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Mar 14

A mid-year review

It struck me the other day that I haven’t really been writing much lately. Here, or elsewhere. For the first four months or so of our travels I kept writing fairly often, but since we’ve been more aggressively abroad (as opposed to being in Canada or traipsing around the US), time has taken on kind of a different nature. It’s a little hard to explain, since I’m used to fitting my daily life somewhere on a spectrum between “time filled up” and “time not filled up,” either end of which manifests itself as “SO BUSY SO BUSY” or “SO LAZY SO LAZY,” respectively. But now that spectrum doesn’t really seem applicable, since I look back on the past few months and feel like it’s been both busy and relaxed, two states of being that have always been fairly mutually exclusive  in my life. For the past four months, our time has been filled enough that I haven’t had many chances to sit and write, though it’s not like each day we have an agenda brimming with things to do and see. Most days we have a decent amount of downtime, but usually I can’t bring myself to do anything more taxing than listening to music, staring out the window, reading a book, or just sitting around with a cold beer or a heavily limed gin and tonic and talking about what comes next, or not talking at all.

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Mar 11

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Cambodia: The Food

After our week in Dhaka, we blew through Bangkok again and headed into Cambodia via a van – shuttle – bus – taxi – tuktuk combination. We started with three hot, sweaty, dusty days in Siem Reap, biking, wandering, and climbing around the temples of Angkor Wat, then headed south to Battambang, what felt like a smallish town but is in fact the country’s second biggest city. After that, we slowed down for four days in Phnom Penh before heading into Vietnam, where we are now (I ate bahn mi three times yesterday, friends. It was glorious.)

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Feb 27

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Dhaka: The Food

After two weeks in Bali, we spent a very quick two days in Bangkok before flying to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to visit a good friend of ours who works at the US Embassy there.

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There’s so much to say about Dhaka that I’m not really sure where to start. It’s not the sort of place we would have put on our itinerary if we hadn’t had a friend to stay with and show us the ropes, and that’s exactly why we went. We had an amazing time – a once-in-a-lifetime sort of experience, actually – but it was certainly not an easy place to travel. We had it about as easy as humanly possible, with a lovely big apartment to stay in and a kitchen in which to cook with items bought from the American Commissary and a constant source of distilled (i.e. safe to drink) water, a driver to bring us where we wanted to go, a ready-made social group of our friend’s lovely colleagues, and a friend to bring us to great restaurants (more on that later) and recommend places to go and things to see. Without all of that, Dhaka would have been much more difficult. Read more

Feb 17

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Bali: The Food

We started our time in Asia with two weeks in Bali, one of Indonesia’s 70,000 islands and probably its most well-known (and most touristy). We hadn’t planned to include it, originally, but had the chance to meet some friends there so added it to the trip. We spent time in various places on the island, including the chaotic, dense, touristy south, the idyllic northwest coast, the rainy, mountainous interior, new-agey, artsy, Expat-filled Ubud (of Eat Pray Love fame, as much as they’d hate me saying it), and the laid-back coast of the Eastern tip. We spent plenty of time on the beaches, yes, but also wandered around temples and soaked in the colors and scents of the markets and trekked through the rice fields and spent many (many) hours driving on winding roads through villages and countryside. The heat and humidity were overwhelming, but we still tried to get out and do what we could, and of course that included eating.

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Jan 28

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The Best of South America

Our two months in South America were amazing, and incredibly delicious. I certainly like a bit more vegetable matter and a bit less fat in my life, but that’s not what I’ll remember from the eating and drinking we did on this trip. I’ll remember the interesting flavors and unique ingredients and new ways of combining and working with food. I wish I could be back in a kitchen sooner to start playing with all of the things that I learned, but it’ll have to wait.

To wrap up all of the writing I’ve done about our experiences in South America – and because a few of you have specifically asked for it – here’s a list of the best things we ate and drank during our time there. I know some of the items are kind of specific to our itinerary and experiences, but others are certainly able to be recreated. Know that I’m always happy to answer questions about places we went and things we ate (as well as the things we purposefully didn’t eat), should you find yourself going to these places.

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