I had so much fun putting together a massive mosaic of my first year of travel in photos (and you guys loved it too!). One comment threw me off. My friend Kiara, said “I was actually surprised there aren’t more photos of food.”
Obviously, there was only one way to remedy the situation: to create a FOOD MOSAIC!
Kiara was right of course. How did I neglect such an important part of our life? Before setting off on our adventures, I never imagined that food would become such a heavy part of our travels. How many days are planned solely around meals? How many major attractions have we skipped in favor of more food? How many destinations are chosen purely for the cuisine?
I’ve always liked eating, but it’s only been recent years that I’ve really started paying attention to it. Mostly before, I just ate whatever I could afford and wherever was convenient (hello Chipotle! Okay fine, I still like it). I didn’t go out of my way to get myself fed. I’d say the turning point was meeting D, who took me all the way to Las Vegas to his favorite Italian restaurant. From then on, I understood that food is something to be sought out.
D was also a more adventurous eater than me. I was never picky, but there were some foods I absolutely refused to eat. Anything with blood, shellfish, or organ meats comes to mind. But travel makes me want to be braver. Because if I’m going to eat blood soup, it may as well be in Thailand.
This past year, from blood sausage in Argentina to goose liver in Czech Republic to frog in Siem Reap, I’ve definitely widened my culinary repertoire. I even tried rabbit in Montevideo, something I swore I would never do! (I still haven’t quite worked up the nerve to eat bugs, and I think that may be where I draw my line). We’ve run all around town to search for that tiny hole-in-wall eatery seen in blogs or to follow in Anthony Bourdain’s footsteps. We’ve splurged on fancy meals in trendy bistros and eaten on plastic stools at grimy roadside stalls, next to dead cockroaches.
It’s been one hell of a food adventure. :)
So here is a look at my first year of travel in food. As with the previous one, I selected (roughly) one picture from each week. Each picture was carefully chosen because it either represents the local cuisine, brings up a favorite food memory, or is just pretty! As before, hover (or click) for the location + description. And if there is a pink flower in the bottom right corner, then click through to the corresponding blog post!
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- Week 1: Santiago. Chile – fried fish at the Mercado Central
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- Week 2: Santiago, Chile – Chileans loooove fries! This is bisteq a lo pobre, a surprisingly good meal at any time of the day.
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- Week 3: Santiago, Chile – Peruvian food is just as poplar as Chilean cuisine. We love the lomo saltado!
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- Week 4: Santiago, Chile – a fancier version of the popular sandwich, of course as per Chilean fashion – slathered with avocado!
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- Week 5: Buenos Aires – we go to a parilla and order absolutely everything, which includes this blood sausage
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- Week 6: Buenos Aires – but we discover that the pizza is really really good there!
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- Week 7: Buenos Aires – and of course, you can’t go to this steak capital of the world and not order a few. This is a perfect rib eye (ojo de bife)
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- Week 8: Buenos Aires – but my favorite thing about BA is probably all the DESSERTS! Seriously, cake shops everywhere!
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- Week 9: Montevideo – more meat! At Puerto del Mercado, you can just pull up at seat at the meat bar and order whatever you see!
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- Week 10: Montevideo – it’s been 2 years since we met, so to celebrate, we attend a fancy dinner hosted by a famous chef
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- Week 11: Montevideo – the chivito is like the Uruguayan burger: beef, tomatoes, lettuce, mayo, and a hard boiled egg
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- Week 12: Montevideo – shrimp pesto pasta at our favorite restaurant, Foc
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- Week 13: Southern California – back home for a week and we stuff our faces with Asian food!
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- Week 14: London – the English breakfast. Enough said.
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- Week 15: Paris – took a break from cheap street food to have this fancier meal at Le Jeu de Quilles
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- Week 16: Antwerp, Belgium – a bucket of mussels! This is first time I ate mussels and I didn’t hate it!
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- Week 16: Amsterdam – surprisingly, Thai & Indonesian food is the thing to eat here. This was the SPICIEST pad thai I’ve ever had
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- Week 17: Berlin – I honestly don’t remember eating anything else in Berlin except for doner kebabs
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- Week 18: Budapest – I LOVED Hungarian food! Beef stew & rice was the best!
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- Week 19: Vienna – did you know weinerschnitzel was invented in Vienna? It is damn good here too!
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- Week 20: Brno, Czech Republic – my first impression of Czech cuisine was a very memorable one with this gigantic meat & dumplings platter!
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- Week 20: Prague – so much goose liver. And so good.
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- Week 21: Wroclaw, Poland – anyone who’s followed since Europe know that pierogis are my absolute FAVORITES! Pierogarnia in Wroclaw had the best ones!
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- Week 22: Warsaw, Poland – thanks to D’s family who took us out! This charcuterie plate at the famous Red Hog Inn was amazing!
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- Week 23: Istanbul – you can’t go wrong with kebabs over rice
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- Week 24: istanbul – we discovered Turkish breakfast! A large spread of cheeses, meats, olives, sesame rolls, and the best: honey with clotted cream
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- Week 25: Izmir – being by the coast means good seafood. D loved this simple grilled fish
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- Week 28: Southern California – gotta have In-n-Out while back home
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- Week 25: back to Istanbul for only one day but we discovered the BEST lahmajoun
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- Week 29: Chiang Mai, Thailand – khao soi is a typical Northern Thai soup with a spicy curry base
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- Week 30: Chiang Mai, Thailand – we took a cooking class! Confession: I kinda chose it just because mango sticky rice was on the menu
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- Week 31: Chiang Mai – this is Thailand’s famous boat noodle soup, a broth made with blood
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- Week 32: Chiang Mai – one of our favorite meals was the keffir lime leaves fried chicken from the stall next door. The best fried chicken I’ve EVER had!
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- Week 33: Bangkok – only in Bangkok for a few days but got fooled into eating at this fancy restaurant claimed as “Bangkok’s top restaurant.” Pretty food, yes, but no,, it wasn’t good at all.
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- Week 34: Sukhothai, Thailand – the Sukhothai noodles were one of our favorites!
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- Week 35: Koh Chang, Thailand – I discover khao kha moo and I loved it so much that there’s an entire post dedicated to it
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- Week 36: Koh Chang, Thailand – but most of the time, we cooked. Check out this beautiful penang curry we made!
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- Week 37: Siem Reap – the first thing we did was take a food tour where we were introduced to Khmer cuisine. This is prahok, a fermented fish/pork thing. We love it.
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- Week 38: Siem Reap – we found a nice restaurant with beautifully presented Khmer food!
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- Week 39: Siem Reap – this is Cambodia’s version of beef noodle soup
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- Week 40: Bangkok – this is the ABSOLUTE BEST thing to eat in Bangkok: duck noodles from Prachak
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- Week 40: another picture from Bangkok because I loved my Chinatown experience!
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- Week 41: Hanoi – we loved discovering new food from Northern Vietnam. Everything is so fresh
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- Week 42: Hanoi – but pho will always remain one of my favorites!
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- Week 43: Saigon – D fell in love with this spicy bowl of bun bao hue noodles
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- Week 44: Saigon – another new favorite: hu tieu noodle soup
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- Week 45: Singapore – roast meat stalls can be found almost everywhere. This is the delicious roast duck and rice
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- Week 46: Singapore – we also got our fill of Indian cuisine, one of my favorites!
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- Week 47: Singapore – the world famous Din Tai Fung is almost everywhere too and the best part is that there is no wait!
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- Week 48: Singapore – ultimately, this simple hawker dish of crispy pork over yellow noodles was one of our favorites!
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- Week 49: Boracay – ate a lot and a lot of lechon with the crispy skin. Yum!
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- Week 50: Boracay – probably one of the most interesting dishes I had: champorado (a chocolate rice porridge)
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- Week 51: Boracay – another trip to the seafood market for some giant prawns
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- Week 52: Boracay – the staple Filipino breakfast of garlic rice, eggs, and meat
Food has become such a large part of our travels, but I haven’t been doing it justice. I find that while I love taking pictures of food (which annoys D to no end), I don’t necessarily love writing about it. Mainly because I have a hard time describing food besides “it’s delicious!”. So I’ve let it fallen to the wayside in recent months. But in any case, I know some of you love my food posts, so let me know if you’d like to see more of them!
I still have a few more posts in mind before I can comfortably close the chapter on our first year of adventures in food, so keep an eye out on the following:
- Vietnam Eats, Part 2: what we ate in Saigon (see Part 1: Hanoi here)
- a tour of D’Talipapa, the seafood market in Boracay
- my favorite restaurants on Boracay and food rec’s (one of them is where I had that chocolate rice porridge above!)
- the best of Thailand in food (which dish will take my number one??)
- an introduction to Khmer cuisine with Siem Reap Food Tour. The reason I haven’t written about this is because this was before I knew how to work my camera correctly when it’s dark, so most of the pictures are blurry. :(
I’m also toying around with the idea of recipes (like the penang curry above, Week 36!). Would anyone be interested?
Happy eating everyone!
What’s your favorite cuisine? What’s the best thing you’ve had lately?
This is an A.Mazing post! Woah, so much great looking food. I feel like you get to learn so much from tasting all the cuisine. I especially like the look of the mango sticky rice, the chocolate rice pudding and the gorgeous Cambodian food! YUM…! :)
Eating the local cuisine is definitely my favorite way of learning about a culture! I’m so bad in that museums and stuff don’t really interest me, but I’d walk all over town in search of food anyway! And mmmmm I miss mango sticky rice!!
Everything looks soooo good! I’m with you, I like taking pictures but then don’t know what to say about them haha.
I know! I feel like the only word I know to describe food is “delicious”, haha! I really need to expand my food adjectives! I do like my food photography though, so maybe I’ll do more food posts anyway and just show off my pretty pictures!
Holy crap you have made my mouth water! I am in Thailand at the moment and struggling to stop myself from eating EVERYTHING!
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Oh I know! The food in Thailand was so good. But I loved the Vietnamese food even more!!
You have to show me all these after I got off from a mom’s special meal of vegetables + herbs smoothie and bitter gourd soup. Thanks for making me feel even more restless!
Like you, I can never write a good foodie guide because food to me is either delicious, or not. Descriptions like “you can feel all the flavors bursting in your mouth” or “the subtleness of the herb compliments the exciting nature of the meat bla bla bla bla” is beyond me.
Also, one reason why I think food plays such an important role in travels is because they are the really unique identifier that proves you have been traveling. You visit monuments and palaces and gardens and whatnot and people can be like “Yeah, the Eiffel Tower, it is magnificent, isn’t it? I can feel how great it is, I’ve seen the pictures and videos” but when you eat and snap lovely food pictures to show, people cannot go put a damper into things, they would “I know how delicious that khao kha moo is because… oh wait a minute, I have never eaten it before, I don’t know! God I’m so jealous now!”
That’s actually a really interesting point! It makes a lot of sense. Most of the time, you can’t have a certain food unless you’ve been to the country. I mean, in Southern California, it’s very diverse but still, you can’t find khao kha moo or Singaporean black carrot cake or even English breakfast. Food is my favorite way to explore a country! I would rather eat food than see that museum or palace. And I find that the memories of meals and the tastes of food stay in my mind so much longer!
I wish I could write kickass foodie guides. I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a separate food blog (posts that don’t really fit in here), but I’m afraid every post will have the word delicious in it like 5 times, lol!
Hey, thanks for the mention :-) and wow, so much beautiful, tastebud-tantalisingly delicious food! I especially want to eat all the dishes you’ve pictured from Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia (minus the meat of course! – I’m a pescetarian) and those mussels and that shrimp pesto pasta look to die for as well! I’m intrigued how you’ve done the mosaic with all the links in? It’s really clever :-)
Those mussels in Belgium were the first time I had mussels! Before that, I was vehemently anti-shellfish because I thought they were all slimey. I didn’t hate it!
I have another blogger (the lady errant) to thank for teaching me how to do the mosaics! The mosaic layout is easy with the WordPress jetpack galleries thing. And then you download the plug-in WP Gallery Custom links and you’ll see an option to insert a URL!
So delicious! I love these posts – makes me want to get up and cook something truly amazing! And now I’m starving so that’s exactly what I’m going to do!
I can’t wait to cook with you! You look like an amazing cook!!
Hahahahaha! Your post reminded me of one I did on the food in Chiang Rai and I opened with, “There is actually a site called, “Asians taking pictures of their food”. Yup. Love it.
After a bit of searching (and getting distracted by all the bug posts in your archives), I found it!! Yesss so much deliciousness! And I am sooo unapologetically that Asian who takes a dozen pictures of my food at every angle and sometimes also stand up to take a flat-lay shot from above! My excuse? Blogger! ;)
Oh, sorry! I don’t like to leave links b/c you know it seems so self-promo. But now that we’ve had this conversation, I’ll leave links everywhere :P And yes, my friends are like, “Okay, okay, take the picture, Lani, so we can eat!”
Go ahead and leave all the links you want, Lani! You have wayyy too many years of archives!
Aren’t you doing this whole travel thing right? Delicious! Glad your friend gave this idea haha!
I think this may have to be an annual tradition now! I love having all my favorite food memories in one place . :)
Yes! Love the ‘food porn’ posts, don’t need to really describe how it tastes if you don’t want, just tell us what it is and let the photo’s do the talking – especially as you take really nice shots :)
Thanks Penny!! It’s so hard to describe the taste of food besides “delicious” or “not so good.” The problem occurs when the photo looks better than it tastes, lol!
Oh wow!!! It sounds like you’ve eaten some truly delicious food over the last year! Those mussels look fantastic. I hope there are many new things to come for you!
Thanks Katie! I never thought I’d eat a huge bucket of mussels, but they were pretty good! Though I still wouldn’t proclaim myself a fan of shellfish. :)
Aww! It looks Yum yum, it reminds me my post workout meals :D, Please parcel ;)
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You have some good post workout meals! If I worked out more, then I wouldn’t gain weight from eating like this!
I am only 45kg :)
So awesome! It took me a while to tame a good look at each picture but it was time well spent. Everything looks delicious! Glad to see In ‘N Out made the cut.
Of course, haha! After so long of not having a proper burger (I’m not really a fan of burgers anyway), In-n-out was extra delicious! Thanks so much for stopping by, Ruth! :)
What is this jet setting life you lead?! My heart just flipped over reading all those wonderful places you’ve been to. And eating is probably one of my favorite activities to do when travelling. Admittedly when I’m away from the states I do more walking and swooning over architecture, but when I visit cities in the US it’s just one restaurant after the other. There’s nothing like a food tour ;)
xo marlen
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Hi Marlen! We are digital nomads/full-time travelers, who make income online (well, my boyfriend does) :). We traveled A LOT our first year of doing this, but I think we are going to slow down a bit in the next year.
Eating is definitely our favorite travel activity! We need to take more food tours. We’ve only been on one and it was definitely worth it to have locals show us places to eat that we would otherwise have NEVER found on our own!
Thanks so much for stopping by, Marlen! :)
Such an interesting idea to present your idea through the food! You can see how you change places from the local dishes…
Yeah! I really like having this pictorial display of all the places we went to in the past year. It’s so fun to see the cuisine from place to place. :)
I LOVE THIS POST!! I’m a huge foodies and so is my husband and I swear I’ve only seen him smile when our son was born and when he is about to eat!
Food is such an important part of travel because you get to taste things that you may never get to taste again, but also because you have to eat while traveling and food is such a moment of trust between the tourist and the host. And good for you for trying rabbit (even though you swore you wouldn’t), it is one of my fav dishes here in Italy!
Angie from reasons to dress,
fashion, travel and life as a mom in Italy.
Thanks Angie!! HAHA I laughed when I read the part about your husband smiling with your son was about to eat! It’s not that I don’t eat rabbit because I think it’s gross… it’s only because I had 2 pet bunnies who I was very attached to, and the thought of eating such cute affectionate creatures seem wrong! I’m not sure I’ll try rabbit again.. maybe I’ll know when the situation presents itself again!
Wow! Now I’m incredibly hungry. It’s amazing how food takes travel experience to another level. It’s an integral part of each culture.
I agree! Eating is my favorite way to discover a new culture. I love trying all the food I can’t get back home. I don’t understand the people who travel and then just eat at Western restaurants!
drooooooooooool!!!!
I think we are a little similar, I’ve never been a picky eater, but just a bit shy with food. But in the last few years, I’ve really started enjoying trying new food out and when you start trying new stuff you get more relaxed with just going “oooh, I want to try that, whatever it is, I want to eat that!” – which I am beginning to really love doing.
We’ve yet to really get into street food, but there’s not too much of it here in Belgium. Oh and the mussels, we haven’t got around to trying them either…
I wonder if the mussels bucket is popular with tourists or if locals eat it as well. It was everywhere in Antwerp when I were there! And we had it at a non-touristy restaurant (we were staying in a residential area).
The more I eat weird foods, the more open I am about it! Today, I just had pork blood cake and it was good!
They are pretty popular with the locals too. I’m just not a fan of seafood like that so I haven’t got around to trying them. Maybe once, before we leave!
I’m not a fan of seafood either! It’s usually the texture of the shellfish that I don’t like. But I was surprised that it wasn’t bad at all!
Yes, yes, yes. I love this. I can’t wait for all the other food posts. Did you use a plug-in for these photo posts? I love how I can click on them, see the full size photos, and then scroll through and read all the captions. This is amazing! Haha, Charlie always pauses when we’re out and get food – he will ask repeatedly, “Can I eat yet? Are you done? Yes? Okay this is getting ridiculous!”
Yeah! It’s the WordPress Jetpack galleries plug-in thing. And to make a picture click to a link, I used the WP Gallery Custom Links plug-in. It’s super easy!
Yep, poor D has to deal with that too. I’ll be like “move your hand, now move your body, it’s in the way. Your shadow is on the food. Your phone is in the background”… etc. I know I’m super annoying!
This looks amazing! But that blood sausage, sorry, I couldn’t even look at that one so I don’t know how you ate it. I’ve expanded my repertoire a lot over the last few years but I have my limits.
I didn’t really eat it! I took one bite and was like, no way! But then I noticed that the people were smearing it on bread, so I tried a small bite that way, and it was much better. But still not for me! I’ve had pork blood cake a couple of times here in Taipei, and that’s surprisingly not bad!
Hi Anna, I’m so thankful I’ve eaten before I read your post. But Im drooling jus the same. You really know how to eat your way around the world. I enjoyed your food mosaic; you should do more of it. Ohh, the champorado…it makes me miss my childhood. Looking forward to your next food post, especially of Boracay’s D’Talipapa. I enjoyed that market myself.
The champorado was really interesting! It was the first time I had even heard of it, but as soon as I saw it on the menu, I knew I had to try. Anything breakfast item with chocolate in it is good with me!
I think I will need to make this food mosaic an annual thing. I really like seeing where we’ve been just based on the cuisine! :)
Oh man this looks amazing! I love this idea Anna and may go off and make a food mosaic myself. Right after I go and eat everything in sight.
Yes! I can’t wait to see yours!!
What an awesome way of showing off everything you ate! Looks like a good year for your belly :) I totally know what you mean about writing about food. I eat so much when I travel but I have such a hard time coming up with creative ways of describing it. Photos help though!
I know! Food is either delicious or it’s not. I guess a food blogger’s job is not as simple as eating and taking pictures, lol! It has been an exceedingly good year for my belly. When I was looking over pictures from the past year for this post, I really could clearly see periods of when I gained and lost weight!!