We’ve been quite spoiled for food and drink the last few days here in the Adelaide area. Without even really trying that hard, we’ve had delicious and fresh Australian, Malaysian, Argentinian, fish and chips, and of course, wine. All the vegetables and fruits were brimming with richness and flavor. We had a tasting menu with a wine pairing last night (the latter of which we almost never do because of how expensive it is in the U.S.) that I loved every bite of. We even had a flat white today from a random coffee shop in the Barossa Valley that Chris marveled over while drinking. “Ugh, I’m going to miss having good food without trying hard when we go back home,” he grumbled on our drive back to Adelaide.

He’s kind of right. You could rarely just pass by a random Malaysian hole-in-the-wall back in New York and just trust that the food was good without looking up reviews.This place we stopped by on a whim made its roti dough from scratch every single morning, and while we just stopped in to grab a snack, a queue quickly formed after we sat down, proving how popular and delicious the place was to locals. Back home, you also couldn’t stop in for a coffee at a discreet coffee shop and just assume that the coffee quality was high. Even after we finished our shared flat white, the creaminess and well-roundedness of the coffee still lingered on my tongue. I enjoyed it for the time that it lasted.

Whenever we are here, I always tend to eat more bread. I rarely eat much bread back home because I just don’t really care for it that much as a food group. I’d much rather have rice or noodles. Bread in the U.S. is the same as with most food; you have to know the company and the brand in order to trust that it will be tasty. Here, any random grocery store or market will have delicious and fresh multigrain bread that would be amazing as toast or a part of a sandwich. Maybe it’s just higher quality wheat, lesser sugar, and higher freshness here.

For most Americans, visiting a winery is about doing a formal winery tour, looking at barrels and being photographed with them, taking whiffs of different scents that are associated with wine grapes and other flavors that you get when tasting wine. You go for tastings or a full fledged wine tour. They tend to feel a bit formal. You might feel like you will be judged for liking or not liking a particular wine. You will inevitably have to pay for that tasting (and in Napa or Willamette Valley, you will certainly have to pay at least $20-30 for a very simple tasting with average to mediocre-sized pours). It is not value for money that you are getting. You’re doing what the average person would consider something that higher-brow people do… because wine is a luxury for the well-to-do, right, unless you are buying 3-buck-chuck from Trader Joe’s? One of my cousins even said I was “acting like a white person” by drinking wine and visiting wineries; so nice of him.

In Australia, wine is just kind of part of the culture. The Europeans brought their vines (from South Africa) and settled in South Australia, and the rest is pretty much history. Most wineries here do not charge for tastings, and when they do, they will waive the fee or apply the fee to a bottle purchase. The pours are generous, and the feeling is not even remotely pretentious. It is casual and fun. Even the rule of thumb Americans typically are told, that you can generally trust that the cuter or funnier the wine label, the worse the quality of the wine will be — this does not exist here. A few of the best wineries have whimsical names and even funnier wine names (e.g. “Floozy” or “Mongrel”).

We spent the day visiting wineries in the Maclaren Vale region, just 40 minutes outside of Adelaide. The most interesting cellar door (as they are called here) that we visited today was the D’Arenberg Cellar Door, also known as “the cube” in Maclaren Vale because if you had to look at it from the outside, it does not appear like any winery you’d ever see in the U.S.; it’s a very modern building shaped like a blue, white, and black-patterned cube. And the inside of it is like a museum, full of interactive exhibits, scent-testers, and even a bathroom that begs to be photographed, with “human mouths” as urinals and flora covering the walls from floor to ceiling.

Wine drinking shouldn’t be perceived as pretentious or so serious; it should be fun and playful the way it is here.

Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, a city that Americans would consider not high on the priority list (if on any list) of places to visit in Australia, since most travelers would prioritize Sydney, Melbourne, and Cairns/the Great Barrier Reef over this city; I get why they would. I guess Chris has, too, in showing me the glories of his home country. It’s my seventh time visiting Australia, yet this is my first time visiting South Australia. But it’s far more diverse and interesting than I could have imagined before, with interesting and modern architecture, cuisines representing the entire globe (today alone, we had a Malaysian snack, Australian meat pies, and Argentinian food), and one of the world’s most famous wine regions with Barossa Valley among others right in the city’s backyard, some areas less than an hour away from Adelaide. Honestly, before Chris, all I really knew about Adelaide was that it was in South Australia and that the musician Ben Folds spent some time living there with his then-wife, who is Australian. Folds has a song called “Adelaide” that mentions things like the quaintness of this capital city and places to visit like Rundle Mall.

With the wine scene being so vibrant, I found that in my restaurant research that many of the highest rated restaurants for local eating in the country are actually right here in Adelaide. Many had won national awards for restaurant of the year or newcomer on the scene by well recognized dining publications or newspapers. It was comical to read in many reviews that some restaurants were so posh, modern, and in high use of local ingredients that “it feels like we were eating in a Melbourne restaurant!”

Traveling for food and wine — what could possibly be better than that?

In the U.S., I always use Yelp to look at restaurant reviews. As anyone should with any random review site, I take the reviews with a grain of salt, as many of the reviews are going to be completely baseless and say absolutely nothing helpful, or, written by people who have no idea what the cuisine is supposed to be, or base their review on the dishes they ordered that the restaurant is not even remotely known for. Some examples of types of reviews that I disregard are: “All of Portugal’s food is nothing noteworthy, but THIS RESTAURANT IS WORTH GOING TO! I loved it!!”; “Chinese food is always so greasy, but this place is not!”; “My husband and I came here for dinner last night (a steakhouse), and I don’t eat meat. So I ordered the swordfish, and it was horrendous!”; “The food here was good, but not great. I’ve had better (end of review, or details on what was ‘good, but not great’).” In other words, that person wrote a bunch of words that said completely nothing.

But what I have noticed overall is that for Asian restaurants in general, the reviews in the U.S. on average tend to be more forgiving than the reviews in Australia. Here in Australia, people use Zomato and rate/review restaurants, and the reviews tend to be more critical. People will be more exacting about whether the pho lived up to their high standards (“beef flavour was not deep enough”), or if the noodles were house-made or not (“noodles were not fresh!”). Reviewers will also on average not give as many five-star reviews as they do in the U.S. for reviews, meaning that in the end, even if someone really enjoyed a restaurant and found it quite good, it might have at best three or four stars. The reviews where people wrote that the restaurant was “good” and only gave them three stars — these were mind-boggling to me. They are really taking “okay” to the extreme meaning of “good” here.

Because of this, when I am looking at the average review in the U.S., I might give a place that has on average 3.5 stars the benefit of the doubt (especially if they are relatively new and are still working out their kinks and consistencies in both service, food, and presentation), but on average, would prefer places that have at least 4 stars. Even a 3 I would almost always pass on there. But here in Australia, I’d still consider a place if it had 3-3.2 stars (ratings seem to also include all those .10s, too, here). In fact, one Vietnamese spot I really enjoyed had only 3.3 stars, and I felt a bit deflated afterwards.

Since arriving in Melbourne on Saturday and wandering through the Central Business District, I couldn’t help but notice a few signs that said, “We welcome all refugees.” Though it is up for debate whether Australia is more welcoming to refugees than the United States, particularly in an age of Trumpism where bigotry and racism have been reawakened across the globe, it is comforting to see a sign that at least appears to acknowledge that there are innocent, well-meaning, and hard-working people struggling in war-torn countries today that need a home in a safer, happier place. Not everyone believes the fake news that all refugees are potential terrorists looking to leech off of “free handouts.”

I’ve also been doing some research for the few days we will be spending in Adelaide this week, and I noticed the immigrant stories on some of the restaurant websites. One of them was especially heart-warming, describing a couple who migrated from Afghanistan with their young family in the late 1980s during the height of the Cold War. As is common with many immigrants to a new country, they didn’t see much that resembled the foods that they loved to eat, so they opened their own restaurant in 2009 to share with Adelaide an authentic piece of the Afghan culture that they left behind. Their website reads:

“At Parwana we believe that even loss and suffering can forge beauty and generosity. It is in this spirit that diners at Parwana are welcomed like guests into a home, and treated to the culinary pleasures of age-old secrets of genuine Afghan cooking, hinting at the glory of the country the family once knew.”

If you ask any American, Afghanistan is not on anyone’s “bucket list” for travel. It has a dark gash over it with an ongoing war there, with heavy U.S. involvement. When people hear the name of this country, they immediately think of Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. And for the conservatives of the U.S., for which there are many, they likely believe that almost anyone from Afghanistan is a potential terrorist. So a story like the one shared above is lost, reduced down to nothing and forgotten, the stories of most immigrants families who leave their home countries, their places of familiarity, seeking out a better life and future for their children and their children’s future children. It’s tragic because it’s a culture like most Central Asian and Middle Eastern cultures that embraces family gatherings, guests being welcomed into a home, and delicious food.

And, this isn’t any surprise, but this restaurant is on our list.

Every time I’ve come back to Melbourne over the last six years, it feels more and more Asian to me. It doesn’t seem to matter what neighborhood we are in or what block we’re walking along, but there is inevitably yet another noodle or dumpling spot, many of which are chains from China or Taiwan or Malaysia. They have have both Chinese or Vietnamese or Thai writing in addition to English. The food always looks authentic and beautiful. And there’s always Caucasians ordering the “right” dishes at the restaurants when we pass by and I take a quick peek through the windows.

And then lo and behold, as we were walking through Melbourne’s Central Business District today, I noticed Happy Lemon, a popular chain of “salted cheese” milk tea drinks that originated in Shanghai that has hundreds of locations around Asia and the world now. They have a location in Flushing in New York, but not yet in Manhattan. And in the Bay Area when my two friends introduced me to it, it’s located in Berkeley, not in San Francisco. This is their first location in Oceania.

It’s overwhelming in a delicious way. I want to eat everything.

My last meeting before leaving Boston today was in Burlington, a suburb that is about half an hour outside of Boston proper. I wasn’t sure what the traffic would be like, as Google Maps estimated that my car ride would take anywhere from 30 minutes to a full 55 minutes to arrive from the Downtown Crossing area of Boston. So of course, I left an hour early only to arrive half an hour too early for my meeting.

As I sat in the lobby of my customer’s corporate headquarters waiting for my hosts to come pick me up, I marveled at the fact that I was sitting right in the middle of what I consider hell: in the boonies of suburbia, a corporate office park where every single person, whether against their own will or not, likely has to drive to work every single day. They have to drive and park their car in the lot outside, and then, when the work day is over, they have to go to their car, pull out of the lot, and leave.

People love to hate on Manhattan and say it’s too crowded, too busy, that traffic is a mess. But really, I don’t care about traffic here because I’m not driving in it. I’m taking the subway, then walking a few blocks to work. One of the best things, to me, about living in New York City is that pretty much no one (sane, anyway) drives to work. We can literally take the train or bus, then walk right into our office. No car to park. No parking lot. None of that. Walk right in. That just sounds so glorious to me.

One of my brother-in-law’s absolute favorite topics to discuss is whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert. He especially loves to say that his brother, Chris, is an introvert, which is the opposite of what most people who know Chris would say. I guess the two of us are both in that bucket; we’re both fairly introverted, but most people who know us as outgoing, gregarious, friendly people would say we are definitely extroverted. I have a lot of extroverted qualities; I am fearless when it comes to meeting new people. I have zero problem going up to a stranger and introducing myself. I also frequently make conversations with strangers when I am alone, regardless of whether the other person initiates it or not. I’m just curious in that way, I suppose.

Well, I know for a fact that I am introverted because one of the most telltale signs that you are an introvert is that when you are around people you do not know well where you have to make an effort to get to know them, to dig deeper and peel away all those onion layers, you feel exhausted once the time is over. I had two nearly back-to-back customer meetings today in Boston, with two video meetings in between both, and I felt so tired after. I wanted nothing to do with anyone. I didn’t even really want to leave my hotel room other than to grab a quick dinner to go and bring it back to my room to eat in silence by myself. The meetings were productive, mind you; I got all the information I needed from these meetings. I shared what I outlined to share via my agenda. But when they were done, I was so happy.

These are the moments when you really do need time to yourself, when you’ve spent a lot of time socializing out of necessity, in this case, for business reasons, and need time to recharge. And the only way to recharge is to be alone, at ease in one’s aloneness and silence.

Today, Chris decided that we would take a day trip from Porto to what is often considered the birthplace of Portugal, or the ‘cradle city’ of Portugal because it is widely believed that Portugal’s first king was born there, and also due to the fact that the battle that led to the foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal was fought in the general area. Guimaraes is famous for its many castles, but unfortunately for us, we didn’t have too much daylight time to see a lot of it. We were able to have time to wander through its historic streets and also dine at a delicious local restaurant that we had to navigate through a parking lot and side alleys to get to.

At this point, we’d eaten so many delicious dishes during our Portugal trip, but this particular meal was especially notable given how local it was (it felt like local people who knew the owners were dining there, and we heard no other language other than Portuguese other than our own), how hidden it was through a parking lot, and how simple, short, and straightforward the menu of the day was. Simple is not a code-word for “boring” or “bland” at all here; instead, we had two of the most traditional and tasty dishes of our trip here. We enjoyed tripas a Portuguesa (traditional Portuguese tripe, pork, and white bean stew) with buttered rice and bacalao com nata, or salted cod baked with cream and what seemed like cheese, in an earthenware dish with a crunchy breadcrumb top. We also had the vinho verde, or “green wine” also known as a local young red wine (hence the “green” in the name) that is made from young grapes and has a thick viscosity.. it honestly reminded me of pouring blood out into a bowl. You drink it not out of regular wine glasses, but rather out of rice-shaped bowls like in Chinese cuisine. The dishes were simple but so comforting and homey. I kept eating more and more of the stew, struck by how simple the flavors were but how good it all tasted. The white beans were so soft and creamy, and the tripe had a little bit of chew and almost melted in my mouth. And the bacalau — this was very likely my favorite way that bacalau was prepared during this trip.

Portuguese tripe stew was actually on my original list of dishes I wanted to eat while in Porto, but here we had it in Guimaraes, which is close by. According to stories I read, tripe stew is a symbol of the Oporto people’s generosity, as according to the legend when Henry the Navigator was preparing his ships to conquer Ceuta in 1415, he asked the people of Oporto to donate supplies to stock the Portuguese navy. Well, they apparently donated so much that they had nearly nothing left to eat other than tripe.  However, that did not mean starvation for the people. Instead, they used their imagination to create this amazing recipe, which granted them the nickname of “tripeiros” or “tripe eaters.” 

I love stories like this when people use in cooking what would once be considered “poor people’s food” and turn their limited ingredients into something delicious that would eventually be treasured by a whole people.