Best foods I ate:
- Chicken in a chipotle sauce served at an Argentinean restaurant in Texcoco. Creamy, spicy, served with soggy french fries which are perfect to dab up excess sauce.
- Cohorizo enchiladas in Chiapas that demonstrated how great a sausage can be. Crisp, vibrantly flavored, and dripping fat.
- 30¢ tacos from the place by the movie theater in Texcoco. Savory and crunchy and salty and fresh and amazing. The best food I have ever had for 30¢.
- A meal in La Olla, in Oaxaca City Mexico: Oaxacana pasilla chile rellano with refried black beans and fennel; tomato and tomatillo salsa with unknown savory spice; guacamole made with a nutty flavored local avocado.
- Amazing Vietnamese spring rolls in Eat Me in Bangkok, Thailand. Duck, and mint leaves, cucumber, and sweetness. Made me feel like I was falling out of a dream.
- Chicken in curry paste and pork in coconut cream with red chili at an unnamed roadside stand on Ko Chang. Both were so steeped in flavor that the tastes were lingering in the mouth well after I had finished eating them.
- An amuse-gueule of salmon mousse with a tomato concasse and a little sesame stick. Appetizer of snails with wild forest mushrooms, cream sauce and thyme, with crispy crust. Main course of guinea hen with foie gras and wild mushrooms wrapped in a crust with brown butter sauce, with green beans, carrots, and small potatoes in Colmar France. After, I felt a bit like I would pop. (I did not).
- In Genoa I had a pesto dish which made me a bit weak in the knees.
- In Florence I had a pig side which tasted just like everything should taste. It was salty in a way which slid down your throat.
The most impressive things which were made by dead people:
- Teotihuacán
- Monte Albán
- Baths of Nezahualcoyotl
- The National Palace in Bangkok
- The Golden Temple
- The Mini Taj
- Duomo of Florence
- Pantheon
- Pyramids at Giza
Coolest Animals I saw in the wild
- Parrots
- Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys
- Crocodiles (including babies!)
- Raccoon
- Puffer fish
- Iguana
- Geckos
- Other small lizards
- Turtles
- Pelicans
- Storks
- Crabs
- Guinea Pigs
- Rabbit
- Worms
- Crickets
- Ant eggs
- Cow
- Pig
- Sheep
- Chicken
- Duck
- Many unidentified fish
- Snails
- Baby cow
- Guinea Hen
- Goose
- Scorpion (okay, not on my plate, but a mezcal which had a scorpion in the bottle and an obscene flavor.)
Strangest things I imbibed:
- Mezcal – an alcoholic beverage which can best be described as if A-1 steak sauce decided to start producing tequila.
- Tibetan Butter Tea – This drink is quite literally just a big glass of melted Yak butter. Even I, The Lover of Butter, couldn’t take it. Added a bunch of honey and was able to make it through half the drink – but not without feeling quite ill after.
- Chartreuse - at a Mexican family birthday party I had this brightly colored drink forced upon me by a man who was taking a bit too much pleasure in forcing it upon me. The flavor was a bit like blindness.
- The flushless, toiletpaper less, seatless, outdoor bathroom in the back of a farmer's home in Chiapas... while I had diarrhea.
- The bathroom in the CAPU station in Puebla, Puebla, Mexico had a floor to ceiling gate you had to pass through to get to the toilets which my large backpack barely squeezed through. When I finally made it to the bathroom, the floor was being mopped by a cleaning woman.
- Several days in late November I was tied to my hotel room in Delhi. Every 22 minutes (give or take 4 minutes) I needed to go. And bad. Oy.
- Out of the seventeen airports I am seeing during my trip one stands out above the rest. The Seoul Airport is a work of art - absurd, friendly, efficient, and from the future. I think I had everything I could ever ask for there - and some things I never even thought of.
- The worst airport comes in two categories. The Delhi airport is the sort of thing which makes you wonder "how do planes land here?" Dusty, no amenities, rushed, ugly, delayed, and dirty - it was nothing pleasant to look at.
- The worst airport experience however was the Ben Gurian Tel Aviv Airport in Israel. Though it features air conditioning, clean bathrooms, and high ceilings - the security and incompetence of the place was absurd and aggravating. While I had expected to be subjected to interrogation upon entering the country, I didn't expect the inquisition to be so strong upon departure. I don't quite know what got me into the mess, but at the pre-check in screening I was whisked off to a cubicle for interrogation for 45 minutes. They asked a little bit of everything: where I had been in Israel, why I had been in Mexico, what I studied, if I knew anyone in Cairo. I eventually was forced to bring out my laptop and show the interrogator my blog and allow him to read it (to which he snapped "Why have you written nothing about Israel yet??"). He then asked to look through the two hundred photos I had taken in Israel (to which he snapped "Why don't you take pictures of yourself?"). The men I dealt with were condescendingly and kept the aggressiveness of their voice barely checked. After that I still needed to get my bags checked twice - getting through the pre-check-in security took me over two hours. Afterwards I was greeted with wrong directions to my check-in counter, chided by security guards for walking the wrong direction down halls which other guards had directed me into, and having to hunt down an elevator attendant so I could give her my checked bag. Boo.
Craziest things I have seen in transit:
- In Mexico Ciy there are all sorts of things being sold in the metro - bubble gum, toys, CDs, brooms - whatever. There are also many people asking for money for various reasons - the blind, old women, musicians, small children. None were too out of the ordinary - except for one guy. One day I was on the metro, the doors opened and a man threw a white shirt full of something heavy into the center of one of the cars. He follows it in, shirtless, and begins to unfold the shirt, revealing broken glass inside. He proceeds to stand on his head as the train gets going, then throws himself onto the shirt, back first. He does this several times. Eventually he is bleeding a little and has some glass stuck in his back. He reaches back and pulls it out, puts everything back in his shirt-satchel, and goes on to ask for money from his unwilling audience. Craziest of all, some people gave it to him.
- In India there is an ongoing competition to see what is the strangest thing you can fit on the back of a bicycle or motorcycle. I am not sure what the final prize is, but there have been some pretty good entrants I have seen around. Four goats in a basket on the back of a scooter (Trivandrum), nine mattresses on top of an auto-rickshaw, which was filled with pillows (Trivandrum), and about 25 flats of eggs and a man on a scooter (Trivandrum). Largest number of people on one scooter? Six. (Oh, and by the way, it's required that men wear helmets in India - but not women - apparently much protest that it would muss their hair).
How Long I was Where:
I know my map might be confusing. I went so many places - but here's the time axis for that bit
| Time spent in… | in days | in hours | in minutes | Percentage |
| Mexico | 98.20 | 2,356.92 | 141,415 | 24.66% |
| United States | 0.13 | 3.00 | 180.00 | 0.03% |
| Thailand | 11.43 | 274.25 | 16,455 | 2.87% |
| South Korea | 0.12 | 2.92 | 175 | 0.03% |
| Cambodia | 3.79 | 90.98 | 5459 | 0.95% |
| India | 120.26 | 2,886.25 | 173,175 | 30.19% |
| Qatar | 0.04 | 0.92 | 55.00 | 0.01% |
| France | 87.19 | 2,092.58 | 125,555 | 21.89% |
| Italy | 21.79 | 522.98 | 31,379 | 5.47% |
| Egypt | 24.42 | 586.00 | 35,160 | 6.13% |
| Israel | 8.11 | 194.57 | 11,674 | 2.04% |
| Latvia | 1.25 | 29.92 | 1795 | 0.31% |
| Sweden | 8.27 | 198.50 | 11,910 | 2.08% |
| Canada | 9.83 | 235.83 | 14,150 | 2.47% |
| Monacco | 0.01 | 0.30 | 18 | 0.00% |
| Vatican City | 0.25 | 5.97 | 358 | 0.06% |
| Total known | 395.08 | 9,481.88 | 568,913.00 | 99.19% |
| Flight and ship | 3.21 | 76.95 | 4,617.00 | 0.81% |
| Total Trip | 398.28 | 9,558.83 | 573,530 | 100.00% |
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