christian Gelleri, a former Waldorf high school teacher in the Lake Chiem area in Germany, has launched a regional currency, the Chiemgauer, equivalent in value to the Euro. According to Gelleri, the Chiemgauer, accepted at more than 600 businesses in the region and with about $3,000,000 Euros worth in circulation, has three times the velocity of the Euro, circling through the economy an average of 18 times a year as opposed to 6. One reason for the fast turnaround is that the Chiemgauer...