colour your life

tao-lin:

Being able to mix food, travel and writing for a career is quite possibly my dream and Anthony Bourdain does all three. Without further ado, here are some of my favourite Bourdanisms, courtesy of Google.

• “Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.” 
  Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
  
  
• “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt. It’s a rush of fragments, all jostling for attention. Some good, some bad, some pleasurable – and some excruciating to remember.”
  The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones 
  
  
• [On being sick while travelling] “Twice in 10 years, and it wasn’t a surprise. Simple diarrhea is another story; it’s something you just have to be prepared for as a traveler. You bring your appropriate medications, but it’s hardly the end of the world. And I always try to remind people: Leave yourself open to the perfect meal by leaving yourself open to the occasional really bad one. The best kind of vacation is one where everything goes marvelously and memorably wrong. Those are the incidents you laugh about 20 years later.”
  
  
• “The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take A train to Mecca”
  A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
  
  
• “I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies” 
  A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
   
• “In the few years since I’ve started to travel this world, I’ve found myself changing. The cramped cynical worldview of a man who’d only seen life through the narrow prism of the restaurant kitchen had altered. I’d been so many places, I’d met so many people from wildly divergent backgrounds, countries, and cultures.”
   
• “In the English-speaking world there’s always been a certain ambivalence about taking pleasure at the table. There’s this notion, this puritanical notion, that if you take too much pleasure in your food, that it might somehow lead to bad character, might lead to harder stuff, like sex, for instance. I think the French have always understood that, yeah, hell, yeah, it does lead to sex, and it should…So, America, perhaps you should try. Maybe duck out of the office when the boss isn’t looking or call in sick for that boring meeting, pull up a chair at a local joint, grab a tasty bevarage, and eat a ham sandwich, really eat a ham sandwich. You just may find that you not only love the French again, but you may also love life, and, ultimately, the world.”

And one of my all-time favourite travel quotes:

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them - wherever you go.”