Elena Vasquez · January 31, 2026
Show up and wing it — that’s the advice I hear on repeat from other travelers convinced that one food festival is basically the same as the next, that a crowded tent of samples is a crowded tent of samples no matter the country. It falls apart the moment you actually try it. I’ve booked … Read more
Elena Vasquez · January 30, 2026
My suitcase has been packed around a wheel of cheese, a layover once got stretched purely for a street food fair, and — I’ll admit it — I booked a train ticket into a tiny Portuguese town largely because someone mentioned free chocolate samples waiting at the station. If any of that sounds familiar, you’re … Read more
Elena Vasquez · January 29, 2026
A guidebook will tell you Rio’s Sambadrome is where you eat your way through Carnival. It isn’t — that’s where you pay tourist markup for cold food while the real cooking happens on the blocos routes a few blocks away, for a third of the price. I plan entire trips around this kind of correction, … Read more
Elena Vasquez · January 28, 2026
Two weeks. That’s roughly the shelf life of a lot of the dishes on this list — recipes that exist for a specific stretch of the lunar calendar and then disappear until next year. I don’t build my trips around ruins or museums; I build them around this kind of scarcity, the meals you can’t … Read more
Elena Vasquez · January 26, 2026
Almost every traveler assumes January is a culinary wasteland — a month for detox diets, gym resolutions, and staying home to recover from December’s excess. That assumption is flat-out wrong. This is precisely when I book flights around the best food festivals in January, chasing some of the most electric culinary events anywhere on earth, … Read more
Elena Vasquez · January 25, 2026
I landed in Bangkok for the first time in 2009 with a 35-liter backpack, a Lonely Planet that was two editions out of date, and the absolute certainty that I had prepared enough. Within 48 hours I had been tuk-tuk…
Elena Vasquez · January 24, 2026
I used to be a chronic overpacker. Not mildly — embarrassingly so. I once checked a 32-kilogram bag for a 10-day trip to Southeast Asia and spent three days of that trip doing laundry anyway because I had packed the…
Elena Vasquez · January 23, 2026
The first time I got truly scared traveling alone, I was 24 years old on a night train from Budapest to Bucharest. A man had been watching me for two hours. I had no alarm, no plan, and no idea…
Elena Vasquez · January 22, 2026
It was 2013, and I was standing at a gate in Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport watching my flight to Tbilisi push back from the jetway. My bag was on that plane. I was not. I had made it through security, found…
Elena Vasquez · January 21, 2026
I was sitting in a hospital in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at 2 a.m., watching a nurse attach an IV drip to my arm, when I realized I had absolutely no idea what my travel insurance actually covered. I had bought…
