My beef with traveling....

I am an avid traveler. My husband is an avid traveler. You can fairly say that our aim in life is to travel around this globe as many times as possible and see and smell and touch and hear and taste as much as possible before we kick the bucket.

But I have a confession to make.

There is one part of traveling that I am not good with. The tasting part. In fact, when it comes to food, I am probably the least adventurous person you could ever come across while traveling. I am really messed up when it comes to trying new or different things. It's not only that I am picky about the what that goes into my mouth, I am difficult about how it was cooked, what ingredients were added to the dish before it was cooked and even what is the name of the dish before it is even prepared. Believe me, I am the least fun person to share a bite with in a far and exotic place.

Understandably, this irks Hubby to no end when we travel. He's exactly the opposite to me. He'll try anything. And I mean anything!! While I'll shrink away from even the sight of a non-threatening unagi sushi in Tokyo he'll go straight for the tako-tako balls, the ones where you don't even know what goes into them!! While I'll push away with a shiver the bowl of soup with the floating something in it, he'll happily stuff his face with the steaming haggis in front of him. I never did find out what Cuy in Peru tasted like because the sight of the grilled suckling pig looking up at me from its spread-eagled position on his plate made me wrinkle my nose in disgust and look the other way while Hubby happily chomped away. I have been known to not touch the rest of my salad in the south of France when I discovered a very suspicious looking puddle of water at the very bottom of the plate. I'll even turn down pre-packaged ham and cheese sandwiches if the ham has any sign of containing those icky transparent spots of fat.

Over the years, Hubby and I have come to a mutual understanding, mainly based on the fact that I am know able to quickly scan a menu and pin point the stuff that I will be able to handle just by reading the names of the dishes. We scan out the restaurants that will have a balanced menu meaning the local specialties and exotic choices for him and still provide an option or two for yours truly, the freak. Risotto is always a safe and commonly available choice (as long as there is no meat, squid or any other kind of seashell in it), feta and mozzarella salads are also passable (except when the salad is swimming in anything resembling a puddle of water), grilled meat will do if, and only if, it's not cooked in any kind of sauce whatsoever and is cooked to a safely carbonized state (no sight of pink or it will go back to the kitchen untouched), cheese I have no problem with in any form or matter, so if worse comes to worse, I have been known to just order a plate of cheese for dinner....

The more exotic the place, the simpler the dish has to be for me to try it. I'm ashamed to say I've developed a system where, if worse comes to worse, I can still survive by dissecting a dish and only eating the sides (ie the french fries or the tomatoes that accompanies a good portion of the suspicious looking dish the Portuguese call Bacalao) or else pick out the parts I will be steering clear of, like the squirmy fish chunks in the Ceviche in Lima. Don't worry, nothing goes to waste with the trash compactor I call my loving husband sitting next to me and finishing off anything I wont eat.

Sometimes I find something "exotic" enough that will sustain me for most of the trip. When we were in Israel I ended up eating Hummus 5 times out of 6 and I must have eaten a whole crop worth of steamed rice with veggies (sometimes spicing it up with green curry) during the 2 weeks we spent in Bali and Cambodia in 2009.

However sometimes even that wont do.

Last December Hubby and I traveled to Hong Kong for 10 days. I knew I was doomed from the get-go. On our first day in the city, and after 7 failed attempts at looking at the menus and trying to find something that my messed up mind didn't object to, we finally came across a place that looked promising. How wrong were we. It was a disaster. The rice and mushrooms dish I ordered was covered in a gooey black sauce which made my stomach sink even before the waiter had finished setting down the plate in front of me. The rest of the trip did not improve. As much as we tried, we kept having trouble finding places where I could even look at a menu and find something that would not make my insides churn, let alone go in an sit down. By the third day, we'd resigned ourselves that while in China we would have only two choices: either go for any of the European restaurants serving only european dishes or walk into one of the thousands chinese restaurants ranging from whole-in-the-wall status to dress-code:-you-did-not-pack-nice-enough-clothes-for-this-place high class restaurants; but no matter which it was, I was not going to make it through a whole plate. Even dumplings, the pride and joy of Hong Kong didn't make the cut. Hubby finally convinced me to give them a try though he knows, he knows!, that I can't stomach raviolis stuffed with any sort of meat... It was brutal, the moment that little unpretentious little pouch of pasta hit my tongue, it exploded releasing a sort of scary warm juice and what I suspect was a mix of little chunks of different meats in my mouth. While I stoically chewed and swallowed what would be my one and only dumpling ever, I knew this would be the end of my food-tasting experience in Hong Kong.

As I said, I am really messed up when it comes to food when we are traveling.

Then again...... can you really blame me?

Photo: Fned's iPhone

Fned.