Michael Brein
THE SERIES Over the last few decades, I’ve interviewed nearly 2,000 world travelers and adventurers. I am weaving the best of their nearly 10,000 fantastic travel tales into a psychology of travel as revealed by these very telling stories. These are travelers I’ve encountered on planes, trains, buses, ships, tours, safaris, and in campgrounds, bars, cafes, restaurants, and pubs. These courageous travelers have freely shared their most personal travel experiences, some good and wonderful and others even horrific and life-threatening, which I, in turn, get to share with you now through my True Travel Tales series.THIS BOOK is a collection of the best travel stories of one of travel’s greatest pleasures and most engaging pursuits, namely, dining and drinking. To be sure, obtaining food and drink is perhaps the singular most essential all-encompassing activity in travel. Beyond getting a roof over our heads, meeting and genuinely connecting with fellow travelers and the locals, and sightseeing, there is probably nothing so singularly important and demanding of our time as our focus on what we consume and what we imbibe on a daily basis in the service of our sustaining ourselves and quenching our thirst in travel. There is nothing more pleasurable and sometimes even more disgusting and discombobulating than the tales of our encounters with what we eat and what we drink. You will read or listen to interesting and riveting tales of the wide variety of occasions where food and drink create for us such great recollections of the best and the worst of our dining and drinking times that pop up time and again in our travels for most of us. This book is about the most exotic of our foods and drinks in travel including tales of what we would never dare eat or drink at home. To be sure, this book is the sum total of our daily experimentation with being often one or the other of both the ’Gourmand’ or the ’Gourmet’ within. And quite often the distinction blurs as we engage in the ridiculous behaviors of the oft hilarious and embarrassing comings and goings of crazy stupit scoundrels on their (our) own National Lampoon-like (summer) ’Vacations’ who cannot seem to help themselves (ourselves) by behaving at times as the ugly Americains who we sometimes cannot help but be!
