The findingDulcinea Blog

Discover a Culture Through its Cuisine

Mollie Caselli writes for GulliverGo, a new study abroad and travel Web site.

When I studied in Paris I took courses in French language and history. Classes were challenging, but my experiences with the local cuisine introduced me to the real Parisian culture. Whether you’re at a food market, birthday dinner, or learning to cook homemade pasta, the local recipes will teach you about daily life.

You can mark the days, seasons, and holidays by what you eat. If you’re Greek, it’s sweet bread at Easter, Baklava at Christmas, and Greek Avgolemono (lemon and rice) soup on Sunday. My Italian family savors a pot of Crab Cioppino every Christmas Eve. Christmas in Paris: I overindulged in La Bûche de Noël (cake bread) and Stollen bread. You know it’s a hot day in Spain when locals spoil themselves with Gazpacho. Anyone can experience these cultural treats; you just have to be a little open-minded.

Visit Local Restaurants

Don’t just open a tourist guide and find the most popular restaurant. Check out those hole-in-the-wall joints. You know, the homely ones where people speak the native language. Carry your language dictionary and you’ll be able to translate what’s on the menu.

Learn to Cook

Take a cooking class abroad. Whether it’s a day or a week, learn how to create your favorite food. You will not only discover its history, but you’ll also take a piece of your host country home with you.

Live With a Family

It might sound daunting, but live with a local family. Maybe you already have family abroad. Get to know them. I lived with a host family in Paris. We shared conversations over dinner. I even helped cook for a birthday party. Some locals invite travelers for one night. You’ll enjoy great food, but you’ll also learn how families value their time together.

Sweet Sites | Graphic Gourmet: All You Can "Eat" Online

A screenshot of foodgawker.com

From “Top Chef” to “Julie & Julia,” from the Travel Channel’s “Food Paradise” to New York Magazine’s whopping 82-burger slideshow, delicious food has become the new cultural obsession. But has it also become a treat for our eyes only? Michael Pollan recently fretted so in The New York Times, arguing that proper, wholesome cooking has migrated from the pots and pans of the American kitchen to the Food Network’s primetime lineup.

Don’t tell Pollan, but we’re about to enable America’s food-porn addiction. We researched the tantalizing world of food art, photography and sheer voyeurism on SweetSearch, and turned up the following (sesame) seedy side of the Web. Plenty of sites serve up photographic fodder, but few can beat Photograzing from Serious Eats, foodgawker or the aptly named FoodPornDaily for lush and delectable pictures. Although the latter two sites offer neither more nor less than their URLs promise, the Serious Eats main site features recipes, restaurants and food news from all over the country—in addition to tasty photos, of course. The restaurant-review site Menuism earns honorable mention in the low-hanging but mouthwatering fruit category: It allows users to browse for restaurants by food photos.

As the photographic equivalent of street food or carnival fare, the above sites offer little for a higher-brow palate. Fortunately, there’s a range of food art and food-centric social commentary that caters to the tastes of both voyeur and connoisseur. WebEcoist offers “15 Fascinating Food Artists and Sculptors,” an excellent introduction to food art that features potato chip portraits, elegant butter statues, surreal foodscapes and a “Biscuit City.”

Time Magazine’s feature “What the World Eats” shows 15 families from all over the world with their entire week’s food allowance spread out before them, providing a fascinating look into geographical differences in diet. Similarly, Mark Menjivar’s “You Are What You Eat,” presented by Good Magazine, captures the contents of strangers’ refrigerators, and the simple Tumblr “Hospital Food” collects photos of meals from sickbeds worldwide.

Finally, there are plenty of resources for budding food photographers. Check out Rob Willey’s advice in his Food & Wine Magazine article “Shoot First, Eat Later,” Photojojo’s “The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips,” “little nuggets from the front lines of food styling and photography” from the blog “Still Life With” or, for a behind-the-scenes look at a professional in action, watch Cooking Up a Story’s “The Art of Food Photography.”

If you’re still not sated, findingDulcinea offers lots of news and features on food, and don’t miss our Web Guide to Food for recipes, restaurant reviews, special diets and more.

Jill Marcellus
Senior Intern

Sweet Sites | Use the Web to Find Summertime Fun, Wherever You Are

The temperature's warming up and you've got some free time, but you have absolutely no idea what to do with this glorious opportunity. Here are some sites that can help you with this high-quality problem.

Festivals.com allows you to search for U.S. events by region and type, including fairs, sporting events, crafts expos and motor shows. The site is particularly strong on music events; find out who's playing where in a variety of genres from alternative to zydeco.

Whatsonwhen offers information about intriguing events happening across the globe. Search by keyword or browse by destination or event type to learn more about a wide range of activities that includes both the North American Sand Soccer Championships in Virginia and the Baby-Jumping Colacho Festival in Castrillo de Murcia, Spain.

If your summer simply must involve a screaming tour of a roller coaster or a spin on the Ferris wheel, consult Theme Park Insider for help planning your next trip to the amusement park. The site offers reviews, park safety news and advice, tips to shorten your wait on ride lines, hotel information and more. 

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Find your own "eureka!" sites using SweetSearch.

Consult our Travel Guides if you're looking for sites to help you with more location-specific trip-planning.

Get "Sweet Sites" in your inbox once a week.

What Are People Spending Money On in the Recession?

Call me crazy, but I think there are positive things to draw from this recession. True, I never worked for Lehman Brothers. I don't have a mortgage or build SUVs for a living. But I live in New York, I work in media and I used to enjoy professional hair dye. I'm by no means impervious to the effects. But I do think we can learn from the crisis as we adjust to the times.

I made some adjustments of my own. My old column, "The Way to Work," became “The Way to Keep Working.” It was when I wrote about the “Recession Depression" that I realized staying happy means making sure the quality of your life doesn’t sink too low. So I recommended five things to keep spending money on during the recession and asked our readers to opine on my choices. It turned out that readers had a lot to say on the subject. So we decided to launch a full-scale inquiry. I asked for feedback through Facebook, Peter Shankman’s Help A Reporter Out and the Qwidget commenting tool. And that’s when I really started to see the silver lining.

What I found was an eager, articulate, positive and brave community. "Things You Can't Live Without During the Recession: Readers’ Choice Edition" gathers what people are saying about the things they love. Good wine. Good food. Running sneakers. Coffee. Gummy bears. Someone even e-mailed me to tell me that she couldn't do without a solar-powered birdbath in her backyard.

The indulgences that people are allowing themselves are not outrageous. Rather, to me, they help to define everyone’s individuality and humanity. A year ago, people were concerned that materialism was driving this country to ruin. Now, we’re working toward a happy medium. We’re finally ready to put some meaning into where our money goes.

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Weightless Travel: Sell Everything and Be a Vagabond

It’s surprising how quickly things can accumulate—books, pairs of socks, scraps of paper with notes scrawled on them. Even e-mails pile up unrelentingly. The bloggers below describe how it feels to shed all the excess stuff, and take off indefinitely.

Christine Gilbert of the Almost Fearless blog quit her corporate job and embarked on a long-term trip with her husband and two dogs. She writes, “the act of physically moving these things out onto the sidewalk, setting prices and then watching as strangers walked away with even the most personal of our possessions, was a strange kind of relief.” Gilbert proceeds to detail the “10 unexpected costs of owning things.”

Almost Fearless also has advice for launching your long-term expedition without necessarily selling everything.

Permanent travel sounds impossible, but for Lea Woodward it’s reality. She explains her rules for maintaining a “stuff-free” traveling life on Vagablogging. She also links to online resources to help you become less wasteful.

On Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site, Matt outlines Part 1 of traveling the world: Pre-trip planning, including “selling your stuff.” He suggests a garage sale, or using Web sites such as Craigslist and Gumtree to sell your possessions, and provides insights. “You don’t want to be in Nepal and thinking “I hope my TV is ok,” Matt writes.

Author John Freyer determined where he would travel by selling his possessions on eBay to people across the United States and around the world. Freyer visited everyone who bought something of his, and then documented the experience in his book “All My Life For Sale.”

The findingDulcinea Web Guide to Long Term Travel Abroad links to programs that help you craft a new life abroad, including job resources, information on volunteering and interning abroad, tips for teaching English in a foreign country, and safety advice.

Read some worldly books and watch movies to inspire you using our previous post, "Year-End Review of Travel Books and Movies."

Sarah Amandolare
Senior Writer

Keeping Those New Year's Resolutions

For many of us, every New Year’s Day is the same. We declare our regrets, recognize our shortcomings, make resolutions, and then a few days later bid farewell to the year that was and forget it all.

Whether your pledge is small and simple or frustratingly hard, New Year’s resolutions can seem impossible to keep for a week, let alone a year or more.

However, as we all follow in the footsteps of the mythical King Janus—who was said to have had two faces so he could look forward and backward, and who inspired early Romans to pledge to make themselves better each new year—we must remember that there is no shortage of help available to each one of us.

Whether you want to shed pounds, quit smoking, or make the world a better place, there are Web resources available to help make your resolution become a reality.

Those who are getting ready to quit smoking can start by watching introductory videos on Joel's Quit Smoking Web site. A professional cessation coach, he offers clips that can be read or watched sharing advice for your first two weeks of the quitting process.

If shedding a few (or many) pounds is one of your goals this year, the Weight-Control Information Network is provided by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. The latest research on weight control sits alongside several downloadable publications on nutrition, physical activity and diet.

Or maybe you'd like to do some good for the world. Visit VolunteerMatch, which matches up volunteers and organizations according to their preferences, almost like a dating service.

Chris Coats
Senior Writer

For a comprehensive collection of New Year’s resolution resources, check out finding Dulcinea’s Guide to New Year’s Resolutions.

List Love

It’s hard to say why, but as a culture, we adore lists. They’re easy, natural and fun to make. You can make lists of places you want to go, lists of people to invite to a party, lists of things you need to do before the end of the week (OK, maybe that’s not so much fun … but still.) At findingDulcinea, we’re kicking off our own series of lists to keep you in touch with Web resources. To get you in the mood, we’ve found a few unique lists from around the Web.

1)    The Village of Joy Blog lists “50 Strange Buildings of The World.” Maybe strange isn’t the right word: these buildings are universally architecturally awesome. A variety of shapes, styles and colors make each one of these buildings, new and old, entirely distinct.

2)    Each year, Time magazine collects the 50 Best Inventions. Some of them are probably as structurally magnificent as the buildings, and many of them have great potential to alter culture as we know it. (The iPhone was once on this list.)

3)    7summits  is a shorter list, but the seven items on it are of far greater magnitude: the highest mountains on Earth. Look at pictures, read stories and legends, or even consider making a trip to visit one—the site can help you figure out how much training you’ll need to make the climb.

Whether you’re inspired to go climb a mountain, or complete the equally arduous journey of heading home for the holidays, check out our own top 5 list, 5 Sites for Last-Minute Travel.

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Site of the Day: Eons

Designed for those born between the years of 1946–1964, the network has a more sophisticated feel than that of Facebook or MySpace, but still has all the fun features. Registered members can create profiles and personalize them with skins, blogs and “LifePaths.” Read the most popular blog entries, join groups or challenge someone to a brain game.

Eons

Check out findingDulcinea's Site Spotlight section for more sites of the day.

Site of the Day: scrapblog

Scrapbookers go virtual with scrapblog. Members of this free service can customize a multimedia book with pictures and videos from photo-sharing sites and social networking profiles. With “thousands of creative elements” to play with, users can personalize their pages with themes, stickers, backgrounds, captions and visual texture.

scrapblog

Visit findingDulcinea's Site Spotlight section for more sites of the day.

A Helping Hand for the Left-Handed

I love being left-handed. There’s just something fun about a person exclaiming, “Oh, you’re a lefty!” when they see me writing. But as nice as it is to feel unique, being left-handed also creates a few logistical hurdles (as I’m sure any fellow southpaw who’s tried using right-handed scissors can understand).

Here are some sites that can make left-handedness a little more convenient.

Gauche! is packed with tips for lefties who need help living in a predominantly right-handed world. There’s even advice for parents and employers on accommodating a lefty at home or at work.

Left Hand Zone is a lefty’s dream. Purchase quick-drying pens and smudge-proof pencils, left-handed scissors for kids or adults, or left-handed kitchen tools like can openers.

Rosemary West’s Left-Handed Page is a blog filled with interesting finds for left-handers. Looking for a left-handed toothbrush? You’ll uncover many unique treasures and interesting tidbits about lefties here.

ABC News adds a little sparkle to the left-handed life with its profiles on 17 famous lefties (southpaws can count Marilyn Monroe, Angelina Jolie, Babe Ruth and even Leonardo da Vinci among their ranks).

Lindsey Chapman
Writer