Okay, let’s be honest here. The rain is terrible. I get it. I totally get it. The plants, they need it to live. Taylor Swift needs it so she can keep writing songs about kissing it in. When you’re already planning on staying in and having a Netflix day, it’s awesome. But when you’re traveling and you only have a few days to explore a place you might never get back to? It is terrible. So you eat. A lot.
When I first moved to the NYC area, I started off in Jersey City, near Grove Street. I lived there because I found a penthouse suite (okay, the top floor of a three-story building) for way less than anywhere I’d seen in Manhattan, right down the street from two of my closest friends Caitlin and Tyler (one of whom has an awesome food blog). I only lived there for a year and two months because I had gigantic dreams of living *in* the city, not just right next to it. This was also during a time in my life when I was staying out until 4 a.m., and not just on weekends, so I thought Manhattan would be easier for my social life.
As you will understand from reading this post further, I am a sensitive person. And while this affects many aspects of my life, I don’t know if it had ever affected my tastebuds until I ate at Divya’s Kitchen on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in mid-December. With the first bite of each dish I sampled, I felt like I was going to cry. I can’t tell you if it’s because of how the spices brought me back to Bangalore (where I spent four magnificent weeks in 2016), or because the experience was so beyond what I was expecting, or because the food was exactly what my body needed at that exact time, but the emotion was there.
I went to my TEN-YEAR college reunion this summer. While I definitely don’t feel as old as someone who graduated ten years ago, I don’t necessarily feel as young as I was then either, especially after having an intense allergic reaction to Miller Lite, of all things. A few weeks before I traveled back to the University of Delaware for alumni weekend, my friend Kristyn and I relived our college days in Madison, Wisconsin. In some ways, the University of Wisconsin – Madison reminded me of our alma mater, but in other ways, I was envious of the current Badger population. Here’s how to relive your own college days in Madison:
I had so much fun when I was in Indianapolis that I didn’t want to leave. Luckily, before I went back to NJ, I had one more day full of fun and food. I went on one last tour of the Indiana Foodways trails in the towns of Lafayette and West Lafayette, home of Purdue University. We had a super-packed schedule but I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of the places we visited or any of the dishes we’d tried. Though I feel like I ate 1,000 things that day, there were a few dishes and treats that stuck out:
While many people I’d told about my February travels hadn’t yet heard of Bratislava, Slovakia, I’ve known about it for quite some time. During high school and college, I worked at a local restaurant for six consecutive summers. Some members of the staff visited during the summer season from Slovakia. I became close friends with a few of them. They told my other friends and me all about Europe, taught us how to say “please” (“prosím”) and “thank you” (“dakujem”) in Slovak, and, well, bought us beer before we were of age. When I saw that Bratislava was on the way to Vienna from Budapest, two cities I already had on my list, I knew I had to check it out for myself.
I didn’t expect to visit Cologne on my last European trip, but sometimes your flight from Berlin to Paris is cancelled and while rearranging plans to get to Paris as quickly and inexpensively as possible, your best bet is to take a train to Cologne for the evening and head out from there the next morning. I had a deadline so I wasn’t able to leave my hotel until around 4 and left Cologne right after breakfast. My time was limited, but I saw enough to make me want to return one day.
You all knew I was going to make this pun at some point – a tiger doesn’t change her stripes. Maybe I even had it in my plans before I went to Hungary, because it’s too obvious to not take advantage of. But I had NO IDEA that Budapest was going to be the source of some of the best food I’ve ever had in my life. Seriously.
I could go on and on about the benefits of solo travel, but the truth is, sometimes it gets lonely – and it did for me in a few cities on this last trip. Something I recommend to people traveling solo for the first time is to sign up for a tour. As one of my tour guides once told me, when the guide asks everyone where they are from, it gives people on the tour permission to then talk to each other: “Where in Bulgaria are you from?” “I have an aunt and uncle in Indianapolis – is that nearby?” “I’ve always wanted to go to Luxembourg,” – even if you legitimately have no context for the place they mentioned. I knew I could fend for myself in the smaller cities, but I wanted to explore the bar scene with others when in Prague, and signed up for an Urban Adventures’ Beer & Czech Tapas Tour.
I was pretty excited to travel to South Africa. Not only would it be my first time on the continent of Africa, the farthest south I’d ever been, and an escape from an east-coast winter – I was excited to eat. I’d heard about the food scene in Cape Town, with fellow travelers recommending specific restaurants to make reservations for weeks or months in advance. My friends and I neglected to do this, but we still found many a gem. Like Brooklyn, Cape Town is full of creative, entrepreneurial people doing their own thing – from gourmet mayonnaise to gin ice cream, so you have your pick of unique spots. Below are the best meals that I ate, a list which by no means encompasses the best meals in South Africa, but it’s a good starting point:
You know Aruba, the Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. John. Turks & Caicos, St. Lucia, and the Dominican. But do you recall…one of the most beautiful Caribbean islands of all?
Okay, I’ll stop so you don’t have that song in your head, but I think Rudolph is a good metaphor for Guadeloupe in that it’s very underrated and would probably save Christmas if given the chance.
It’s no surprise to anyone who’s read this blog before that I LOVE street food. If you’ve been reading long enough, you may even remember when I went for a whole weekend in NYC eating exclusively from food trucks, thanks to a challenge from one of my cousins. When I found out that there was an entire street dedicated to street food in Bangalore and that it was even conveniently named Food Street (or Thindi Beedi), I knew I had to spend a night there.
Traveling solo is hard for a few reasons – You have to figure out everything for yourself, there’s times you get lonely (even if you like being with yourself as much as I do), and you can’t try as much of the local cuisine off of someone else’s plate. Which is why, because I only had three days in Kuala Lumpur, I took a food tour with Food Tour Malaysia. Food tours are one of my favorite things to do while traveling, because you get Erin-sized samples of many varieties of food, along with the story and history of the country, if you’re on a good one.
In my six years in NYC, I used my kitchen maybe three times a month. I didn’t exactly use my oven to store shoes, like SJP’s “Carrie” in Sex & the City, but I did (and d0) like going out to eat. Even if I wasn’t going out, I’d be perfectly fine eating cereal (or Chipotle) for dinner as I’d usually grab a bigger lunch at work to escape my desk.
Even though I don’t cook a lot, when my local Sundara friends mentioned that Thuya’s sister May taught a cooking class {Pennywort Cooking Class} in Bagan, I wanted in on it. I was absolutely LOVING the Burmese cuisine, as I knew I would with my little taste at Cafe Mingala in NYC. During my visit, I was especially obsessed with the green tea leaf salad, a traditional salad that was incredibly delicious but at the same time completely unrecognizable to me. I needed to be able to recreate these tastes for myself and also wanted to share them with my family once I returned back home, even though my dad can be quite picky.
Before I left New York last month, it was important to me to have one final Global Bites without the Flights (for the time being). I’ve somehow been lucky and loved all my Global Bites so far, but this one was extra special. On my first adventure of this whole “quitting my job to travel” thing I’ve gotten myself into, I’ll be spending the most time in Myanmar. Many people asked, “where?!” when I told them about my plans. It’s a country I admittedly didn’t know much about until recently, in Southeast Asia, bordered by India, Thailand, China, Bangladesh, and Laos. Right now, I’m only an hour away from there in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and heading there tomorrow afternoon.
10 miles behind me 