Fantastica

"We are what we eat" popped up to my mind when I first read the topic. Traveling to discover culture, we sight and experience the place. By experiencing, we joy local activities and we taste the food. Every time, when you plan for a vacation to somewhere, you would search for what to see, what to do and what to eat. Through the breakthrough of the technology in this era, it is fortunate for us to see beautiful sites on various forms of media especially television. However, experience food is exceptional because we need to taste, eat or drink which we cannot use this sense on any form of media.
A way to truly understand a culture is experiencing food. I have had many chances to learn about Lao culture throughout tasting and cooking local food. I was born in a small town, LUANGPRABANG, A world heritage town, where are full of tasty meal. I love how they thrive on interplay between sour and spicy, crunchy and soft, and both cooked and raw ingredients. The effect is extreme taste and textures intense, bold, lush and somehow find lovely balance in the most homespun preparations and combinations feel wildly. Regarding to the way we cook, the ingredient we use, it is clear to me that food could manifest our local attitude too namely most of local people, we eat at home and we always play attention to our meal, we frequently eat actual breakfast, lunch and dinner with actual food, rice and dessert. Comparing to where I live now, Vientiane, the capital of Lao PDR. people always lives in the rush life, this attitude affects to culture which show a change to food we eat everyday. Vientiane people mostly don't eat "actual breakfast", they grab lunch outside and they buy meal from market for dinner.
Traveling will tell the brief history and culture but to truly understanding a culture we require to sample its cuisine especially learning the making process because the way to cook of any cuisine could be different just like a story of establishing a country is uniqueness.