So I went to Asia! It's impact on me or my perspective of food?
Hard to reduce so much experienced into words. Or for that matter come to a conclusion about
something still spinning in my brain. I
suppose what I can say first and foremost is that Asia eats well… now I realize
that is quite the inaccurate statement depending on your point of view. (And perhaps vaguely distasteful bearing in
mind the vast majority of the continent suffers from poverty and
malnourishment.) What I mean to have said rather is that there was not a meal I
was disappointed with on this journey. The
closer to the local, cheap staples eaten in each town, the better tasting and
more satisfying the food ended up being.
As for the over all encounter with each destination: well I tried to record that all in a journal. I didn’t try very hard regrettably. To my credit, the writing surprisingly lasted
5 days, which is about 4 days longer than I expected. But the little bit of writing done isn’t much
of a help. More so a journal jam-packed
with embarrassingly enthusiastic and useless adjectives than the formatted
notes we all were taught in school to take. “The restaurants here are wild!” in
retrospect provides no clarity to what happened where or when. Fortunately, each country and city visited bore
a unique personality from the rest. Each
destination professed its own quintessence that I still smell and taste
days after.
Recollecting the trip is not
the defeating task set ahead as I had begun to assume when I first tried to write
out the trip. Alternatively, it’s possessing
such a vivid imprint from these places, and hoping to articulate the experience
in any sort of worthwhile way that I am finding to be the real challenge. How can anyone actually summarize witnessing
the product of thousands of years of cultures, traditions and methods materializing
in person? I’ll tell you what I saw, and I will stress to everyone, go see for
yourself someday. Nothing else can do
these people and places justice.
In an attempt to give accurate descriptions of each country I saw, I will be posting each of them individually throughout the next few days. First on the list: Japan...
