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Travel Food Tips - Finding your Daily Bread
Here are my Lunch and Dinner food tips: (The operative word here will be local.) Picnic!
Restaurants can be expensive and can really kill a travel budget. I splurge on them only once in a while and have what the French call a "picnic" instead.
Go to local grocery stores, delis, self serve restaurants, and better yet farmers markets. In most places in Europe, you don't need directions. All you need is a sense of smell.
Find the local bakeries and shops/market stalls for deli, pastry, meat, fruit, cheese, wine, sweets, pickles, or whatever for another picnic meal. Repeat generously.
Enjoy your picnic on a park bench, say, near the Notre Dame in Paris with a baguette, Dijon mustard, French veal sausage, a creamy salad, killer brie, outstanding pastries and a bottle of wine. Complete magic!
Repeat with Bavarian Smoked Ham, real Swiss cheese, Kaiser Rolls, potato salad, Swiss chocolates, and a cold bottle of dark beer and take the gondola ride up to the top of Zugspitze, the tallest mountain in Germany. Heavenly delights.
For other food tips, try couscous in Morocco. Fish soup on the Italian Riviera. Fish and Chips from a Fish and Chips Stand in Cornwall, England. Try it, you'll like.
Most pubs in every country have inexpensive bar food. Ask your bartender. In Spain, I lived on Tapas, a wide variety of Spanish cold and warm appetizers - a cuisine in itself. I love the Calamari, which are rings of battered squid that I thought were onion rings. It was too late for me to get squeamish about it, when I did find out. I realize that American loathing of strange food is just plain silly and self defeating.
Another food tip: Watch out for that fish soup, though. Soup is usually my trick for eating safe (without those strange ingredients) in areas where the some of the food groups are unknown or unrecognizable. After all how can you make it unappetizing or dangerous? In San Remo, rather cavalierly, I ordered fish soup. I didn't know that it came with the heads and tails. All to be eaten. The Italian girl I sat next to waited to see if I would actually eat this, knowing the way Americans hate eating unusual animal parts. I tried to make the best of a tough situation. I became the staunch traveler. I proceeded to eat everything but the fish lips, much to my surprise. She warned me not to eat those. A pretty foreign girl will make you do things like that.
My Restaurant Food Tips include following the locals to their eateries and what to do when you get to there. If you develop tummy problems, try to look on the bright side of life and refer to my page on Diarrhea.
Here are some important meal tips: Go to the Page on Restaurant Tips Picnics - Fun in the Sun Six Great Food Adventures from Around the World Translate a Menu Fun with a Chinese Menu Diarrhea
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