Right, onto the trip. My attempts of professional cooking then had been well and truly quelled, but my foodie instincts were and are still burning, with me realizing I’m more accustomed to eating food, than cooking it. So when summer came around, I decided to eat food, a lot of food, in a lot of different places!
This book will be a smorgasbord of tips, reviews and pictures of European foodery. There are as many restaurant reviews as you could ever want in one book (about ten... trust me, you wouldn’t want anymore than that, enough’s enough!). There will be tips to help you on your way to the perfect European trip, that is if you’re looking to shun culture and the arts, in order to divulge in total food ecstasy. You will also see pictures via my admittedly unqualified hand, taken on my slightly unprofessional equipment (a well known handheld device named after a fruit, you catch my drift. Actually if I say the name, I may get free stuff, free APPLE stuff...). Note: please do not send me apples, only Apples!
This ‘enthusiasm’ for good grub led me to thinking of going further afield from London town, my usual stomping/eating ground. For me travel is food and I don’t mean travel is food for the soul or any of that philosophical mumbo jumbo, I mean the reason I decided to travel was simply because I wanted to eat food. I didn’t buy guidebooks for the thirteen cities I travelled to, or scour the internet for the cultural highlights, the amazing architectural achievements or the trendy art scenes. Any research I did undertake was purely food related.
So food is why I went to Europe in the summer of 2014 and is why I’m already dreaming of trips to Japan and India, heck take me to Kyrgyzstan if the foods good (I mean this in every possible respect to any Kyrgyzstanians reading or to the Kyrgyz people as Wikipedia tells me is correct). I should say that I’ve tried not to make a habit of using Wikipedia as a research tool for this book; that is reserved solely for my university work!
As hinted at in the sub-title of this book, I’m a bit of an introvert. I’m scared of big groups, I fear public speaking or what I like to call speaking and generally keep myself to myself. My routined nights at university usually consist of a mug of herbal tea, a few biscuits and a square or two (two if I’m feeling particularly wild) of dark chocolate. I’ll then watch a film, play my guitar and i’ll often end the end night by crying salty tears into my cup of chai at the loneliness of it all, I joke...
Anyway, so, when I decided to do a bit of traveling, it never really entered into the equation that I would want company, I mean my own company’s good enough right guys, guys! But, I didn’t want to wake up and have to compromise with my traveling partner the day’s plans, especially when it came to where, when, what and how much we would eat.
Even with my acute social anxieties, traveling by oneself I had no choice but to interact with fellow travelers. I met a fair few people on my travels, all of whom were on a budget of sorts; I even took a small notepad with me containing the phrase for tap water for each country I was visiting! However, food seemed to be the fall guy in everyone’s budget but my own. For example, one fellow traveler I met in Brussels, returned back at the hostel distraught at failing to find a pot noodle, settled instead on one of those subway things.
Let’s get this out the way now, I am a bit of a food snob. If I lived on Pot Noodle for the duration of my five week trip, from the money I ‘saved’, I could afford another Interail ticket and do the whole thing again. Even with this being the case, I wouldn’t want this, not because I didn’t enjoy my trip, but because for me FOOD IS TRAVEL (this is a literary device known as ‘repetition’; I know this because I am a real author, not just a twenty year old boy who is perfecting the practice of productive procrastination* from his university work!) *And alliteration as it turns out!
If you haven’t found my disregard for European culture and awful snobbery off putting, you’re in for a right treat. If you have, you’ve brought the book now, so I win either way, back of the net!
Paris - Three nights
Bruges, Ghent/Gent (still not sure of correct spelling), Brussels - two nights in each
Frankfurt - One night (to make travel from Brussels to Berlin a little more palatable - hey get it, palatable, food - you can expect more food based puns throughout)
Berlin - Four nights
Prague - Three nights
Vienna - Three nights
Munich - Three nights
Venice - Three nights
Bologna - Two nights
Modena - Two nights
Florence - Three nights
Rome - Four nights
1) Modena
2) Rome
3) Berlin
4) Prague
5) Bruges
1) Bologna & Modena
2) Berlin
3) Prague
4) Vienna
5) Venice