Chocolate Log

I’ve mentioned that shout wipes are a must when packing-both in my purse and extras in my suitcase. I’m fairly clumsy to begin with. Add traveling to that which means you don’t always know when you will have a chance to wash your clothes and you get a mess-or at least I get a mess. I’m always impressed on TV shows were people get off planes and buses looking fabulous. I get off looking rumpled with as many bags under my eyes as I have checked at baggage claim.

On the flight to Italy when I studied abroad I was sitting away from the rest of the group and I was proud of myself for remaining calm with no one’s hand to squeeze for take off. I imagined I looked quite calm and relaxed. Then the food tray came around and when I popped the top off the yogurt it exploded all over me including my glasses. Just great-another 7+ hours to go in these clothes and I’m now covered in crusted strawberries.

But dried strawberries are nothing to the disaster I created on my clothing on the orchestra tour to South Africa. One night a bunch of us were hanging out in our hotel room. I was laying across one of the beds on my back, chatting for a few hours. When I got up, I found something nasty underneath me. It was chocolate. One of those little chocolate mints that nice hotels place on your pillow had become chocolate fondu under my lower back and rump. Yes, I know what it looked like. It looked like a mess. I feel sorry for the hotel cleaning staff when they found that the next day… Of course the story spread around the orchestra. Notably songs about my mess were created to the tune of “O Fortuna” which was one of the pieces we were playing. Even the orchestra conductor got in on the fun by getting someone to get me off the tour bus so he could stick a chocolate candy aptly named “chocolate log”  that he found at a rest stop on my seat.

Look before you sit.

Bidets Revisited

Looking through my old travel journals I rediscovered another famous bidet incident I had forgotten to mention. This one took place on my study abroad trip to Italy. A group of us had made a weekend trip away from Rome to Florence for the weekend. We had divided into boys and girls rooms at the small hotel. The girls room was directly above the boys room and I remember we heard some sort of commotion coming from below us and then saw pants hanging out the window. When we went down to see how the boys were fairing one boy, was stripped to his boxers. Apparently he had been in the bathroom and saw a bidet for the first time and decided to use it thinking it was a second toilet. I presume he was trying to “flush” it like a toilet when he accidentally turned it on and started soaking himself in water, which he then slipped on and grabbed the shower curtain to try to break his fall but ended up pulling it down with him. Which explains why we had seen his pants hanging out the window to dry…

When we returned to Rome Rob told his bidet story to our Italian teacher who laughed so hard and loud that the other Italian teacher came to check on us and our teacher told her the story, this time in Italian. I wish I could remember the translation, it was equally if not more funny when retold in Italian complete with hand gestures. Then our Italian teacher lamented on a serious note how annoying it is to travel somewhere without a bidet since she uses one daily…Perhaps bidets should come with a warning for American tourists.

Taste This

Since I complained in my last post about pictures not having taste I thought I should write a little bit about tasting other countries. The first time I had sushi was in Rome. And the first time I had Kentucky Fried Chicken was in the Beijing airport. I’ve eaten Subway now in both South Africa and in China. And I’ve had to pay for ketchup and mustard at McDonald’s in Italy. All of these food anomalies aren’t because I don’t like trying foreign foods in other counties. I actually love trying new foods (and if you think about it since I had never had sushi or KFC before I was actually really excited to try them for the first time-probably more so the sushi than the KFC…).

I think part of the reason I end up trying non “traditional” cuisine in addition to “traditional” cuisine in foreign countries is that it can be daunting trying to figure out a foreign menu. One of my favorite meals in China was in Beijing where we went to a restaurant that did not have a menu in English. It was a little after lunch time so there were only one or maybe two other groups eating there. We looked around for another place to eat, but the food on the other patrons’ plates at that restaurant looked too delicious to resist. So the helpful staff allowed us to order by pointing to other peoples’ plates and bringing out some things based on our previous choices. This was my first taste of Chinese food (the night before had been some sort of pizza buffet with the grossest tasting soft serve ice cream I have ever had) and I loved it.

But finding a place that is willing to put up with foreigners trying to decipher the menu is not always easy. My roommate and my first night in Rome ended with both of us in tears after trying to order a pizza. We were deposited at our host family’s house around 5 or 6pm after traveling all day and we hadn’t learned yet that Italians tend to eat around 9 or 10pm. So we were unaware that our host lady was going to offer us a nice dinner around 9:30pm. So we decided to go out on our own. The professors managing our trip had given us our weekly allowance but they had only given us bills in 20 euro increments. When our pizza was rung up it only cost about 3 euros each and some odd change. When we tried to give our 20 euro bill the woman refused it (We later realized that Italians expect exact or close to exact change when making purchases). We didn’t know any Italian yet so we did not quite understand the problem nor did we have any bills smaller than a 20. The woman kept shouting stuff at us in Italian and we kept trying to hand her our bill until she finally took it and gave us back non-exact change (though i think the error was in our favor) and told us to leave.

It also can be hard to know what kind of food you are actually getting. When I was in both Italy and Brazil the idea of being a vegetarian was not very well understood. In Italy my vegetarian friends in my tour group were served chicken soup with chicken cubes floating in it instead of pasta with meat sauce. In Brazil meat seemed to be implied even when not listed on the menu. One time I ordered what was advertised as a 4 cheese calzone which when it arrived had ham chunks in it. And another time I ordered what I thought looked like a fruit pastry only to bite in and realize it was filled with red sauce and meatballs-not the breakfast I was expecting.

Sometimes it’s interesting to try food you think you recognize in another country. For example my cousin and I are obsessed with the Lipton Peach Ice Tea found in every other country I’ve been to besides the US. I don’t know what makes it taste so good, but it is different than any I’ve tried here (but don’t drink it before a long car ride or you will for sure need to make a stop). Also Nestle makes different treats in other countries too.

I think part of the reason I’ve been drawn to these unusual food choices is homesickness and a need for comfort food, either on my part or on the part of my travel companions. In Italy my study abroad group went for sushi because we were searching for something other than pasta or pizza for dinner. We also went to the Hard Rock Cafe for a taste of home. (I preferred the sushi much more than hanging around with a bunch of drunk American tourists…) My professor’s daughter in Italy confessed to me that after spending the summer in Italy she and her family go to Burger King’s immediately after going home just because they haven’t had it in so long. In China my friend Lee wanted to try different restaurants when we were visiting Beijing because where he had been living in Wuhan did not have the same international restaurant scene available. And as for the fast food, well some of that is just based on convenience and recognition. I know I would be disappointed if I went abroad and the food didn’t taste any different than it does here, but on the other hand I really wish I could find some of those treats here!

I have tried some interesting local food too:

-duck heart in China (but not duck head because the people who were living in China didn’t even recommend it),

-squid a few times, gelati almost daily and I made a quest to try every type of coffee I could find in Italy,

-deer probably killed that weekend in France, unidentified seafood on the coast, and I’ve been known to stand drooling in the cheese aisle in a French grocery store,

-meat that torchlight made impossible to identify on safari and cake and custard for every dessert in South Africa

-and unidentified meat on a stick while in Brazil

Delicious dumpling

The famous cake and custard dessert in South Africa

Chinese Mexican dinner-much better than the watery margarita