Palampur, India

I’ve talked a little bit about eating while traveling in Puerto Rico and in Turkey, so I thought I’d share a different experience, about eating while living abroad.

In the summer of 2010, I was volunteering in a small rural town in northern India, near the foot of the Himalayas, and living with a host family with other volunteers. We had a cook who prepared us rice, daal, and vegetables every day, and I would buy mangos and cantaloupe for dessert. He’d make us chapatis, too, which some of the other girls would secretly smear peanut butter on when he wasn’t looking. For breakfast, we’d have cream of wheat with steamed milk or stuffed parathas.

We also drank five or six cups of tea a day, which was a huge treat because my girl Sonika makes the best tea on the planet, brewed from leaves from a nearby tea plantation. The work we were doing was with the children of the plantation workers, and we spent most days over there teaching and playing with the kids. It was a really incredible experience to participate in both the tea’s production and its consumption so intimately and to see how much a part of daily life it is. Needless to say, a lot of people were given tea as a souvenir when I got home.

We definitely lived and ate like locals. Plus, I got to hang out with these hooligans all day.