The Answer to His Question
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I typically keep to myself when I travel. While I don’t go out of my way to avoid eye contact, I also don’t go out of my way to make it either. Until thinking about it now, I honestly don’t know what mix of ingredients has to come together just so for a conversation with a total stranger on the road to materialize.
Engaging creators, waitstaff, artisans and shopkeepers is different. Those conversations come more naturally to me, born from a curiosity and hunger to hear more about others’ origin stories, calling to craft and purpose.
The people behind the taste are such a rich and fascinating part of the full experience that I can’t help but get inquisitive and talkative around them. They always make the difference between logging a moment in time with food, art or drink and impressing a lasting memory. Dozens of qualifying candidates come rushing at me now – a bartender in Luxembourg, a waiter in Seoul, a barista in Rome.
The encounters I have with other locals or travelers like me, the other patrons I’m sitting elbow-to-elbow with at a dining counter, dimly lit bar or community breakfast table take shape differently, maybe even a bit more mysteriously.
When I travel I must operate under a sneaky, savvy sixth sense. While I deliberate with myself about what and usuallyhow much to order, it runs, without my knowing, on auto-pilot in the background sizing up the souls and situation around me. If the program runs without encountering a red flag, I soften and let my guard down.
That’s when a narrow gateway to potential connection opens up just a crack. It’s wild really what happens when one of us, me or them, dares to step on through.
In the week and a half that I’d been traveling in Vietnam I hadn’t chatted much if at all with strangers until I got to the counter at Anan Saigon. A story in taste all of its own, Anan Saigon is a sensational one-Michelin-star treat for the senses in Ho Chi Minh City. If one could taste color, they would taste it here.
At some point, when the spell Taste had cast over me broke a bit, I noticed I was sitting next to a young man in his late twenties. Just like with so many of the other collisions I’ve had, I don’t know exactly what sparked our conversation.
He was young, facing a career inflection point of his own, and enjoying an extended layover in Ho Chi Minh City between his family in Singapore and his home in Los Angeles. At one point, as we traded life and travel stories back and forth, he asked me a question I wasn’t expecting.
“Why do you pick the countries you visit?” he asked.
Not even sixty days laid off, still interviewing for a slew of roles I had no business pursuing, I was and am still shocked at how quickly and resolutely I answered.
“Food,” I said. “I go where I want to taste.”
And there it suddenly was.
This conversation with a young stranger, my first of consequence and meaning in days, from a country half way around the world, wasn’t just a collision – it was the collision.
What followed in the months to come was a series of nudges, more collisions with purpose I couldn’t ignore and an eerie and heightened level of self-awareness – an unavoidable avalanche of self-discovery.
Two months later, hiding out from the rain over a pot of peppermint tea in the Hotel Maria Cristina in San Sebastián, Spain – with the answer to his question front and center in my mind – I finally saw the first piece of it.
The Untethered Traveler.
