Molvania: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry (Jetlag Travel Guide)

As a Molvanian native, I thought at first that this is yet another one of those soulless Western monographs, good only to patronize and condescend to the locals. Imagine my surprise then when, on close scrutiny, I found how the team at JETLAG has managed to compile an accurate and actually useful guide, an opus that will serve well all travelers, past and future, to Molvania and beyond. I find that the maps especially are a treat in their accuracy and detail, especially considering that you cannot buy maps in Molvania proper. Details of cuisine and local customs are also accurately captured, and their flavor stays with you even longer than the hangover. There is one omission in this travel guide, however, one that I hope will be addressed in future editions: a section addressing the needs of business travelers is sorely lacking, and visiting business persons will find that they need all the help they can get while transacting their affairs with Molvanian tycoons. Otherwise, a well deserved five stars. PS - To all Molvanians and neighboring natives who have spoken negatively on this one: please lighten up, this is a fine read (two minutes at a time), one of the best jokes related to that part of the world, enjoy it!

As a Molvanian native, I thought at first that this is yet another one of those soulless Western monographs, good only to patronize and condescend to the locals. Imagine my surprise then when, on close scrutiny, I found how the team at JETLAG has managed to compile an accurate and actually useful guide, an opus that will serve well all travelers, past and future, to Molvania and beyond. I find that the maps especially are a treat in their accuracy and detail, especially considering that you cannot buy maps in Molvania proper. Details of cuisine and local customs are also accurately captured, and their flavor stays with you even longer than the hangover. There is one omission in this travel guide, however, one that I hope will be addressed in future editions: a section addressing the needs of business travelers is sorely lacking, and visiting business persons will find that they need all the help they can get while transacting their affairs with Molvanian tycoons. Otherwise, a well deserved five stars - especially that hey have used my picture for the book cover. PS - To all Molvanians and neighboring natives who have spoken negatively on this one: please lighten up, this is a fine read (two minutes at a time), one of the best jokes related to that part of the world, enjoy it!

A brilliant parody of travel writing and a merciless satire of more ridiculous aspects of Eastern Europe, this is a healthy cold shower in a deluded world of bleeding-heart intellectuals pretending to admire every place on earth as long as it is not America. Having been born in Lithuania and freely confessing of my Eastern European heritage (which some consider offended by this humorous book), I say this to you: yes, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh at unfamiliar cultures, especially if there is no evidence that a country may offer a great deal of objectively valuable material to admire. After all, the Eastern Europeans (and pretty much everyone else) laugh at America, UK, Western Europe and their neighbours. It is called harmless fun. It is acceptable precisely because it is harmless. And there is nothing wrong with making fun of filthy toilets, lame "ethnic" restaurants, bumpy roads, grotty hotels and pathetic parochial "landmarks" that are of no serious interest to anyone in the world. Condescending? Maybe. Do the countries of the authors of this book also have ridiculous and stupid things? Absolutely. In the world before political correctness, it was acceptable to laugh at things which were funny. Of course, this arrangement did have its downside: occasionally people would get offended. It is like skiing: sometimes you fall down, and may even get hurt. But skiing is fun, that's why people do it. And humour is like that, and should be like that. If it is worth anything at all, humour may - and will - offend at times. A humour which is incapabale of offending is also incapable of making people laugh. It is doubly acceptable and admirable to poke fun at writers of similar literature who write this kind of stuff about real countries, because they do not even have an excuse of ignorance. The self-important, talentless, annoying bores (about half of them work for Lonely Planet, others are equally distributed between all the remaining guidebook publishers), who are on the shining path of setting the world right, deserve every bit of ridicule that this book throws at them. This book is a long-awaited kick in the teeth to the entire lazy, cliche-happy, lowest-common-denominator industry of shamelessly bad travel writing, with its pathetic prefabricated babble about "narrow cobbled streets", "colorful markets" and "local character". You thought those half-witted authors with an imagination of a telemarketing copy writer could not be stopped? Well, now the tables have been turned. Enjoy the revenge.

I'm a Yank fortunate enough to have purchased and read this book almost a year ago while in New Zealand. Now I'm buying several copies for friends... It's spectacularly funny, very authentic in appearance -- look at every page carefully, the smallest details are some of the best, like the individual street names on the city maps, and those are mostly in about a six-point font. Simply said, I was reading this book in public, and was laughing so hard I started to cry. I decided I couldn't read it in public anymore. Here's to hoping that some of the promised sequels are really on their way to the publisher as I write...

The three authors have created a brilliant parody of those travel books that always have a slightly optimistic edge to the copy despite the country they are writing about possibly being a bit of a third-rate dump. The contents follow the usual format, a brief survey of Molvanian history, geography, culture, food and drink, theatre and the arts, how to get there etc, etc and as this is Molvania there are some useful words on crime and ATMs. The rest of the book is devoted to a full description of the five regions with information about the main towns, hotels, where to eat and what to see. In fact just what you would expect to see in any travel guide and this is why I think the book is just stunning, it looks so convincing. The attention to detail has paid off, with little colour code squares on the edge of each page, central area street maps of each town, hotel references (with those little symbols for bed, phone, karaoke or toxic spa) the use of bold type in the text to emphasise things to see or do, color panels with Traveller's Tips, dozens of photos obviously carefully chosen to depict negative aspects of the country and at the back an index, a detailed map of Molvania and a map of the capital (Lutenblag) transport system. It just looks so real and I think it is a tribute to the authors that they have managed to keep the parody text credible to the last page. As is usual with travel guides the publishers have a plug for their titles, other Jetlag Travel Guides include, for instance, 'Let's Go Bongoswana' (formerly known as Belgium East Congo) 'Surviving Moustaschistan' (Central Asia's forgotten jewel, tucked between the break-away Soviet state of Kalashnikov and the former Persian province of Carpetstan) or how about 'Sailing the Syphollos Straits (another forgotten jewel near the oil-drenched capital of Port Halitosis) I haven't quoted any of the great stuff in this book, you can get a flavor of this by going to Molvania (via Google) to see some pages from the book but here is a useful phrase, "Sprufki doh craszko" (What is that smell?)