I’m a Travel Blog Dork!

March 5, 2010 | Location: The World | Leave a Comment 

A big thank you to the awesome Off-Track Planet for making me an official Travel Blog Dork! I am honored by the title, and immensely flattered by their words.

Check it out!

Eating at Street Level: Tips on Enjoying Street Food

January 19, 2010 | Location: The World | 4 Comments 

Deceptively simple and quick, often fiery and unpredictable, street food is the truest expression of a country’s cuisine. After you’ve sat down on a plastic bench and braved car fumes to enjoy an eye-wateringly spicy noodle soup, eating in a five-star hotel restaurant will feel as relevant to visiting a country as staring at postcards. Plus, it’s the most delicious, cheapest thing you’ll find.

But for many of us raised on the West’s overzealous hygiene standards, taking the first bite into a street dish can be a daunting experience. Here are five tips that will help ensure your meal is a positive experience.

Note: By street food, I designate both street kitchens, where the food is prepared and served literally on the street or the sidewalk, as well as tiny, no-frills restaurants where the decor is nonexistent and the seating capacity is limited.

Caveat Emptor: My experience with street food extends to North America, Western Europe, the Balkans, North Asia and Southeast Asia. It’s highly likely that this article can be generalized to the rest of the world; if you have experience that corroborates or contradicts this, please let everyone know in the comments!

Look for Packed Places

Your one and absolute rule when choosing a place to eat is whether the place is packed with locals, especially workers or employees on break. Avoid places packed with teenagers – if it’s not a KFC, it’s probably not much better. (In my experience, teens choose hangout places on a lot of other factors besides the quality of the food – I’ve got a few horror stories to back this up.)

At all costs, avoid street stalls packed with tourists. Whereas stalls in non-touristy areas depend on word of mouth and return business, tourist-oriented stalls can attract foreigners based on criteria that have little to do with food quality, such as the ability to speak English, an attractive menu, or even happy hour specials. The difference in quality between the two types of street food is usually staggering.

Trust Your Nose

Whatever place you end up choosing, don’t be afraid to leave if you have a bad feeling. Your nose and eyes can spot a lot of things that may not register in your conscious mind. Trust your instincts! You want to go somewhere where you can relax enough to enjoy a good meal.

On the other hand, keep in mind that your own definition of hygiene may be challenged here. Observe, instead, how the cook keeps things clean or not. Yeah, those eggs are sitting on the sidewalk unrefrigerated, but chances are they’re fresh from the market, and will be gone by evening. Even in perfectly clean places, non-refrigerated meat, flies, stray cats, and even the rare cockroach on the ground are par for the course. Also, some ingredients might smell offensive if you’re unaccustomed to them, such as fish sauce, shrimp paste, stinky tofu, or cheese. Try not to let unfamiliar smells deter you.

Order by Any Means Necessary

Smile. Laugh at yourself. Gesture. Point to things (but don’t touch food you’re not gonna eat, that’s disgusting!) Point to the neighbor’s food. If you don’t get what you want, accept what you get. The point here isn’t to ask for the fanciest item on the menu. You want what everyone else is having, because that’s probably this stall’s specialty.

As far as alcohol and tobacco go, try and respect the way the locals drink and smoke, if they do at all. If they’re drinking modestly and smoking very rarely, you’ll make a very bad impression by getting drunk and chain-smoking. If you really must, do it back at the expat bar.

Oh and, in the name of all of us who enjoy our dishes spicy when the local cuisine requires it: please stop asking for non-spicy food. For the real spicy dishes, the pepper will be on the side, as not all locals like their meals mouth-melting hot. The sheer number of foreigners asking for non-spicy food, though, means it’s hard for spice lovers to convince the cook, sometimes.

Soak Up the Atmosphere

Rub shoulders with the locals, accept the stares and the laughter. Sometimes you may even cause gatherings around your table, and you’ll feel like you’re a new specimen at the zoo. You know what? That just means you’re one of the first foreigners to try this food. Enjoy feeling like Marco Polo for a little while.

Part of the appeal of street food is the direct, uncensored connection you’ll make with people outside the tourist trade. This is a great opportunity to chat with people you wouldn’t usually interact with, and food is a great conversation starter. Just mention you like someone’s favorite dish, and they’ll swell with pride and affection. Soon enough, you’ll be leaving the street corner waving goodbye to new friends!

Smile and Say Thank You

Be polite! You’re representing all of us out there. If you really liked the meal, say it to the cook. He or she might not understand your words, but they’ll get the enthusiasm. Better yet, say it in the local language.

If you’ve just eaten somewhere off the beaten path, chances are you’ll be stunned by the low price. If you feel like tipping, don’t do it out of charity for the stall owner; do so only if you genuinely feel they deserve the tip. Giving money out of pity is condescending to a business owner, and you’ll do a lot more for them by being polite, thanking them, and giving them your return business. Engage them on a human level, as businesspeople worthy of your respect; that’s worth a lot more than a few extra bucks at the end of the day.

Follow these tips, and you’ll be rewarded with a unique insight into your host country’s cuisine and culture, as well as many memorable encounters and some new friends. Be warned: street food grows on you! The next time you eat in a sanitized, expensive place, you might just walk away dissatisfied, longing for your next meal at street level.

Three Travel Secrets: Backpack Foodie Edition

January 12, 2010 | Location: The World | 5 Comments 

There’s this meme going around where travel bloggers each spill three “secrets” they learned from traveling. The concept also involves tagging five other bloggers, but as you can imagine, at the bottom of the pyramid you run out of friends to enroll, so I’ll skip that part.

Gillian and Jason of One Giant Step kindly tagged me in their own Three Travel Secrets entry; and so, here are my own!

Local Food Is Safer than Tourist Food.

I’ve lived three years in Shanghai and ate mostly local food, the majority of which came from small, family-run places; yet the majority of times I fell sick was from eating imported food that appealed mostly to tourists and expats.

Heard about all those travelers who meticulously eat hotel food, drink only bottled water, and peel their fruits, yet fall sick because they drank one fruit juice? I’ll bet you a hundred on the dollar that the so-called safe food, not the juice, is what got them sick.

If you stick to a few simple rules – always eat in busy places, look for clean, well-lit places, eat what the locals eat, and trust your instincts – then you’ll find local, even street food, to be a perfectly safe and healthy diet choice. Plus, it’s a hell of a lot tastier than that rewarmed pizza with three week-old imported mozzarella, and it’ll save you tons of money. Finally, you’ll encourage local, often family-run businesses, instead of foreign-owned corporations.

To Find Great Places, Read a Guidebook.

Then go where they say not to go.

The mainstream guidebooks focus their energy on places that tourists will enjoy, which typically means tourist facilities, some local nightlife, and a minimum of sightseeing. If you visit a place with none of these, what you’ll discover is somewhere where the people will be genuinely curious to engage you in conversation, and where you’ll see very little of the typical harassment associated with tourist centers.

I’ve gone against the recommendations of Lonely Planet and Rough Guides a few times. Every time, I found a charming, unpretentious place where we were able to relate to the locals as human beings instead of peddlers, and where we could enjoy a slice of local life. Every time.

You Can Communicate Without a Common Language.

Don’t let the lack of a common language prevent you from engaging the people you meet! A smile and a nod go a long way. With a lot of patience and the ability to laugh at yourself, you can force your way through the language barrier.

That’s not to say it’s not a good idea to pick up a few words of the local language. As a matter of fact, knowing ‘hello’, ‘thank you’ and ‘this is delicious’ can go a long way towards endearing you to the people you meet. In a country where the local dialect differs from the official language (say, in Shanghai, where Mandarin is the official language but Shanghainese is the local dialect,) you’ll entice a few belly laughs and big grins by saying ‘thank you’ in the local lingo rather than the official language.

Seventy percent of communication is non-verbal, as the saying goes. You may not be able to hold deep philosophical conversations this way, but you can still connect with your fellow humans on a personal, fundamental level. Try it!

Postcard from the Edge

September 8, 2009 | Location: The World | 1 Comment 

I make sense of it through the imagery of dreams.

I’m sitting at the edge, my legs dangling from the cliff, my heels drumming the rock, echoes spiralling down. The wind whispers through my hair.

I plant my hands behind me, and push myself. Friction grabs me back, but I persist. I drop. The wind now howls its way into my head. My legs dangle, free of gravity’s grasp.

I’m off the edge.

As I write these words, the little plane icon on my seat’s monitor is inching its way towards the International Date Line in the Sea of Bering. Twelve hours earlier, Helene and I boarded a plane from Montreal to Chicago, then from there to Tokyo, Japan. I busy myself with the minutiae of international flight – customs, timetables, body stretches – to distract my mind from the immensity of what is happening to us.

On this day, September 7th 2009, Helene and I have completed the last push that took us off the edge of our previous life. Today, we have become world nomads, on the first step of a one-year journey. This is the result of ten months made in equal parts daydreams and plans, of fears and hopes. We deconstructed our daily routine until we left ourselves out of a home and out of jobs. The total sum of our worldly possessions amounts to thirty cardboard boxes in a storage locker, and two backpacks small enough to make it as carry-on.

In more ways than one, it feels as if we have jumped off a safe, comfortable mountaintop, and the air is now rushing around us.

But I have dreamed enough of this to know better than fear.

For if you dream of flight enough, one day you wake up with wings.