A woman's got to eat.

I promised a friend back home that I would take pictures of all the food I ate here in Europe and I've totally failed. I took one food picture. I can only attribute this failure to the fact that most of the food has not been worth photographing. In fact a lot of it wasn't even really worth eating.

I ate Schweinbraten in Germany and it was okay. I said to someone recently that chocolate, gummi candy, and beer were the only decent consumable products in Germany and that is pretty close to the truth. The goulash was also good, though goulash everywhere is pretty good. There was a restaurant just up the street from where I lived in Munich that had great food. They had one of the best salads I've ever had and they had excellent American style breakfast there which I actually ate one time (at about noon on a Sunday which is kind of an early breakfast for me).

I think the fact that I don't eat breakfast is where my problem in finding good food in Germany (and Europe in general) lies. Breakfast is a big deal in Germany and they do breakfast foods really well. They love bread, and jam, and eggs, and pork products, and dairy products, and muesli so they have the breakfast bases pretty well covered. The few times I did eat breakfast it was excellent. In Switzerland, Germany, France and Spain, breakfast was great.

In France I only ate twice, breakfast and frites and the frites were more of a novelty than an actually food item. They weren't bad frites but they were mostly good because I was eating them in France by the side of the road after watching Stuart O'Grady win the Paris-Rubaix. In Switzerland I had great food but that's because my family cooked every meal I ate there. In Germany I had great international food, good Indian, good Spanish, good Italian food, but the local food I tried to avoid after the first few days. In Spain I had paella in Barcelona which was pretty bad but I had a tuna sandwich there that was excellent and I had gazpacho here in Granada that was amazing. In general the food has mostly been better in Spain.

London has good food too actually. I'd been getting warnings for weeks, no more like months, about how awful the food in London is, but it's really not bad at all. It's not just fish and chips either, in fact the fish and chips are bad in comparison to some of the other food. Of course there's great curry in London, and sandwiches, but there's more than that. The food in London in general is pretty good. I'm looking forward to going back for a proper English breakfast (of fried potatoes, bacon, sausage, toast, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, black pudding, etc). I only just learned what black pudding is a couple weeks ago and it kind of freaks me out actually so I probably won't really eat that, but I'm told it's part of a proper English breakfast. Of course I'll have to find someplace that serves it in the afternoon as I don't really eat breakfast.

Perhaps I've stumbled on the real reason I loved Prague so much. I didn't have a single bad food experience there. They food was fantastic. Great salad, great goulash, and truly exceptional pancakes, it was all good.