The Man is cook­ing in the kitchen and I can smell the tomato sauce and pep­pers cook­ing. I’m starv­ing : why on earth did I have to spend half of my day at work today ? It’s Sun­day, peo­ple ! Of course, I haven’t eaten yet and there­fore feel­ing a bit bitchy. Yep. Some peo­ple get cranky when they haven’t got enough sleep, but lack of sleep doesn’t influ­ence my mood much but for the fact you’d bet­ter not ask me to solve world’s issues. How­ever, you don’t want me hungry…

I love test­ing new food when I travel. Some­times you get lucky, some­times you don’t… but you end up with some pretty cool sto­ries to brag about !

Here is my top five of the weird­est things I ate, my best sur­prises and my worst disappointments.

1) Tricked by Australians

We were then stay­ing at an hos­tel in King’s Cross, for about 20$ a night with free break­fast served early in the morn­ing. On the first morn­ing, I got up just a bit before nine, hop­ing there were some break­fast left. Half asleep, I made my way to the kitchen and saw the nicest thing ever : a big jar of Nutella ! I man­aged to find a clean knife and a slice of bread and started to help myself with some of the deli­cious hazel­nut spread. First bit. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. This wasn’t Nutella. No it wasn’t. It was Veg­emite (also known as Mar­mite in the UK), an extremely pop­u­lar yeast paste. I’ve never felt so betrayed. I mean, how could you ??? This stuff doesn’t even remotely taste like chocolate !

2) Ren­dered veg­e­tar­ian in Hong Kong

I don’t mind Chi­nese food and I’ve always prided myself on test­ing every­thing, includ­ing food west­ern­ers typ­i­cally don’t like. How­ever, Hong Kong was a dif­fer­ent story. I loved the Xiu Mai, the Dim Sum, the seafood, Yuanyang… That was basi­cally the food I enjoyed when I was eat­ing alone or with friends.

But I some­times had to attend busi­ness lunches with my boss. Have you ever been to an Hong Kong busi­ness lunch ? It usu­ally starts at 11 am with some Dim Sum, and is then fol­lowed by…yummy… meat. Let’s called it like that. Offal. Mixed pig organ por­ridge. Pig feet. Why, why, why ? The meals never seemed to end, pig feet are quite awk­ward to eat with chop­sticks and the aver­age tem­per­a­ture out­side was 30C. I quite became veg­e­tar­ian after this…

3) So many food poi­son­ing avoided…

For all the times we ate in the street on the road, I think the night we spent in Puno (Peru) was the most dar­ing. We had just arrived and were tired and hun­gry. By the time we fin­ished show­er­ing it was already pitch dark out­side. We went out any­way, look­ing for food and even­tu­ally ended up at the local mar­ket. Food stalls were scat­tered in the dark alleys and since we were both hun­gry we didn’t pay too much atten­tion to the food we were engorg­ing nor the peo­ple around us.

Luck­ily, none of us was sick after­wards, I guess by the time we got to Peru our stom­ach bugs were pretty much dead. But what a food raid !

4) The best fish is the one eaten on the beach

I love seafood and I can remem­ber two great time I had some.

First one is one the shore of lake Tit­i­caca (Bolivia). We had a test of the famous “trucha”, fresh out of the lake served with rice and lemon.

Sec­ond time was in Playa Del Car­men. We had just arrived and were starv­ing and tired as usual. We walked to the beach nearby and just sat there for a while. A small restau­rant caught our atten­tion, and we soon found our­selves sit down at a wooden table, with a huge piece of fish served with tor­tilla and a Mar­garita. Loved the fish, loved the place.

5) Food fest in Rio

By the time we got to Rio de Janeiro, in our 2001–2002 crazy Latin Amer­ica raid, we knew the trip was almost over, so we didn’t mind spend­ing some money on food. Bye bye street food, hello food courts ! A mall in down­town Rio had the really nice food court with all kind of food, located on the roof of the build­ing. We used to have Chi­nese stir-fry look­ing at the Pan de Azu­car down below…

I also loved to sam­ple doce de leiteon Copaca­bana or comida por kilo in Glo­ria or Catece…

It’s not so much the food than the place where you eat it and how hun­gry you are at the time…

Related posts:

1. Things I Love/ Hate About Cana­dian Food
2. 5 Things My Mum Observed in Canada
3. Ten Things I Can Do
4. Supper’s Ready
5. The Sweets, The Fat And The Scale