I used to think everyone iced their drinks. Like, religiously. I mean, what kind of monster drinks a lukewarm Coke?
Then I moved to Ukraine in 1999 and ordered a soda at a café in Kyiv.
I had just arrived in Phuket, and I was convinced I’d cracked the Instagram code to life.
It started in a musty Kyiv office.
When I first moved to Europe, France, specifically, I was ready to embrace the food revolution.
I pictured myself in a sun-drenched Toulouse apartment, grabbing a baguette from the corner boulangerie, one so fresh it hadn’t met a preservative since Marie Antoinette’s head rolled off the guillotine.
They told you to avoid these places. I’ve told you to avoid these places! But here’s what locals know that you don’t….
Four months. That’s how long I’d been living in my mom’s basement. Not figuratively, literally.
It was somewhere between the third “Genius Packing Hack” and the fifth “Travel Tip You Need to Know Before Your Next Flight” that I realized I’d been duped.
It hit me sometime around my fourth soul-sucking trip to a government office in Kyiv, 1999.
One minute I was breezing through immigration in Spain, practically handed a glass of Rioja with my stamp, excited to start the Camino de Santiago and wondering why everyone made international travel sound so complicated.
A few months later, I was stuck at the Polish-Ukrainian border, passport in a grim-faced officer’s hand, customs agents tearing through our humanitarian vans like we were smuggling gold.
It happened in Kyiv. I was on my way to meet some friends for a few pints on a Friday night in a small basement pub back in the day called “The Drum” or “Baraban”.