This is a good thing, at least according to Balkan Travellers, an e-zine focused on travel in the volatile region. The world’s newest declared nation is tiny, landlocked, impoverished and a cauldron of tension, but it’s apparently also got lots of building projects (hence the “joyful noise"), good cafes and restaurants, a youthful population and even a tourism Web site.

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As an editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World, I spend a good chunk of my time following geographic changes around the globe. And the last year saw more than a few worth noting, from borders shifting—or even disappearing—to names changing and islands suddenly appearing. Herewith, my favorites from ‘07, starting with some good news.

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Alex Kapranos has traveled around the globe two and a half times as the lead singer of the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand. Along the way he ate a few things, and in 2005 and 2006 he sent back spare, vivid dispatches about those meals for a column in The Guardian. Those columns have been collected and combined with new material into a book of the same name: Sound Bites. In it Kapranos—who worked in a restaurant kitchen before hitting big with his band—reveals himself to be a fearless eater.

But “Sound Bites” is about more than meals. Food writing can be some of the most indigestible of the world’s purple prose, but Kapranos delivers deft, resonant and funny meditations on everything from the social nature of meals to the weight of tradition to the difference between travelers and tourists. 

“I don’t know how many times Prague has been invaded,” he writes, “but tonight it seems to have been invaded by wankers: British wankers, German wankers, North African wankers and American wankers. A tourist in his early 20s is explaining to another tourist in her early 20s that he is not a tourist: he is a ‘traveller’. They have a tourist map spread on the cafe table in front of them, by the English translation of the menu. He is saying that his experience is richer. He looks, smells and acts like a tourist. I don’t get it.”

“I’m a tourist,” Kapranos continues. “I tour the world. I don’t feel I have to excuse myself.”

Kapranos answered a few questions by e-mail from Canada, where he was recording ... and eating.

World Hum: Did you travel much before touring with Franz Ferdinand?

I was too skint to travel as much as I wanted to before I was in the band, but I did tour the punk squats of Holland and once drove a Land Rover Ambulance from Kosovo to Dumfries.

Can you tell anything about a place by the food people eat?

Yes, but it’s usually a mistake to judge people by what they eat. There is no good food in Berlin, but it’s one of the best cities in the world. If you go to great restaurants across the planet you’ll find the greatest food served by obnoxious people to obnoxious people.

You say that Athens street food is the best in the world. Any other places you like to eat on the street?

I love Osaka where there’s a street food called Takoyaki. They are delicious deep-fried octopus dumplings. A lot of Northern European cities serve hot chestnuts in winter, which make you feel it’s worth having numb feet and four hours of daylight just so you can enjoy them.

Any thoughts on why some places develop such fabulous food cultures, while others, well, you know who we’re talking about...

Access to ingredients must have something to do with it. That gives Iceland an excuse. The social role of eating also plays a part. In Greece families and friends gather round the dinner table, while in Scotland they gather in the pub. Moral Puritanism can screw things up too. Britain’s cuisine was ruined by the Victorians and their uptight sense of protestant guilt when encountering anything vaguely sensual, including food that tasted stronger than potatoes that had been boiled for six hours. Babette’s Feast is a film that explains it better than I ever could.

Your band mate Paul says that he’s at an age where if he hasn’t tried something, there’s probably a reason for it. Do you think you’ll ever reach that stage?

No, I’m too stupid. Paul’s smart enough to know when he won’t like something. I’ll always try it to make sure.

So if you had to be stranded in one city, food-wise, what would it be?

NYC. It’s the most cosmopolitan city on the planet. You can taste any flavour you want from anywhere if you look for it. Even good black pudding, although I haven’t found haggis here yet.

Your perfect day, breakfast, lunch and dinner anywhere in the world?

Breakfast: Las Manitas, Austin, Texas.

Lunch: Elias, Kardamyli, Greece.

Tea: Mother India, Glasgow, Scotland.

And your worst culinary nightmares?

Breakfast: Little Chef Motorway services, M1, England.

Lunch: Anywhere in Malmö, Sweden.

Tea: Subway, anywhere in the world.

You call yourself a gastro-adventurer. Do you have any advice for travelers about how to be adventurous eaters away from home?

Give it a go. What’s the worst that could happen? Well, it could be a tapeworm or dysentery, but if you survive you’ll be able to tell your pals all about it as they buy you drinks.

Any food you’d still like to try before you die?

Lutefisk. It can’t be as bad as people say it is, surely.

Frank Bures is the books editor of World Hum.

Related on World Hum:
* Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos on Fresh Air
* Why Am I Searching the World for Mexican Food?

We write often about how soccer explains the world. Here’s another post, one that tells the story of an amazing soccer team based in a small town near Atlanta. Team name: The Fugees. “The Fugees are indeed all refugees, from the most troubled corners—Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan,” writes Warren St. John in a front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times. “Some have endured unimaginable hardship to get here: squalor in refugee camps, separation from siblings and parents. One saw his father killed in their home.”

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Nobody brings the world together like muppets. The new season of the PBS series Independent Lens debuts this week with the documentary The World According to Sesame Street, a look at how the TV show for kids has become a global phenomenon. Los Angeles Times critic Robert Lloyd writes in a stellar review: “It runs in more than 120 countries, mostly in dubbed versions of the original, but in more and more places—beginning as far back as 1972, after an inquiry from Germany—it is being produced locally, retooled for the native audience, with new characters and settings reflecting native culture and concerns.” The documentary focuses on productions of “Sesame Street” in three countries places: Bangladesh, Kosovo and South Africa. 

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Two years ago, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo established a railway from Macedonia to Serbia. “The train,” writes Daniel Sekulich in an excellent story in Outpost magazine, “is regularly pelted with stones and cinder blocks or shot at with rifles.” Nevertheless, Sekulich boarded the train, and his story about his trip covers fascinating geographical and political terrain. “Several European nations offered aging diesel locomotives and coaches to the cause, with security provided by international forces stationed in Kosovo,” Sekulich writes. “Not surprisingly, few Serb or Albanian railroaders wanted to drive a train carrying ‘the enemy,’ so the call went out for international volunteers to take up the task.” Among them is Donald Crawford, a Canadian locomotive engineer. “For many people - mostly Serbs and Roma - this is the only way to get groceries, visit the hospital and see relatives,” Crawford tells Sekulich. “It’s called the Freedom of Movement Train because that’s what we provide.”

Boston Globe Staff Writer Tom Haines filed a thoughtful story this summer about his visit to the Guca trumpet festival in Serbia and Montenegro, where locals were setting aside war memories to have a good time. “I think many years have taken of my generation,” one young man told Haines during the festival. “War was beside me since I have seven. We don’t hate anybody. Bosnia, Kosovo, there is a part our guilt. But we shouldn’t punish all because of one man. We lived in Bosnia, and we had to leave, and my parents, and blah, blah, blah. But who cares?” Wrote Haines: “Who did care, on that night last August, in the cool hill air of the Balkans? Wars had ended. Slobodan Milosevic had long since fallen from power, and the Guca trumpet festival had hit full swing, as it has every year since 1961...”