In case you haven't noticed by now, we have a serious, extreme, ridiculous, insert appropriate adjective here, amount of backlog of entries to write, edit photos and upload. Spain was way back in March, and we still haven't finished with the editing of photos. If we were still working and have this amount of backlog, I think we would both have been fired by now. Thank god we're just 2 jobless bums then.
Since some people have asked for new entries, this is part 1 of Being on the Road. And being a true blue Singaporean, of course we have to start with food!!!
First of all, while you may have seen very nice pictures of food in the blog, we do not wine and dine all day. In fact, restaurants in France and Italy have pretty limited opening hours, typically from 12 - 2pm for lunch and then 7 - 11pm for dinner. If you arrive outside of these hours, you either eat a kebap, pizza by the slice or really bad Asian food. Sometimes given those choices we typically end up eating instant noodles instead.
Second, traveling with a cook definitely helps, haha... CS went on a cooking course for 2 months before we went for our trip. Whenever we stay in an apartment, he would typically whip up some dishes. Our roles are, he cooks, I wash, so all in all a pretty good arrangement. Having western food day after day, you crave for a simple clear asian chicken soup now and then. So we tend to cook Chinese/Thai food and you'll be surprised how often we stumble onto an Asian supermarket even if we are not looking for one. The supermarkets are also pretty well-stocked, one of the best ones we found was in Barcelona, we went a bit crazy there and bought quite a bit of stuff. Fried bee hoon, fried rice, rice with stir fried meat and veg are kind of what we cook to eat on the move now, we also cook some pasta dishes on and off, but mostly Asian food.
Third, we do try to go out of our way to find good local food whenever we go, either by researching on Tripadvisor, or from guidebooks or Via Michelin. We did cave in on a few occasions and bought Asian food but so far they all taste bad, so lesson learnt, when in Rome, just eat Rome! So far, 80% of the time, we have pretty good food though we have learnt a few things too
- Do not eat pasta or pizza outside Italy, everyone else overcooks it. We have given up on ordering pasta now. As for pizza, its a bit overpriced outside of Italy, so we don't usually order that too.
- Tripadvisor is a good source of info, but don't rely on it too much, some of the reviews are honestly quite dubious. Lonely Planet is not too bad and Frommers is 80% reliable.
- Go where the locals go! It's common sense but sometimes we forget this. And language is not a barrier, we had a waiter who moo-ed at us once when he was trying to explain what meat it was on the menu. Also, ask your tour guide where to go, our guides have been able to provide pretty decent recommendations so far.
- If you have no idea what it is, don't order it. CS ordered something once and when it came, we realised it was sausage stuffed with liver, intestines, etc. He ate all the side dishes and left the sausage completely untouched.
- Go with the flow. CS saw this billboard with grilled meat along the road while driving in Spain and decided he just had to eat it. Of course I also need to use the toilet so again, another win-win for all. We managed to hunt it down and we had the most delicious grilled ribs ever.
All in, it's been great fun eating around Europe. Now, we just need to figure out what there is to eat in UK since Brit food is supposed to be really bad. I guess we'll just have to survive on fish and chips and curry then :p
