Dahl baath for the soul

One thing I always look forward to when I'm coming back to Belgium, is the food. I'm not talking about Flemish fries, Brussels sprouts or expensive chocolates. It's mama's cooking I crave before/during/after traveling. Because mom's food is the best food. My mom beats every tv chef and fancy restaurant. I could even say my mom beats your mom's cooking. But that would be rude. But true. She IS one hell of a cook. The only reason I'm homesick once in a while is because 'home' equals her divine meals.

A very important part of traveling for me, is trying local dishes. It's like tasting the soul of a place. Sometimes I enjoy a beautiful meal prepared by a family, other times I find tricky looking food stalls that sell things I might regret eating. But I try it anyway. And a whole new world opens up to me. Four years ago, my stomach didn't agree with some Nepali dishes, but this time my belly was having party. I ate crispy noodles with a piece of cardboard instead of a fork, goat lungs that tasted like soft chicken, dahl baath until I fainted with happiness. And for a second, I forgot about Belgium and mom's homely food. 

Pancake rocks and fergburgers

By the end of this trip you can go and roll me around the street. That's exactly what I've been doing for the last four weeks: rolling from restaurant to snack bar to cookie shop to ice cream parlour. I'm forced to wear dresses because they are the only things aside from curtains that fit around my new cirkel shaped body. Honestly, it's been so worth the extra lumps of fat in all the wrong places. While stuffing my face with the biggest burger I've ever seen (a fergburger - the bombay chicken. It was good. Google just turns it into an awful looking thing) I was already dreaming about dessert. And dinner. And dessert after dinner. Midnight snack. And you can't start the day without a big breakfast.

You can imagine how draining traveling can be, so lots of great food and a bottle of red wine have become two basic needs in our daily lives. We're not spending money on a place to sleep, so why not throw it at snack bars and pay them to turn us into fat women?

That's one of the reasons we were looking forward to see the pancake rocks. They were stunning. To celebrate our little walk to the rocks, we treated ourselves to a piece of cheese cake.

The same day we met two guys from Chile who share our love for barbecue, so we decided to travel together for one week and ten thousand extra kilos.