When I was 22, I spent the summer in Indonesia. I was fresh out of college and looking for a little life experience before finding a job and getting down to the business of supporting myself and paying off those college loans. It wasn't an easy trip, but I've always been grateful to have had the experience of it. When I search back through my memories of that summer, one of the themes that surfaces first is food. I particularly remember a fried chicken breast that a friend and I split early one morning. We had been on a bus all night and stopped in a tiny town for water, bus fuel and bathrooms. When we sleepily asked about food, we were taken to a three-sided tent, where an elderly woman fired up an oil-filled wok. Working quickly, she dropped a whole chicken breast (skin, bones and entire chest structure intact, nothing like the single plump chicken breasts we know here) into the the wok, moving it around occasionally with a handmade spider. When it was done, she wrapped it in a handful of banana leaves, we paid her the equivalent of $.85 and hurried back to the bus. It was delicious.
If you're the kind of traveler for whom the food is one of the most important parts of the journey, you should check out the World Hum's new feature on the Eight Best Cities for Street Food (congrats on your snazzy new look, World Hum!). Their contributing editor Terry Ward has compiled her street food memories from all over the globe, offering a collection of tempting and tasty tidbits that may just convince you that it's time to start planning another trip, just for a bite of the food she describes.
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