Seat of Our Pants

I love food. It’s as simple as that. Catch me a few hours after a good meal and I’ll most likely be thinking about my next meal. It’s a habit that becomes heightened when traveling. Sure, it’s great to see pretty things, explore soaring mountains or wile away on an island beach. If I were honest, though, I feel most in touch with local traditions when I’m eating the local cuisine.

 A bit of Dosa in Kolkata strengthened my sense of India. A mouthful of Momos in Nepal broadened my understanding of mountain life. A spicy Vietnamese Pho helped me understand what street food was all about. The list goes on and on.

There is irony in this situation, though. It doesn’t happen right away, but I often find myself longing for food I can’t have. When I’m in Thailand, I want some Nepali food. When in Sweden I’m longing for Mexican food. Perhaps I’m just used to variety. I’m American after all. We don’t have a national cuisine, but we do have food from almost everywhere else. It’s that variety, those options that I start to miss after eating my 20^th plate of the same local cuisine.

Turkish cheese store

 Take the delicious cheese that we’ve been eating in Turkey and Georgia as an example. Two months ago we couldn’t stop talking about cheese. We had long, detailed discussions about whether or not cheese is the best food ever made. We were in India at the time, where you can’t find the type of cheese that we were craving. We flew from there to Sweden, where we could finally get our fill of cheese. We left happily satisfied, flew to Turkey to find that it has some epic cheese options too. Yay for more cheese!

Two weeks have passed and the enthusiasm is gone. Because we’re traveling on the cheap here, we eat out only once a day. The other two meals are made up of things we can find locally – mostly bread, cheese and the odd piece of fruit. This makes for a lot of cheese eating.

We came across this gorgeous cheese shop in the northeastern town of Kars. Out of respect for big beautiful rounds of cheese we bought some. It was divine cheese for sure but my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t get Indian food out of my mind.

Kolkata fast food - mmm mmm good!

 Such is eating on the road. A long story of amazing food, followed by selfish bouts of wanting what I can’t have.

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