Confessions of a Sabbatical Returnee

Whoa, those BLUES came out of nowhere...

It happened within hours of returning to California from Burning Man and it hit me like a ton of bricks. The 9-month world foodventure that started in Nepal, brought us to Ethiopia, Indonesia and a lot of other places in between had just ended. Although we spent a few days in Los Angeles and San Diego immediately after we left Singapore, it was all in preparation for Burning Man, which felt like it was closer to being in Mars than being in the USA. The acknowledgment process that our fantastic sabbatical was finally over did not start until we unpacked our playa dust covered backpacks and started cleaning up after spending a week in the insane desert up in Black Rock City.

From one moment to the next, there wasn't somewhere to be, something to pack or  some way to figure out how to get from point A to point B. It all just felt "settled" and static. I realized something was wrong when I was sleeping-in and did not even want to get out of bed, talk to anyone or go out to socialize. I didn't know why I was feeling so funky but after a few days, as I was sitting in the parked car just staring out into space, I jerked back a little and realized I was depressed. Depressed! How did I just go from being so obnoxiously happy and content to actually feeling depressed? Change.

I'm a fan of change. I like spontaneity. Routine can get boring. But routine can also get addicting and it doesn't take much to get used to. When that routine is fun and involves traveling the world, it's even easier to get used to. This change was too abrupt. Everything was too different. Everything seemed too dull. Worst of all, everything felt too serious. I felt immense amounts of pressure to "get serious" and go back to work and start being productive. Thinking about it made it worse and I felt even more depressed. I started feeling anxious that I was getting myself into some deep negative emotional hole that I had no interest in experiencing. This whole return business was just awful.

It remained awful for a few days until I broke my awkward silence and started talking about it. I broke the silence because I realized I was focusing on the wrong things. I kept wishing that I was back on the trip and not permanently in California. I wanted to hop on a plane so bad and disappear again. But I realized that this was no different from dealing with reverse ear block 15 feet below the ocean surface, mouse infested guesthouses in the middle of nowhere or being covered in white and green gunk from a sickly woman who just sneezed all over you in a cramped bus (gross, I know, but that did happen). 

Those of us who have the luxury of choice are extremely fortunate. I finally got out of the fog and chose to have a different perspective and to start talking about how I was feeling. By making this choice and with Eliot's incredible support and patience, I was able to get out of what felt like a self-induced brief spout of mild depression. I'm lucky it was easy for me. It's not that easy for others tormented by this illness...

I have since loved being in the Bay Area, and have gone on endless hikes in the redwoods, eaten at the best hole in the wall places and discovered that if you're a foodie, Christmas is possible every day if you live close enough to Berkeley: it's called Berkeley Bowl.

Fellow travelers: if you're ever stuck in that dark hole, just remember that you have a choice and make sure you surround yourself by a strong, supportive community who'll help you get out of it. The adventure of life never stops, no matter what changes may come or where you may find yourself. Get out there. Eat your heart out. Never stop adventuring.

****In memory of our beloved friend Brian****

Less and longer: a few words of wisdom on traveling right

So you’ve saved and budgeted for your trip and now it’s finally time to plan your itinerary. Six months of travel time stretches out before you like a magic carpet. So many opportunities to explore exotic locales! So much time to explore all those places on your bucket list!

Ahh, your bucket list… How many boxes will you be able to check? You have six months. Why not do the Inca Trail, explore Patagonia, go shark diving in South Africa, eat dumplings in China, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, go to a full moon party in Thailand and find yourself at an Indian ashram? Hell, you should probably throw in an Italian cooking class and a camel riding in Morocco for good measure. It all sounds great. Until, of course, you hit the brick wall of reality.

Inside a hellish bus for a heinous ride through Nepal

Travel can be hard, frustrating and draining. You start to think about that into your second day into a thirty-hour bus ride in Nepal where the space between the seats was apparently designed to be perfect for two-year-olds and there’s a box of meat rotting in the back. Or when you arrive in your fourth Tanzanian town and every single local is trying to cheat you for forty times the proper cost of accommodation. Or maybe when you get violently sick in the middle of the wilderness with no hospital (or road) for days. These are the times when you start to appreciate two magic words: less and longer.

Less really is more. Don’t stack your itinerary. It’s far better to spend two months than two weeks in any given country on your list. And in that country it’s far better to spend two weeks rather than two days in any given city or destination.

By doubling down on particular places you kill two birds with one stone. First, because you’re in one place for a long time you’ll find that perfect beach bungalow owned by the local mayor’s family and get invited to a massive wedding party where you make friends for life. If you were only there for two days you’d probably be at that guesthouse with decent but outdated reviews from Lonely Planet that now has a cockroach infestation.

Second, you minimize your exposure to the bane of all travelers: logistics. You don’t spend half of your time in country on a local bus. You don’t discover that your fourteenth taxi driver rifled through your bags. You don’t loose you luggage on an avoidable regional airline flight. You've taken six months off, use that time wisely: with less and longer you'll interact more with locals, enhance the quality of your experience and maintain very healthy levels of personal relaxation.

Basically, you’ve taken the work out of the travel. By staying longer in each place you actually get a feel for the local life there instead of blazing through in a series of photoflashes. As you get ready to plan your trip, doing a country a month would be a good rule of thumb. You may not check as many boxes but you’ll learn a lot more about yourself, a lot more about the country you’re visiting and a lot more about the true meaning of fun!


Co-posted on www.eliotpeper.com

Food: I love you! Travel: I like you too!

I love food and I really like to travel

Not just any food though, I love fresh food, mostly the unprocessed kind (organic, locally sourced is my preference!), and I love the experience of learning about it, picking it up at a market, smelling it, cooking it/ordering it and savoring every bite 

 

Unless it was a life or death situation, you'd never catch me at the McDonald's, KFC's, Applebee's or the like

 

Part 1. I eat therefore I travel. I travel therefore I eat. This is how my story begins.

I have always loved food and was not a picky eater when I was a little kid. Many of my baby pictures show me eating cubed cheese and fresh fruit. When I was about 5, I received a cook book as a gift and started making scrambled eggs for breakfast and tried to help in the kitchen as much as I could. I actually liked making salad dressing from scratch for lunch - even salad tasted amazing to me as a little kid. Growing up, my mom never let me eat alone. She would always eat with me or sit down next to me and watch me eat. She later told me this was one of her favorite things to do because she just loved how much I enjoyed food and how much I loved the experience of eating my meal. Throughout elementary school, I usually made my friends jealous because my mom would always make me home-made lunches from scratch: one of my favorites was bistek con arroz, braised beef with sliced red onion and sliced tomatoes on top of a bed of rice. There were no microwaves back then so she'd back it in one of those Thermos and it would still be nice and warm around lunch time. Oh and I would have a side of sliced green apples with salt and lime (trust me, it's a great combo) or sliced green tomatoes with salt and lime and home made banana bread for dessert PLUS a bonus tropical fruit juice made from fresh fruit as my drink - this was basically fruit, water and pure cane sugar all mixed in a blender. 

There are many poor souls out there who've never enjoyed a delicious Tomate de Arbol juice, it's so good!

Mora aka Blackberry - throw in a blender and drink!

Weekends were awesome - they  basically centered around food, food and mas comida that I enjoyed to no end with every single member of my family. We'd usually go to a finca and eat small round potatoes known as papa criolla, yuca (aka cassava), empanadas vallunas, savory plantains and small arepas with all sorts of fried meats including chicharron and chorizos. 

Empanadas Vallunas stuffed with Beef and Potatoes

Plantain tostadas topped of with hogado (simmered down tomato, onion, thyme, garlic) and avocado

That was the appetizer. Then we'd dive in to a very typical soup called sancocho which you could have with either gallina (hen) or beef. You usually add avocado, rice and spicy aji as an option and the soup has more plantains, yuca and potatoes inside and both the meat and the soup (in a giant pot) are usually cooked over leña that gives it a nice subtle smoky taste.

Those were the good days.

Then we moved to the United States... to New England out of all places and food just... sucked! It was so BLAND and boring and everything seemed to be processed and wrapped in plastic. Luckily mom and dad still cooked a LOT at home so I still ate pretty well but I missed food from home so much. Even the eggs were weird and tasted like nothing AND looked different. Did you know that egg yolks are supposed to be orange and not yellow? When a hen roams around freely eating dirt, grass, worms and whatever is in a normal chicken diet, they absorb more nutrients including beta carotene thus giving yolks an orange color. When those poor hens are confined to tiny spaces and are fed industrial GMO corn that not even humans can eat, their life is pretty horrible and they produce lame looking eggs with yellow yolks. The taste is insanely different; orange yolks give eggs an incredibly delicious flavor (ask anyone who grew up in a more 'developing' country and I think they'll agree!). Anyway, I wasn't about to drown in a glass of water so I started getting more and more into cooking at home as I survived eating at the college cafeteria and realized that the meal plan was a scam with a horrible value (e.g. I was paying to eat pretty nasty food). Then the summer before Junior year came and it was when my taste buds woke up from their long, ardous nightmare: I spent my entire summer in one of the culinary meccas of the universe: ITALIA.

I mean, what can I say. You haven't had Italian food until you've been to Italy. It is so fresh, so full of flavor and so elegantly simple.

Making Beet Risotto with an Italian chef we hosted at our home in California

I loved going to the market (what they call a farmer's market in the US) almost every other day and getting fresh fish, the greenest most fragrant bunches of basil, melanzane, blood oranges and mozzarela or walking down the street to eat a 6 euro dish prepared by a really cute Italian grandmother consisting of fresh mussels on a bed of pasta with capers that they practically brought up from the beach and then topping it all off with a refreshingly cool lemon gelatto. Italy reminded me SO much of home and at first I couldn't quite put my finger on it but then I started realizing that, just as we did when I was little, the Italian life also centered around food, food, and mas comida that is enjoyed with every single member of the family!

From that summer on, I started becoming extremely passionate about food and cooked more and more at home when I wasn't traveling the world. My trip to Italia also woke up my apetite for travel and I spent many years living in East Asia where I finally learned to eat spicy food (I couldn't even handle fresh ground pepper until I was 20!) and ate some crazy but often delicious dishes (Freshly slaughtered and roasted Mongolian goat, congealed pig's blood, live miniature shrimp that jump all over your table if you down douse then in lime juice and Thai chilis, a pig's head that sat out in the sun for 6 hours, barbequed korean dog, raw minced beef served in a shack off the side of an unpaved road and grilled Chinese snake to name a few).  

This blog, then, is my attempt to document my food adventures going forward as my fiance and I travel to Nepal, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. But before that, everything starts in California... onward to Part 2!