Some thoughts about food. The right food in the right place – Is it dinner time yet? – Would you like a coffee with that sir? – Have you done your homework? – Self catering? Really?
1. The right food in the right place
We set off determined to eat the food of each country, and not to go for the easy options of Indian and Chinese and other fast food. This has resulted in a LOT of cucumber and tomato for every meal apart from Second Breakfast. It has proven to be surprisingly easy to resist eating Indian and Chinese food because I think the EuroEpic19 route precisely identifies a set of towns where no ambitious immigrant chef would dream of setting up shop. With the exception of Bari, which announced the somewhat dubious establishment “Sushi Wok!” on its outskirts.
We were very pleased with ourselves to eat Indonesian food in Amsterdam (nice link there to past trading history) but have failed to find anything so poetical since. Good news is that we still have France and Spain left…
2. Is it dinner time yet?
Dinner time varies enormously along the route. Germany eats early, 7pm and things are mostly over. Turkey, and Edirne in particular, caught us out with restaurants emptying by 8pm. And then in Greece it’s ok if you want dinner before 10pm as long as you have Tourist pinned to your T-shirt. Italy isn’t quite that late, but still late. We haven’t really got used to adjusting our dinner time and tend to turn up at 7.45pm to an empty restaurant, whatever country we are in.
3. Would you like a coffee sir?
No! It’s been hot for us all the way through June and July, and we dream of iced coffees. Or a freddo cappochoccochino thing with crushed ice. In Turkey and Greece they do a cold coffee with whipped white topping and we have no idea what that topping is made of. For a scientific experiment Sid tried blowing through the straw into the underlying coffee and the long-delayed …gloop ….gloop of rising bubbles looked like a visual effect from Jurassic Park. We drank it anyway.
4. Have you done your homework?
Ah this is a bit of a sore point. We should really have done more work on “street food” in each country. We have tended to use our standard assumptions – that cafes serve food, that bakeries will sell you a variety of sweet and savoury snacks, that you can buy something yummy from the shelves of a grocery store – and that hasn’t really worked. The most annoying thing is when you discover a really great food on the last day in a country. We had gyros for the first time on the day we left Greece and it was ambrosial! Carbs, fat, protein, salt, all in one stupendous package. Get one between two and you might even be able to cycle afterwards.
Oh, also we discovered the concept of “tavolo caldo” on the day we left Italy – self-service food from a hot counter, perfect cyclist fuel.
5. Did you do any self-catering when you had apartments with kitchenettes?
No. Ha ha. It is going to be quite a shock when we get home and find that food doesn’t just turn up on the table.