Always the Adventure Getting a taste of travel, literally
Bigfork graduate Amber McDaniel shares her adventures from a semester abroad at Oxford University and four months of backpacking across Europe.
Food is a huge part of any cultural experience, and it happens to be one of my favorite parts. While budget traveling demanded that I carefully watched what I ate, I tried to not let that stop me from getting a taste of every place I visited.
Not everything I tried was something to write home about, such as the strange spicy pizza on fry bread in Prague and the disgustingly salty vegemite on toast every Australian raves about, but I did have my fair share of some of the most delicious things I have ever eaten: Vietnamese pho at a hip restaurant in London, greasy tapas in Spain, braided strings of smoked Slovakian cheeses, and, of course, the U.K.’s famous digestive biscuits, the most unappealingly named but delicious tea cookies you’ll ever eat.
Aside from my limited budget, being vegetarian amplified the struggle over finding traditional things to eat. While most places were very accommodating, some were not. I speak primarily of Eastern Europe, in which a menu consists of meat, meat, and more meat, washed down with what is essentially rubbing alcohol. Only once, though, was it truly a problem. After getting into Mostar, Bosnia late one evening, the little old man who ran the hostel instantly set to making me food, despite my protests that I really just wanted to go to bed.
“No, no, I make you food first,” he insisted and set down a bowl of what was hopefully beef stew.
Being unfamiliar with the customs of Bosnia and fearful that refusing the gesture would be seen as rude, I spooned up the stew, swallowing almost exactly four years of vegetarianism with it. The next day I thankfully discovered a café that served spinach börekinstead.
Aside from that, however, I was anything but picky. My standards for food, already fairly low from being a poor college student, declined even further as I grew accustomed to shopping from limited selections in tiny grocery stores, even if it meant buying unknown products blindly. “Well this will probably taste good” became my mantra.
I was also mindful of the fact that hostels generally have pathetic excuses for kitchens and thus low preparation foods were ideal. At the height of my desperation, I once made hard-boiled eggs in a plug-in water kettle in Macedonia. After that incident, I crossed eggs off my list of staple foods and instead decided I would just have to get protein from Nutella. Oh darn.
When I ate out, I gravitated toward non-tourist areas; hole-in-the-wall cafes, food stands that looked like they could be crawling with salmonella, outdoor food markets, and kebab vans. Turkish kebabs are a constant all across Europe and yet are something America is unfortunately lacking, because they are cheap and delicious. At Oxford, St. Anne’s was blessed with a food truck known as Ali’s right across the street, which served giant a heaping of chips in a pita shell slathered in hummus all for £1.
Some of my fondest food memories, however, came from staying with locals. At my final destination in Alpnach, Switzerland, I stayed for ten days with an old friend, Sinah, who had actually studied abroad in Bigfork my senior year of high school. There in the land of cheese and chocolate, my two favorite foods, I dined on homemade, traditional Swiss dishes, such as fondue and alplermagronen, which translates roughly to “alpine herder’s macaroni”.
By the time I flew home, I carried with me a new list of favorite foods, a dread at the bland cheeses I was returning to, and, of course, over four kilograms of Swiss chocolate.