Taj in India Kitchen

Returning home from travel, we come back mostly to things that we find comfortable and familiar. The foods, the scenery, the air, even the bed that we know best, to which our bodies have adapted, often over the course of years, if not decades–or a lifetime.

What we call “exotic” is really the unfamiliar, the new–a positive way to characterize those different foods, scenery, air (and maybe that bed) that we encounter along the way.

In Bangkok, I sampled street food and reveled in the cacophony of flavors, the sour underpinning of sweet, salty, herbal, umami–and then pepper exploding. Luckily my system came prepared with its own exotic flora, mostly up to the challenge. Yet I was still in need of settling later that night, as jet lag woke me in that unfamiliar hotel bed, and a talking tummy kept me awake. Oh, but I arrowed those waking visions to rest with a well-placed Singha beer.

There’s a reason we find street food generally safer to eat in many places than warmed-over food on a hotel buffet: fresh ingredients under high turnover that quickly cook before they have a chance to spoil, never to see the dingy back of a filthy walk-in under the questionable refrigeration brought on by sporadic electricity. And there’s a reason Asian mass-produced lagers strike a similar tone: calm, cool, soothing like ginger ale, but with a handy sedating effect. Soon I was back to sleep.

Returning home, we find comfort, but then long for the intense color saturation to paint in what we miss, that lack of exotic in our everyday. We search for it, but often the menu at the Thai Town or India Kitchen around the corner somewhere in middle America rarely rings the bell–or does so only to rattle out a hollow sound.

We sip a Taj to go along, hoping to find more than a mere echo of the charm…and it’s just a pale reminder of those pixels we lose when we return home from the road.