Welcome aboard a food, travel, and culture blogging adventure!

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I’m glad you’re here! I’m Betsey, and I’ll be your tour guide on this weekly journey of food, travel, and culture. Each week, we’ll journey to a different country and explore its rich culture by digging into its best dishes.

But first, let me introduce myself.

Hello, my name is Betsey, and I am a foodie. Not the snobbish, uppity, I-only-eat-in-three-star-or-above-Michelin-rated-restaurants type, but more of the I-love-to-stuff-my-face-with-good-food-because-it-makes-me-feel-like-a-real-American type. I grew up with a Czech Grandma who cooked armies of kolaches and dumplings, and since I was in diapers I watched my super mom of a mother bustle around the kitchen. She was no Iron Chef, but she always had a curiosity about cuisine that has stayed with me ever since I left for college six years ago. Mom was always trying a new technique she’d learned in some exotic cookbook, and when my brother and sister and I weren’t wrinkling our noses at whatever new concoction Mom had cooked up, we had to admit that we loved her sense of adventure.

My mom and I at undergrad commencement in May 2011.

That’s where the travel part comes into play.

My Mom and Dad love to travel. Every year, and sometimes twice a year, they’ll go wherever the wind takes them. As they age, I find wind patterns tend to blow toward cruise ships. But when I was younger, Mom and Dad would take us on world tours. The summer before my senior year in high school, they took me on a trip to the Baltic states: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Poland, and Germany. It was love at first passport stamp.

But I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite a bit before then; a year before the Baltic trip, I’d ventured to Italy and Spain. And the summer after my freshman year of college I studied photography in Provence, France (more on that later).

The point is, through my travels, I have learned a few very important lessons.

First, food is the great unifier. Everyone loves to eat, and there’s something so intimate, so special, about sharing a meal with someone that you just can’t help but think that if the world spent a little more time cooking and eating together, we’d find we’re not all that different after all. Plus we’d probably all be so stuffed we’d be too sleepy to fight, anyway.

Second, you can learn so much about the world and where you come from by learning about others: their history, their culture, their homes.

Third, you can learn so much about yourself by experiencing other cultures. Travel exposes us all to frustration, fatigue, homesickness, and sometimes even real sickness (I mean, haven’t we all had a bad experience after eating at that kind-of-shady-by-really-cheap Chinese restaurant down the street?).

As I see it, what they say is true:

“Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer.”

…but buying food is totally worth it.

Let’s dig in!