Sometimes I feel like I write more posts about our WorldEats tour in theory than we do about the places we've actually visited. Hopefully this will be the last of those posts and then we can just concentrate on the food!
So a few years ago when we first posted about WorldEats, we were crazy ambitious. We were going to do a "walk around the world." We would start in one section of the globe (Canada, we decided), and then geographically explore, one country to the next, and wind our way through the continents. Doing it this way, we would do our best not to miss any countries, especially those that were harder to check off the list. 3 years later, we have gotten through Jamaica, meaning we made our way through 3 countries.
That isn't really great progress, but our idea of exploring a country and then finishing it meant we had a mental list of all the things we wanted to eat to fully explore that country and we would keep going until we hit everything we wanted to try. That way, we would feel like we had enough different things to really get a sense of the country, its culture, and its cuisine. Would it be enough to make us experts or inform us fully on that country? No, of course not, but at least we would have made a dent in our exploration. We didn't want to flit around from country to country, just checking things off because we went somewhere, but wanted to make a very deliberate trek from country to country in a nice, logical, geographical order. We also would only count visits made during that time period. That was a bit draconian on our parts ... or just crazy ambitious, as I said.
Last year, we refined this a little bit and decided not to be so strict on an exploration that's supposed to be fun. We decided to still focus on one country at a time and generally go geographically, but allow ourselves to do some visits outside the time period if they fit our schedule and whereabouts. It would be like counting our visit for Sinaloan food in Los Angeles even though we weren't doing Mexico at the time, but we would still make our best efforts to do each country as a unit.
Earlier this summer, we still hadn't progressed beyond Jamaica and so we decided we would not only allow visits outside the time period, but we would start doing country units in whatever order we wanted. We could go in whatever geographic order we wanted but we would still try to do one country at a time. I think we feared that, at our current snail's pace, we would never get out of the Caribbean, and there is so much diversity in NYC restaurants that we wanted to explore. A bit more freedom, a bit less rules.
Sitting at Viva La Comida (an awesome food festival in Jackson Heights that we'll post about soon) today, we talked a little bit about WorldEats and how we wanted to handle it going forward. There was such an amazing variety at the festival - Colombian, Korean, Tibetan, Indian, Ecuadorian, Italian, Mexican at the very least - and we wanted to include some of these for WorldEats visits even if we weren't doing those countries as a unit at the moment. We had no idea when we'd be able to try some of these places again. Was doing a country as a unit still too strict of a rule? Doesn't it just matter that we're exploring?
It's taken us a long time to get here and to get rid of all of our rules, since I think we were really trying to challenge ourselves when we started and the rules provided some structure. (We also thought we would make much quicker progress on this challenge.) So this is how we're planning to do WorldEats going forward (and I guess, retroactively too):
- For each country we visit, we'll have a general idea of places we want to go for that country and/or foods that we want to try. (For some countries like India or China, we would break that down by region, since there is so much variety.) It would be like doing the research or making the mental list that we would if we had been up to that country as a unit.
- We will count visits towards WorldEats if we feel like they're "WorldEats worthy." For example, if I went to our local Indonesian restaurant and got a lunch special for just me, I probably would not count it, but if A and I went there together for lunch specials, then we might. The local sushi takeaway may not count, but a wonderful sushi omakase might. Is it arbitrary and completely subjective? Yes. But it's our challenge and we're trying to keep the spirit of the WorldEats idea, and include only things that we would have in our original "concept" of our walk around the world. We don't want to include every single ethnic restaurant we ever go to on the list. If it's the type of place/visit that we would have included in our original WorldEats plan if we were doing it at that time, then it counts.
- We can still write a country summary (like these) when we "finish" a country to reflect on what we've learned and everything we've eaten. But it's no problem going back and doing more country exploration whenever. It's not like we're going to check a cuisine off the list and never go back to try more if there's more to try (after all, we haven't run across a world cuisine yet that we haven't liked something from).
- Past visits are fine. Finishing a country and then going back when something new opens is fine. Not doing everything for any particular country at the same time is fine. Not doing countries in a set order is fine. No more strict rules about that. No more rules period (other than actually writing about our adventures). That does mean we'll have to look back and see what things we want to retroactively tag as WorldEats but that'll be some fun reminiscing. It also means I'll need to update our challenge tracker.
I'm pretty sure that there are only 2 people reading this who actually care about how we run our challenge (A and I are probably it) but there it is, in case anyone's wondering. Which I'm sure you're not. Now we should probably move on to writing up Viva La Comida places so we can actually count those for WorldEats!
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