I've never been one for fancy restaurants. I'm sorry, they just don't appeal to me. I know there's lots of people who only think it's worth going out if you eat at some knock-out place where the waiter wears a tux and you can't get a wine bottle for less than fifty bucks (yeah, that's my notion of expensive wine). And I don't get those people because while I love food, restaurants just don't interest me.
One of the main minuses of traveling, for me, is the food. Because sure, you can buy shit at the supermarket and eat that instead and I often do, but you gotta have a hot meal ever so often and restaurants around Europe tend to be expensive, especially by Romanian standards.
Anyway, that's not the point. The point here is the food in fancy restaurants is just so...tasteless. You wanna know what the best food I had recently was? A warmed-up sandwich from a vendor in the park. Tasted fucking amazing.
Don't look like much, does it? But it was one of the best meals I've had in my life. Maybe it was to do with the mind-blowing concert I'd just left. Yeah, if I think about it, that definitely had something to do with it. And the fact I was starving, given that Italian restaurants have this habit of closing up over the afternoon, so I'd had nowhere to get food.
But see, I don't think I would've been happier if I'd stopped at a restaurant on the way home. To me, restaurants are just an unnecessary expense. I don't see where they enter into the equation. I'm not the sort of person who goes home and tells their family and friends about the luxurious restaurants they ate at or the fancy hotels they stayed in. Why would I? With all that extra cash, I could fund another trip to another badass show. And, subsequently, another warmed-up sandwich. And it would be delicious, trust me.
Better than oysters steeped in blah-blah sauce or whatever they serve at these fancy restaurants.
Another favorite meal from my latest trip - fries from fucking Burger King on a platform, while waiting for the train. Late-night pizza in Verona after yet another rock show. (It seems most of my meals on trips have to do with rock shows, I know...)
I mean, I don't know...do people honestly sit around and go 'man, that one restaurant where I payed like 200 bucks for a meal, yeah, that was great'? I mean, I'm sure they had good food, but is it really worth 200 bucks? Matter of perspective, I suppose. Different value systems and all...
Some people find a lot of meaning in being able to afford elegant hotel rooms and impressive restaurant meals. And I don't get them. I tend to stay away from restaurants here and when abroad, I choose them based on how much I can afford to spend on something so secondary as food. Hotels are always chosen based on proximity to venue. Seriously, it can be a shit-hole, as long as it's within walking distance. It's more important to me than cutesy toiletries and soft beds.
And the funny thing is, they're never shit-holes, at least not to me. Because they're all associated with a rad night, rad memories and rad people. And when you put it like that, you can take your smooth curtains, roll 'em up tight and shove 'em up your ass...
