Last week, when I landed at O’Hare and de-planed from a direct flight from Dublin, Ireland, it occured to me that I would never be able to summarize my week-long trip in a short enough amount of time that anyone with any amount of patience would be able to listen to. Instead, when faced with the question I’ll have to answer a million times (“How was your trip?”), I’ll be forced to reduce it to the inevitable one-word answer: “Great!”
And listen. It was great. It was amazing. It was more than fine. But it was also an eight-day, seven-night, three-city epic that cannot be retold. Instead, what I’m resolving to do is to tell people about my trip through food (stay tuned for the ultimate Irish foodie getaway rundown on Page & Plate).
My favorite part of traveling is wandering around and discovering hidden gems -- and by gems, I mean coffee shops and bakeries -- in the cities that I visit. There’s no better way to acquaint yourself with a different culture, whether in a city 300 miles away from home or in a foreign country 3,000 miles across an ocean, than ditching the hotel bar and finding local favorites. On this trip, that meant Griffin’s Bakery in Galway.
In the past, it’s been a fish and chips shop on the beach in a quiet suburb of Sydney. An amazing bakery in San Francisco. Fresh fish in Seattle. Hummus in a remote village in the north of Israel (which, lucky for you, I’ve done my best to replicate here).
I remember all of these trips because of the food that I ate while I was there, and for me, the meals are the highlights of the trip and the windows into other places and cultural experiences.
My trip to Ireland was delicious and full of those experiences, and if I had my way (and my own jet), I’d be traveling every weekend, getting a taste of different cities around the country and world. Lucky for me (and my bank account), I don’t have to go all the way to Spain or Greece or Seoul -- The Chopping Block has all that covered for me in classes that explore cuisines across the world every week.
