2 weeks ago, I shared the Top 5 worst things about my round-the-world trip.
Of course everyone loves a happy ending so today we’ll be looking on the bright side of things.
5. Learning Spanish in South America
There is something about learning a new language: A new way to express yourself. A different way of seeing the world. Being able to eavesdrop on other people.
Now that I’m back in Singapore, I can finally take a break from travelling and take a good look at my 4.5-month round-the-world trip.
My friend M asked me to summarize my trip in a list of Top 5 best and worst things about my RTW. Since it’s an interesting way to summarize the trip, I will share with you my two Top 5 list today and next week.
Since I’m a “bad news first” kind of person, we’ll be looking at the worst things things that happened during the trip. In one of the next posts, I’ll share the other side of the trip: the Top 5 worst things that happened.
Check out the rest of the post…!
Welcome to YQtravelling’s FoodFriday. The day of the week when I show off some of the lovely eats I had while travelling.
We’re heading to Argentina today for some main meals.
Since I was in Argentina for about 3 weeks, I had too much food to stuff into one post. So I decided to split my Glutton in Argentina post into two: main meals + snacks and desserts.
Tasty beef is probably the first thing people think of when you mention Argentinian dishes. While I had been busy cooking my own steak in the hostel, I went to a few restaurants to splurge a bit.
Location: Puerto Iguazu, Argentina
There were a lot of cats at Aripuca and I’ve featured a sun bathing cat in Caturday.
One of the most fascinating of the feline was a very fluffy white cat. It was majorly adorable but I didn’t dare get too close in case it ran off.
For more Meow Power, check out the other Caturdays:
Henri le chat noir in Turkey
Give a cat a rod
Good Cat Hunting in Athens
Welcome to YQtravelling’s FoodFriday. The day of the week when I show off some of the lovely eats I had while travelling.
Today we’re going to Argentina for a hell lot of barbecued meat.
Before I went to Argentina, I thought I knew barbecue. To me, BBQ is a time when friends gather around and put dainty raw meat such as chicken wings, hotdogs and maybe some slices of meat on top of some charcoal.
Then on my second night, the Buenos Aires hotel I stayed at had a BBQ Thursday. Just hand over 70 pesos and you can eat all you want. When I heard of the event, I thought about how many chicken wings I can eat (many many!) and was glad that beef is popular in Argentina. Now I can replenish my iron supply!
But when I saw the barbecue pit and the meat on it, I realized how wrong I was about Argentina’s BBQ. Those were not chicken wings on the grill, those were huge chunks of meat (fatty parts included without apologies), wrist-sized sausages and half chickens.
Oh, I have to explain. Here, carne (meat) refers to beef.
Some of the guests from the US requested beef that was bleeding, not realizing that different cuts are used for BBQ. Unfortunately, the guys at the hostel didn’t really cook the meat enough so I was feeling a bit queasy after just a few bites.
Later in the supermarket, I saw a huge part of the meat section devoted for barbeque meat. They looked more like large intestines than meat.
After the asado at the hostel, I was quick to dismiss Argentinian asado. But one day, I met the best barbecued meat of my life at a restaurant in Iguazu.
The restaurant is called Vaca Verde (Green Cow) and the owner was a really friendly old man who recommended the house’s asado.
The meat that came out looked a bit charred but the taste was marvelous. The slightly burnt skin tasted sour but the meat was sweet. I gobbled down my share quickly but I wanted more. More of this beautiful meat.
After the meal, my brain was still hooked on it. I even had a dream where I was served something that tasted exactly the same. Alas, I have not had the dream since then.
Location: Buenos Aires
This cat refused to budge even when some tourist tried to push it off.
This tomb is found in Buenos Aires’s famous La Recoleta cemetery.
Caturday: Black Beauty at Istanbul Archaeological Museum
Welcome to YQtravelling’s FoodFriday. The day of the week when I show off some of the lovely eats I had while travelling.
Today we’re making our own hot chocolate, Argentinian style.
I was introduced to the submarino–a winter Argentinian drink–in my Spanish class in Buenos Aires. Out teacher asked our class of 3 if we knew what a submarino was.
Being the smart ass (although truthfully more ass than smart) that I am, I said that it was a sandwich, thinking that it was a quirky nickname for Subway.
Then the teacher explained that it was a drink. In a tall glass of hot milk, a bar of chocolate is submerged, giving it its name “submarino” (submarine).
One day, I tried the drink at a Buenos Aires cafe. The waitress came with a glass of milk and TWO bars of chocolate. The chocolate’s label indicated that it was for submarinos. However, I took a nibble and discovered that it tasted the same as regular dark chocolate.
Instead of flying to Buenos Aires during winter to try the submarino, I will share my recipe for making a submarino in 4 simple steps.
For this recipe, you will need:
Pour out your milk into your mug. Put the mug of milk into the microwave and heat it up in 20-30 seconds intervals, test the temperature of the milk and you are ready when the the milk is steaming hot.
Break off a row of chocolate and drown it in milk. Stir vigorously with your spoon.
Once most of the chocolate has turned to liquid, you are ready to…
Drink the whole mug in a go.
Oh, you might need to bathroom afterwards because even people who are not usually lactose intolerant will have some of its symptoms when finishing a large glass of milk. (Or maybe it’s just me.)
Welcome to YQtravelling’s FoodFriday. The day of the week when I show off some of the lovely eats I had while travelling.
Today we’re going to going to South and Central America for some raw fish yummies.
It was my mom who introduced me to the wonders of sashimi. A long long time ago, I didn’t realize just how tasty raw fish with a hint of spicy wasabi is. One day, she encouraged me to try out “just one slice” of tuna sashimi. I was hooked!
Since then, I always welcome dishes with raw seafood (even if they taste like rubber) so imagine my joy when I learned about Latin America’s ceviche.
The dish, also spelled as “cebiche”, is raw fish or seafood marinated in citrus juice. The juice “cooks” the fish using some scientific magic. Or About.com can explain better:
In the culinary arts, ceviche is a Latin American recipe for raw fish and seafood marinated in citrus juice, mainly lime and lemon juice. The acid in the citrus juice coagulates the proteins in the fish, effectively cooking it.
Ceviche is served in the morning and until noon in Peru because it’s not good to keep the half-cooked fish until dinner time. However, for tourists, restaurants do serve ceviche for dinner.
My first ceviche experience was in a Peruvian restaurant in Buenos Aires.
Chan Chan was near my hostel and was said to serve cheap food. I ordered the ceviche, despite not knowing what to expect. I imagined a large plate of sashimi slices but it looked like this:
There was a bush of onion on my fish and a piece of tapioca and a small corn. I thought it was going to be all meat. :(
Still, I fell in love with the tangy dish despite my ulcers which were stabbed by the lime juice with each bite.
From then on, I was open to tasting as many ceviches as I could. However, until now, the dish from Chan Chan remained the best tasting and the most filling ceviche that I’ve had.
I’m hesitant about eating ceviche in most places because the combination of raw fish and unsanitary conditions equals disaster.
So I was glad to learn that the couple from GQtrippin did not have problems with the ceviche at San Camilo Market in Arequipa. I made it a point to visit the market and taste the local ceviche.
The sauce for my ceviche was dyed a slight orange color from what I hope was the tapioca. The dish was nice but it couldn’t compete with my memory of my dish in Buenos Aires.
I adore ceviches but I find it frustrating that they never serve a big enough serving to strerch my stomach. Ceviches are served in petite portions with more garnish than the actual fish.
Sometimes the dish is served in fancy wine glasses like this one from a ceviche recommended by one of the teachers in Arequipa.
As a budget traveller, I do not frequent fancy restaurants much. But when I was studying in Arequipa, Peru, my retired schoolmate Tasha* (not her real name) always had plans to visit nice restaurants. I could have said no but I always went along.
At Mares in Arequipa, they have a dish with four different sauces for ceviche. I quite like the one that tasted of fruit but I do not remember the proper name.
I tried ceviche at a seafood restaurant in San Salvador. There was quite a lot of fish and even a fried banana biscuit to garnish.
I was surprised by the crackers they gave me. The waiter told me that I should eat the fish with the cracker.
The fish was quite OK and I liked the salty taste of the cracker combined with the lime juice. Yum yum.
When I head back to Southeast Asia, I’ll miss ceviche the most. Even if restaurants sell ceviche, I seriously think that the price will be over the roof so I’ll just eat all my share of ceviche here before I head home.
Location: Puerto Iguazu, Argentina
A regular-colored cat lying in the sun to tan its belly at Aripuca near Iguazu.
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Location: Santiago, Chile
[This post was delayed by a day because of travelling and feasting.]
Finally, I am leaving Buenos Aires. I have been in Argentina for more than 3 weeks which is about 1 week too long. I blame it on my US visa application but I should be thankful that the application was successful.
However, thanks to Buenos Aires and Argentina, I’ve met quite a few exciting people. Like me, they’ve decided to take time off from “real life” and travel/ live abroad for an extended period of time. I feel less strange.
My plane to Santiago was leaving at 11:25am and I booked a 8:10am shuttle. This meant that I had to wake up at 7:00am and skip breakfast.
While waiting for the shuttle, I managed to lose my shuttle booking voucher. (I later found it in my pocket.) When the driver asked for the voucher, I had to pretend that I left it in the hostel.
Throughout the drive to the airport, the driver was twitching. Not listening-to-music twitch but a jumpy shoulder. I was afraid he might lose control and run into something.
Luckily, we arrived in one piece.
At the airport, I found the Overexposed Model in one of the ads. For those who don’t know me in real life, I have been “curating” a tumblr called The Overexposed Model which features a stock image model on many different ads.
I groaned loudly when I saw the ad. It’s not really that exciting seeing her on advertisements now. It’s more like a crazy nightmare.
Let’s head to my Sky Airlines flight. The plane was a small vehicle with three seats on both sides. I had the aisle seat as well as a lumpy seat.
The meal was horrible, one of those that give plane food a bad name.
They didn’t even have coffee or tea. Gasp. Thank goodness the flight was only 2 hours.
The plane seemed to take forever to land in Santiago airport. The clouds were really thick and the plane was flying around for a long time before it landed.
I took a shuttle bus (5,000 peso) to my hostel. The bus waited for a while for enough passengers before heading to town.
Along the way, I saw some beautiful green mountains. It was emerald green with a few trees lined up on its side. I’m liking the city.
After checking into my 6-person dorm, I headed out for Japanese. Sky Airline’s inflight magazine recommended a Japanese restaurant in Santiago that was just down the road from my hostel.
The place had two floors. I went to the second floor since the first floor was full.
I almost had a heart attack when I saw what the other customers were doing. They were drinking espressos, after a Japanese meal!
After getting over the shock, I ordered the set meal. It wasn’t until everything arrived that I knew what it was: Fish tempura with chicken in soy sauce.
The meal was delicious but the green tea was horrid. There’s something bad about Santiago’s tap water. It’s foul.
After lunch, I took a long siesta, something I needed badly.
For dinner, I went out with Xiao Li who I “met” on Twitter. She has been in Santiago for a while and has been teaching entrepreneurship. I feel highly underachieved compared to her.
Xiao Li and her boyfriend, M, brought me to a Peruvian restaurant where I had my first pisco sour. I am in love with Pisco Sour.
Despite being on the same longtitude as Buenos Aires, Santiago is very very cold. I suspect it’s because it’s in a valley.
The night’s temperature dropped to about 7 degrees C. That is bloody cold. Luckily there’s a heater in my room so I didn’t freeze during the night.
YQtravelling 