Right near the top of my list of reasons I love to travel is the opportunity to eat local specialties. This is true of whether I’m going to New York or New Delhi. Everywhere in the world, as far as I can tell, has its own special cuisine—something they do better than anywhere else. Hawaii, of course, is no exception. Here, in words and pictures, are my favorite Hawaii eats.

(Please note, I am not much of a food photographer. This is primarily because I am a top-notch food eater, and I either get so excited about my food that I forget to photograph it at all or I get so anxious to eat my food that I fail to take a good photo. I’m sorry.)

No trip to Oahu is complete without a trip (or was it three? or four?) to Leonard’s, home of the island’s most famous malasadas. For all of you sad souls have never had one, malasadas are Portuguese donuts. Best eaten straight from the grease and piping hot, traditional malasadas are served covered in sugar, though at Leonard’s, you can also opt for malasadas stuffed with chocolate, custard, haupia (coconut milk custard), or the flavor of the month (it was pineapple in February, macadamia nut in March). Expect lines out the door at Leonard’s, but don’t let them deter you. The malasadas are totally worth it.

Another Hawaii must-have is shave ice (note: it’s called shave not shaved ice). To be clear, shave ice and snow cones are completely different things. Shave ice is about one million times better than snow cones, because of the way that the ice is shaved very, very finely with an incredibly sharp blade so that the ice actually absorbs whatever flavoring is added to it unlike with a snow cone where it all drops to the bottom. It’s very common in Hawaii to eat your shave ice with ice cream or red beans at the bottom. I’ve never tried the beans, but the ice cream is a fun choice because it gets all the leftover syrup and thus makes for a tasty treat. As for flavors, I like to stick with the tropical choices, including liliko’i (Hawaiian for passion fruit), mango, and pineapple. Probably the most popular shave ice shack in Hawaii is Matsumoto’s on Oahu’s North Shore. I’ve had it and can vouch for it, though this time we tried Aoki’s and I would rate it just as highly.

I’m a big fan of seafood, especially when it’s served in a casual atmosphere, and it’s hard to get much more casual than the shrimp shacks and trucks dotting the islands. The biggest collection of them that I am aware of is in the vicinity of Kahuku on Oahu. These “restaurants” keep things simple with a small menu that basically consists of shrimp served in a couple different ways (with butter and garlic sauce, with cocktail sauce, with a hot and spicy sauce). They’re delivered in a styrofoam container with the common two scoops of rice, and there’s really nothing to do but dive in and get messy. The shrimp are ridiculously huge and delicious. The only negative is how long the wait can be. This is not fast food; waits of 40 minutes are not uncommon. But, hey, you’re in Hawaii. This is island time. Get used to it. As for recommendations, I’ve tried both Giovanni’s Aloha Shrimp Truck and Romy’s Kahuku Shrimp Shack and can vouch for both of them, though if you’re a fan of spicy, I’d suggest Giovanni’s. Their spicy shrimp live up to the billing.

I’m a sucker for farmer’s markets, so of course, I made it a point to seek one out in Hawaii and I’m definitely glad I did. We happened to arrive in Po’ipu on Kauai on the day that the farmer’s market was being help in nearby Koloa. As we pulled up, I thought that there must be something else going on in the park where it was held, because of the overwhelming number of people, but nope, people just take their farmer’s markets seriously on Kauai. (There was a gate keeping people out until the designated start time, and there was a huge crowd waiting at it, so to get the good stuff, get there early.) The market wasn’t huge, but the offerings were delicious, with a special emphasis on the tasty fruit grown on the island. We loaded up with apple bananas (my favorite!), oranges, grapefruit, papaya, pineapple, starfruit, and tomatoes, all of which were awesome. I highly recommend seeking out a farmer’s market while in Hawaii. Each island seems to have a near-daily farmer’s market, though they rotate locations (every Monday in one town, every Tuesday in another, etc.).

Sadly, I didn’t get photos of the other food we enjoyed in Hawaii, but on our list of favorites was the ahi tuna (just barely seared; so good), Kalua pig, saimin and other noodle soups, the Korean barbecue, and the sweet bread rolls.

Other restaurant recommendations include:

OAHU
Nico’s on Pier 38 (Honolulu): Casual seafood right on the pier. Get the ahi.

KAUAI
Pizzetta (Koloa): The pizzas are really delicious. Pasta servings are large and tasty as well.
Scotty’s Beachside BBQ (Kapa’a): The brisket sandwich was really good, and I loved the baked beans. Nice view as well.
Duane’s Ono-Char Burger (Anahola): We only had the milkshakes were (nice and thick), but I’ll go back for the burgers next time.

BIG ISLAND
Kona Inn Restaurant (Kona): If you’re looking for a splurge, I enjoyed the classic Hawaii atmosphere here. The view is good too, and the ahi was excellent. If you opt for the mud pie, share it with the whole table. It’s ridiculous.
Kona Brewing Co & Brewpub (Kona): Fun atmosphere, good beers, and good pizzas.
Bite Me Fish Market & Grill (Kona): Right in the marina, Bite Me does the seafood proud. Picnic-table eating with a view of the water is teh way to go. (Don’t opt for a salad here. They’re very sad.)
Thai Thai (Volcano): Food options in Volcano are extremely limited, so if you’re staying in Volcano bring food with you or be prepared to drive down to Hilo. Or you could just eat all your meals at Thai Thai, where we found excellent curries and stir fries.

*Be sure to check out other Photo Friday fun at Delicious Baby.

1. Fanta Passion

Sure, I hear you saying that you can find gyros all over the United States, but I’m telling you, friend, they’re just not the same as they are right off the spit in Greece (and they never put French fries inside the gyro here in the U.S.!). For the year I taught in Athens, I lived right across the street from a gyro stand. I probably ate there three times a week. Why I didn’t eat there seven times I week I don’t know. In retrospect, I should have. The gyros were awesome and so ridiculously cheap. Though there is much I love about Greece, I would be 100 percent happy to return and do nothing but eat–gyros, moussaka, patitsio, proper feta, awesome olives, tatziki, proper Greek salads, saganaki, tyropita, spanakopita, gigantes, fassolakia, loukaniko…

As we walk down the main beachfront street in Taganga, a man yells out to us encouraging us to come check out his restaurant. This restaurant has no name, doesn’t even really resemble a place to eat. On a circular slab of concrete shaded by a thatched roof, a small bar and a few molded plastic tables and chairs hold court. Aside from one supporting a local having a drink, the chairs remain unoccupied.

I look at Jeff and he asks if I want to check it out. I give a noncommital nod. After a morning of diving, we’re famished, but I’ve already rejected a handful of restaurants. There was nothing wrong with them, per say, but they weren’t what I wanted. They were places that catered to tourists, that automatically handed you an English menu, that would at your request cook up the same thing your mom was serving for dinner at home that very night. Some days that’s great, especially when you’ve been traveling a long time and feel the slight ache of homesickness or are simply travel fatigued, but on a short trip like this one, those places aren’t for me. I want to get the local taste.

So we enter the man’s restaurant. “What’s on the menu?” Jeff asks. The man, a guy bordering on senior citizen status with grey hair, worn hands, and a few missing teeth, doesn’t hand over a menu. Instead he opens a cooler. First, out comes a pink fish. In rapid fire Spanish, he begins to explain the fish to us, what it tastes like, how he’d cook it. He then opens the fish up at the gut and tells us to take a look inside, to note just how fresh it is. He then pulls out two more fish of different types and does the same thing. Our choice.

We pick the first fish. The man then places the fish on a platter and takes off down the street, disappearing into a doorway. He comes out emptyhanded. I have no idea who now has our fish, but I picture a little woman, his wife or mother, fixing up our lunch.

He returns to us, pulls up a chair, and begins to chat. Soon a local couple comes in and picks one of the remaining fish. They join in the conversation. As we wait for our meals, we are showered with advice on where to go and what to see, we get opinions on the upcoming election, we learn that the people here are believers in climate change as they’ve endured less and less rain and changing seas, we hear stories of how much Colombia has changed for the better in the past few years, we’re questioned about why more Americans don’t come to Colombia, Jeff is applauded for his Spanish.

When our food comes, it’s delicious. Accompanying the well-seasoned fish are fried plaintains, coconut rice, and salad. We clear our plates. For $5, it’s an incredible value. For a moment we consider paying up and heading back to our hotel for a nap in a hammock. But instead we order another drink and settle back into our chairs. The hammock will wait. Meals with this much local flavor are meant to be savored.

(P.S. We apologize for all the comment spam lately. Our server is not recognizing our spam blocker, and we’re having trouble working things out. Of course, this had to happen while we were gone and not online 24/7. Bear with us. I promise we’re working on it.)

Thanks to all of those who left us questions when we opened up the floor. Here is our attempt at answering. If you’ve thought of something else you want to ask, go ahead and do so. We have received other questions via email, and we plan to answer those in a later installation.

Did you ever have to get medical treatment or even buy medicine?
Only two sicknesses stick out in my mind. On New Year’s Eve 2008, two days before we were to begin our hike to Machu Picchu, I came down with a stomach bug. I first got sick on the flight from Lima to Cuzco, and it didn’t let up the rest of the day. Making it worse, we were in a freezing cold room with a crappy bathroom. It was also pouring rain. And to top it off we had to go to the trekking office to make our final payment. I had to stop about every 20 feet, and at one point, I was so bad off my brother actually offered to carry me. The next day I felt better, but then it returned the next day, our first day on the Inca Trail, when I hurled the second I stood up from the lunch table. Unfortunately, I also passed it on to my brother, who got to learn just how tough he was when he was horribly sick on the hardest (and what turned out to be the coldest and wettest) day of the hike.

The second incident was when Jeff and I both simultaneously came down with what we strongly suspect to have been the swine flu. We were in Siem Reap, Cambodia, which was experiencing a big outbreak of the epidemic at the time. We had all the symptoms—crazy delusion-causing fevers, respiratory issues, horrible aches and pains, and overall yuckiness. I also had the bonus of stomach issues. We were sick for about three days, but there was one night I thought we just might die. I may have actually wished to die because I felt so miserable. Luckily we were able to secure some Tamiflu, which really helped.

Other than that, we were pretty much healthy. Our stomachs also proved to be made of steel as we handled the local food and water with nothing more than a blip of discomfort here and there.

What is the one things that pissed you off the most?
We got annoyed at the fact that most people in the world have no idea what a line is. We got tired of being quoted prices many times higher than they should have been and having to haggle for a fair price. I thought the guy on our Inca Trail hike who didn’t think we needed to tip our guide or the porters was an ass. But I only remember getting really pissed a few times.

Once was when the bus left us, as well as the four other tourists onboard, at the Vietnam-Laos border, forcing us to hunt down and pay for a private mode of transport because it took us too long to get our visas. I actually took the getting left behind in stride; what were we to do? What got us pissed was the company’s refusal to take responsibility or give us any sort of fair compensation.

The second was when my purse was stolen on the train in India. I wished all sorts of evil on him, and if I had had a chance at him, it would not have been pretty.

The third was later on the same day in India, when we saw the reality of the caste system come into play and witnessed the level of inhumanity that so many people live with every day. We haven’t told this story here before, and it would take too long to explain in this post, so check back next week when I’ll tell my Varanasi cycle rickshaw story.

What made you smile the biggest?
I immediately thought of the kids in Africa when I read this question. It’s funny because I wouldn’t say that either of us are huge kid/baby people. Don’t get me wrong, we like them, and might even want our own one day, but we definitely don’t fawn over every one we see. But the kids in Africa were so spirited, so funny, so contagiously in love with life. And they were always so damn thrilled to see us (unless they were absolutely scared to death of us). I still remember turning this corner in Zanzibar and coming across a group of three small kids. As soon as they saw us, they started shrieking “Mzungu! Mzungu! Mzungu!” (what they call white people), jumping up and down, and going absolutely crazy. It was like they’d just won the lottery. Simply amazing. We don’t quite get the same reception around here.

World’s best airline? Worst?
Air Emirates has earned its reputation as a top-tier airline. The seats were comfy and came with individual entertainment systems with tons of options, and food and service was good. We also had a good experience on Air France, getting exit row seats and a choice of approximately 1 zillion movies on our own individual systems.

Air India Express was probably the worst. Our flight was delayed  for 6 hours, and we could get absolutely no information on why or when it might possibly leave. Also, the passengers on this airline were nuts. I think every single person went the bathroom during the flight (which was less than 2 hours), and they made a line all the way down the aisle of the plane. And more than one person actually got up to attempt to go the bathroom as we were landing. We were literally about to put wheels down when they stood up. I know this isn’t directly about the airline, but the flight crew didn’t seem to have much control or influence.

Where in South America should I go?
What a beautiful continent! I’m ready to go back. Go to Patagonia if you want to see natural beauty the likes of which you can’t imagine. Go to the Galapagos because you get to snorkel with seals and penguins and see things you won’t see anywhere else in the world. Go to Buenos Aires to eat steak, ice cream, and wine, be seduced by the tango, marvel at the beautiful people, photograph the architecture, and try to speak their crazy version of Spanish. Go to Machu Picchu because it’s mystical and magical and simply astounding.

You are supposed to go to the dentist every 6 months. Did you?
No. I don’t even like going to the dentist here (though yes, I do it). There was no way we were braving it in some foreign country.

Best thing you ate? Worst thing you ate? Strangest thing you ate?

Best according to Jeff: Coconut Ice Cream with Dulce De Leche (Argentina), Steak (Argentina), Keow Teow Noodles (Laos), Malai Kofta (India), Naan (Amritsar, India)

Best according to Theresa: Steak (Argentina), Cau Lao Noodles (Hoi An, Vietnam), Fresh Fruit Shakes (Asia), Mangoes (Malaysia), Naan (Amritsar, India), Potato Momos (Dharamshala), Omelette with chips and roti (Mbeya, Tnazania). Strangely enough, what I find myself most craving though is gallo pinto, Nicaraguan style basic beans and rice.

Worst: Neither of us cared for the chincheros (fried pork skin) given to us by our host family in Granada. I also have to say we’re not big fans of cassava, or the million other names third-world countries around the globe have for the starchy white stuff that fills the world’s stomach without providing any real nutrition.

Strangest: We didn’t eat bugs or any of the other creepy-crawly-type things that really freak people out. In Africa, we did try ostrich, springbok, kudu, and some other types of wild game. In Asia, I had fish balls, which I actually liked.

What’s your favorite place in the world and why?
Africa, Africa, Africa. If I were to be given another year to travel, I’d immediately hop a plane to Africa, buy me an old 4WD, and spend the entire year exploring the continent. The landscapes were phenomenal, and the people even more so. I felt like our most “authentic” experiences were in Africa, that we experienced it on a more intimate level than most other places. I also have to say that I never, ever, ever got sick of looking out my window and seeing an elephant or zebra or lion or whatever. It’s just simply the most amazing place I’ve ever been.

Place Taken: Tisey Reserve, near Esteli
Date Taken: October 27, 2008

During Nicaragua’s rainy season, the forests surrounding the city of Esteli get pretty wet. We were determined, however, not to let a little (or a lot) of rain keep us from seeing this beautiful part of the country. So we made two trips—one to the Miraflor Nature Preserve (which turned out to be a muddy disaster as we wrote about at the time) and one to the Tisey Reserve. Though the evening and night brought a lion’s share of rain, the day had breaks of sunshine, which we took advantage of, hiking up a nearby mountain for a 10-mile view and then walking to a nearby village where we were told they make excellent goat cheese.

By the time we arrived at the village our mouth was nearly watering as we thought about the creamy, white, spreadable goat cheese that we know and love. But that’s not what we found when we got to the goat farm; what we found was hard rounds of rinded cheese. We went for it anyway. It turned out that we didn’t like it as much as the creamy stuff, but it wasn’t bad. Right after we purchased it, the rain began to come, so we enjoyed the cheese with some bread while tucked away in the village general store, where the friendly owner provided us with a cutting board and knife. The rain would last the rest of our time in Tisey, but it wouldn’t ruin the trip. We could still lay in the hammock on the porch of our cabin and listen to the frogs, and that evening we met another couple also visiting the reserve. The guy was from Nicaragua, the girl from Spain, and our entire conversation was in Spanish, a major accomplishment for me as I’d just finished my first and only week of Spanish lessons.

Brunei is a tiny country. If you were motivated you could probably walk right across it. And as you might suspect, there’s not a whole lot for a traveler to do in Brunei. So why did we stop there? Well, crossing Brunei is the easiest way to get from the Malaysian Borneo state of Sabah to the Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak. And if you’re going to cross, you might as well stop and see what there is to see, right? That’s the way we see things.

So what is there to do? Well, in the conservative Muslim but rather friendly nation of Brunei, we pondered the trappings of wealth at the Royal Regalia Museum, respectfully reflected at the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque, peeked around the floating neighborhood of Kampung Ayer, took a hike to a waterfall, and snacked on some excellent satay.

And oh yeah, Jeff ate noodles. In fact, he ate three packages of Mee Goreng (fried noodles) in a span of just over three minutes. And while that’s fast, it wasn’t fast enough. Someone else managed to eat the same amount of noodles in a span of three minutes and a few less seconds. You see, Jeff’s idea of a good time in Brunei is entering a noodle eating contest, which was held as part of some great big Ramadan sale and festival. The contest was held after dark, of course, so as not to interfere with fasting.

The contest involved two sessions, with Jeff being the only non-local entered into either. His entry brought plenty of smiles from the locals, and he even had his own cheering session yelling “Go USA” as he shoveled noodles into his mouth. Entering the contest, Jeff didn’t think he stood a chance, but as the clock ticked toward the three minute mark, it was down to Jeff and a fellow competitor. They had a few forkfuls of noodles left on their plate, as well as a glass of tea that they had to slam down as the finale, while everyone else had mounds. I suspect that more than a few people entered the contest not to win, but to get a free dinner.

Though there were a few short seconds in the contest where it looked close, in the end Jeff fell to someone with a bit more practice eating noodles. Oh well, we would have missed the finals, scheduled for September 5, anyways, and I’m not sure what we would have done with the grand prize of hundreds of packages of noodles. The free dinner, free t-shirt, and new friends we made was prize enough. Maybe a few more eating contests is just what the world needs. It’s not too often that you see conservative Muslims chanting “Go USA. Go USA.”

I’ve always had an addiction to Pad Thai. It started with my first taste of Thai food, at Sawadty Thai Cuisine on Bainbridge Island and has really only grown since. Which makes being able to eat it on a daily basis a wonderful, wonderful thing (though more than once a day is a little to much for me). Now, at home, we’ve tried all sorts of “pad thai” recipes trying to recreate the deliciousness that comes so easily to asian cooks. Pretty much any recipe we could find, that doesn’t require days of preparation, we’ve tried. All to no avail. We’ve been told the “secret ingredients” range from extra sugar and peanuts to ketchup (more on that later). But alas, nothing ever tastes quite like what you get at a Thai restaurant.

So determined to get to the bottom of this once and for all, we took a cooking class in it’s homeland. Specifically, in the heartland of Thai cooking, Chiang Mai. I started off with my favorite Pad Thai. It’s really very simple, just some oil to start the wok, water to keep things from burning, your meat, vegetables and garlic in, then some fish sauce for salty, some sugar for sweet, and some oyster sauce to give it some body. Add your peanuts and sprouts, and presto!, really good pad thai. Of course, the problem is in the whole finding the right ingredients. Fish sauce is relatively common in the US, but oyster sauce may be a little tricker. Unfortunately for all of you, I gobbled it down to fast for Theresa to get a picture. Theresa started with spring rolls and had it down in no time. Delicious stuff, and definitely one for the recipe book.

Really, I could’ve left then and been happy now that I can make my own pad thai, but we went on to to cook about ten other dishes between the two of us. I worked on hot and spicy soup, cashew chicken, spicy red curry, an asian chicken salad and mango sticky rice. Theresa specialized in hot and creamy soup, sweet and sour chicken (hint: secret ingredient – ketchup!), green papaya salad and mango sticky rice. Besides being ridiculously full as we also ate all of our dishes, we left armed with a whole slew of new meals to make. And I’m sure they won’t be as easy as our teachers made them seem, and finding the right ingredients won’t be particularly simple (shrimp paste, which smells disgusting by the way, and green papaya can be a little more difficult to discover, or even identify) but the food’s just worth it.

As a final test to our readers, in the middle of our day, we learned to carve a leaf and a flower. Can you guess who’s handiwork this is?

Jeff and I love Asian food. And we also like to cook. I’d say that back in our “normal life” we eat food we prepared in our own kitchen about 90% of the time. But it’s rare that we cook Asian food. We cook some curries and stirfries; we’ve made our own dumplings; and we’ve tried plenty of times to create the perfect Pad Thai. But generally when we want Asian food, we eat out. In fact, most of the 10% of eating out we do is at Asian restaurants.

For me, cooking Asian food is intimidating. Well, I’m not sure it’s the cooking so much as the shopping for ingredients. Asian food requires items that aren’t necessarily pantry basics; items that sometimes can’t be found at the regular grocery store. Now D.C. has no shortage of Asian grocery stores, and I have ventured into them, but usually I leave empty handed. The store is full of items that, to a good ol’ southern girl like me, look weird and smell even weirder. And to top it off all the writing is in Asian script and the staff rarely speaks English, so I usually don’t have any idea what the weird thing I’m looking at, smelling, and poking actually is. I once did manage to find shrimp paste, a necessary ingredient in some recipe I was trying. I swear I’ve never smelled something so bad. Apparently the dish tasted fine (according to Jeff); personally I couldn’t eat it because I couldn’t get the smell out of my nose. When it was time to move out of our D.C. apartment, it was the one jar that I didn’t recycle. While I emptied out, washed out, and recycled literally every other bottle and jar in our refrigerator, I wasn’t about to open that one.

But not wanting scary shrimp paste to permanently scar me and prevent me from making some of the dishes we love most, Jeff and I decided that we’d dive into some cooking classes while in Asia. Up first, Cambodian cooking in a half-day class at Battambang’s Smokin’ Pot.

We started out with a trip to the market, which made the Asian supermarkets in D.C. look as non-threatening as a Care Bear. We scuttled in between women deep-frying crickets and fish flopping out of buckets and wiggling toward parking lot puddles. I tried not to wonder how long the huge slabs of meat had been hanging there, and I only asked Jeff once if what I was looking at was noodles or worms. By the time we exited, we were all laden down with bags full of the ingredients we would cook—lemongrass, eggplant, chiles, garlic, chicken, fish, snake beans, and more—as well as tips on what to look for when shopping and a pretty good idea of what all the fancy packaged ingredients in the U.S. look like before they’re nicely preserved.

And then it was time to cook. Our first dish was fish amok, a curry that is probably the most popular dish in Cambodia. This wasn’t cheater-style curry; we actually began by making our own curry paste, a feat that required much chopping and then some stone mortar and pestle action.

Ingredients prepared, it was off to the stove, where we sweated (very literally) over a flame, as we mixed our homemade curry with our hand-squeezed coconut milk and our hand-chopped veggies and fish. As soon as most of the coconut milk was boiled away, we transferred our food to plates and chowed down on the best fish amok we’d had yet.

I was stuffed after cleaning my plate, but we were just beginning. Two more dishes awaited. The second was a spicy basil stirfry with beef that required us to throw ingredients into our wok at astounding speed while making sure that nothing burned. I felt very chef-like, and I must say that my dish could have made the menu at any of the Asian places we frequent.

And to end the day, we made a soup, one of my favorite kinds–a sour-spicy lemongrass chicken soup. Though normally I’d say it was too hot for soup, and though I was already stuffed, I finished it off anyhow. Delicious.

And though I’m still not sure I want shrimp paste in my refrigerator (or fish paste for that matter, which we used in our amok), I don’t feel nearly as intimidated about cooking (or shopping for) Asian food. We’ve definitely got three new dishes to add to the rotation, and I bet there’s a few more we’ll like in the cookbook they gave us at class’s end. Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll invite you over for dinner once we return home.

Thanks for all the voting so far … keep em coming, we need to know, Riga or Tallinn?

As many of you know, and as many of you don’t know, today was my birthday. I’m finally the same age as Theresa again (for another six months) and, well, that’s about all the benefits I see about being a year older any more. In years past it was driving, then voting, then drinking, then … renting a car. No longer, nothing more gained but another tick off the clock. But today was quite a special day for another reason.

Its official! I wrote a book! Now I nail it to the wall tomorrow (ala Martin Luther) and then wait three weeks to defend it against all who dare to criticize me =). The process is almost complete!

The best part of my birthday though, was our dinner this evening. We headed to Kungsholmen, a restaurant I had heard about as being very unique, lively and delicious. The voices that told me this were certainly right.

Kungsholmen has seven different “bars” – really cooking stations set up on the sides of the restaurant. Each one contributes six elements to the menu, and they vary widely. There is a sushi bar, a salad bar, a soup bar, a bread bar, a grill bar, a bistro bar, an ice cream bar and a cocktail bar. I ordered the Moroccan lamb chops off the grill menu while Theresa ordered the tuna burger with wasabi sauce off the bread menu. Both of our meals were absolutely delicious, my chops perfectly spicy with sides of fried mashed potatoes and yogurt covered cucumbers and Theresa’s tuna lightly seared aside an open faced burger and an almost guacamole-ish wasabi sauce.

The atmosphere itself was also something to behold as the waiters and waitresses shuttled between these various bars while still maintaining an eye on their customers – truly an impressive feat.

Yet at the same time, it wasn’t like a lot of restaurants where they go for the busy vibe but you can’t even hear yourself think. It was an active environment that you could still have a cozy conversation in – a rare balance.

Anyway, you may be able to tell from my comments that I left the restaurant duly impressed. It certainly is not the cheapest place in town, but if you find yourself in Stockholm, check it out. What other restaurants out there have you been to that have impressed you equally well? Bonus points for bargains!

Grocery stores reveal a lot about a place. In Germany, grocery stores are just a couple of aisles. They’re very focused. You want mayonnaise? Here, have a tube of mayonnaise. There aren’t 27 brands to choose from. There isn’t full fat, low fat, no fat, imitation. There aren’t glass jars, plastic tubs, squeeze tubes. There’s just one of each product, and you either take it or leave it. Though at first, it seemed so limiting, by the time I came home from a year in Germany, I was so adapted to it that I was completely overwhelmed by American grocery stores.

In America, we don’t have grocery stores; we have supermarkets. There are entire aisles dedicated to bread, entire shelves stocked with ketchup, more cereal choices that you could consume in a year. Even “exotic items” have options. And if you want to buy your toilet paper, light bulbs, school notebooks, and laundry detergent, do your banking, and pick up your prescription while you’re at the grocery store, no problem.

So while I usually enjoy going to grocery stores in foreign countries—you never know just what you might find, and it always provides a bit of insight into the country you’re visiting—I don’t particularly enjoy American supermarkets. Grocery shopping takes forever. I have to compare prices and compare nutrition facts. I have to try to calculate the actual savings of driving to another store that has better prices on certain items in regards to the cost of gas and the value of my time. It’s just not fun.

Thus you’d probably think that being that Jeff and I are currently on vacation—enjoying the beach at Pawleys Island, SC—I’d probably not be very happy about having to go to the grocery store. But you’d be wrong. I actually enjoyed it. First of all, the store is called Piggly Wiggly, which is without a doubt the best name for a grocery store. I saw that they were selling shirts with the mascot pig on it, and I must say, I’m tempted to go back and buy one. Secondly, though American supermarkets are pretty standardized, there are some differences. For instance, in the produce section of the Piggly Wiggly I found boiled peanuts and packages of collards and mustard greens. We are, indisputably, in the south. The Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway and the Confederate flag rafts only served to back that up. The blazing sun that left my legs and my knee in particular (odd, I know) a fiery shade of red provided final confirmation.

Anyhow, what items in your grocery store give away your location? And what is the weirdest thing you’ve found in a foreign grocery store?