Theme: Food

(there's a new post below this with more pics!)

Traveling and food experiences go together like peanut butter and jam. Like bees and honey. Like stink and shit. There are so many aspects of eating that you take for granted at home that become mountains of anxiety or inconvenience on the road.

Sometimes food is a highlight. I still count my meals at the One Love Juicy Jerk hut in Negril, Jamaica as possibly the best I've ever eaten. Contrasting that, the breakfast I had in Port Antonio was one of the worst. Here in the Balkans, the food is not quite so distinct, but there have still been some experiences.

In Sarajevo I had an AMAZING shrimp and rice risotto that literally knocked my socks off. It was excellent.

On the bus to Novi Pazar, I considered myself rather clever for managing to not starve to death. I took a three hour trip to Podgorica at 9am, before which I had a light breakfast. I expected to have lunch in Podgorica, but found out upon arrival that my best connection left in exactly 1 minute. I had to beg the driver to let me visit the toilet before pulling out! Some quick thinking on my part saved the day, however: I had a bag of honey-flavoured cereal in my backpack which I pulled out just before they loaded it into the cargo hold. Mmmmmboy, that stuff was good! I had dry cereal and water to hold me over, but it did the job. (btw, that cereal would go over great at home. It was a honey flavoured combo of Harvest Crunch and puffed wheat).

Other times you're wandering around, getting hungry, but you have to weigh your desire to eat immediately against your need to find a place that actually has a toilet. That can be a bit interesting in some of the slummier areas that you visit, where the 'restaurants' are just street vendors moved into concrete block shacks. When was the last time you chose your restaurant based on the criteria that it must have at least a squat toilet in back?

These considerations are balanced, however, by the joy you get in biting into something totally foreign and being delighted by it. The food is not overly exotic here, but a staple on the street, called burek, is pretty good: potatoe, cheese or beef in filo pastry. They do it in long cords and then coil them up like ropes on old sailing ships to cook. They come out like a coiled snake from the oven, and sometimes you get a slice like a pizza. That allows you to pull off ridges of the stuff and eat it with your fingers. Yum!

Another plus is the price. Today I had a hamburger for 1 euro (about 1.50) that was loaded with cucumbers, tomatos and cabbage, plus ketchup, mayo and spices. It also came on one of the best kaiser-style buns I've had in a long time. All the baked goods around here are always fresh, and always excellent.

Finally, as I mentioned to many of you before I left, you need to make sure that you have something normal to start your day. I've gotten into the habit of having muesli or dry cereal on me at all times, and I always buy a medium-sized container of yogurt to keep on hand in the communal fridge of the places I stay. This has worked out really, really well so far. It was also the reason I had that cereal that saved my life on the bus trip. The upside of yogurt is that it's basically the same everywhere, and I trust it more than milk. (I drink skim milk: try finding that anywhere outside the western world). It also keeps better and travels better. The downside is that it's ~almost~ the same everywhere, which implies that there are differences. Sometimes you buy a container and open it up to find that it's almost solid! Crazy! It still tastes fine and does the job, but its weird when your cereal just sits on top of your dairy product of choice, and requires some solid mashing to submerge. ha!

Finally, there's the joy of coffee. One of my favourite memories of Tunisia was the capucins, which Craig later explained to me are similar to the proper european macchiato. I don't know my coffee terminology, but they're basically a shot of espresso topped with some very thick milk froth. And they are meant to be LOADED with sugar. You don't think of these as coffees, you think of them as a sugary treat that will just happen to give you a caffeine buzz. Well, they're back again, but under the proper 'macchiato' name. I grin every time I drink one.

OK, that's it for my food rant. cya!

bms