Travel Rebates?

And while we’re on the subject of taxis, if I have to use my own GPS to help out a cab driver who doesn’t know the way from the airport to the nearest major city, shouldn’t I get a rebate or something? (Interesting fact of the day: London cabbies have more than average brain development, according to an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in New York, because they have to learn ‘The Knowledge’ – all London streets – before they can be licensed.)

And then there was the driver who took us from JFK to Jersey City on the first leg of our trip. We’d booked the cab for an hour after our projected arrival time, but ticked the box to tell them to check the actual flight arrival time. Instead of this being a convenience for all concerned, what it meant was that they arrived 30 minutes after wheels-down (has anyone ever got out of an airport that fast? It doesn’t happen!) and then tried to charge us for waiting time. After a few emails back and forth, we eventually won that battle.

Food Rants

I also had a couple of annoyances on the topic of food. This year, we used JetBlue. The airline has a snack menu with a couple of healthyish options. At first glance, this looks quite varied, but on 3 of the 4 JetBlue flights I took, some of the more appealing items weren’t available. And I was sitting in row 7, so it’s not as though there was time for them to run out before they reached me – they just weren’t on the plane in the first place. I wasn’t impressed, though apart from that I enjoyed the JetBlue experience.

Finally, food at the airport. I know it’s usually expensive, but the cost of two stromboli, three drinks and a packet of mints was unbelievable – nearly $40!  I don’t mind paying a bit more for convenience, but I thought that was overdoing it.

What travel experiences make your blood boil? Feel free to share.

Image: Damian Brandon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Iced Tea, Venezuela

It’s been more than 20 years but I can still remember the first time I tasted iced tea. These days, everyone’s drinking it but it was much more of a rarity in the 80s — and I’ve never found anywhere that can make iced tea in the way I first had it. This was during my trip to Venezuela when I was still a student. Around the corner, say about 10 minutes walk from where we were staying in Sabana Grande, was an Arab eatery that served the falafel with iced tea. This tea did not taste like tea at all — it had a heavenly scent of lemons and exotic spices. It didn’t taste like lemonade either — more like Pimms without the alcohol — but it was pure ambrosia.

Paella and Guitar, Barcelona

Fast forward a few years and I was in Barcelona with a couple of friends. It was our first trip and we decided that we had to sample paella. We couldn’t have picked a better location. It was a cafe with a view of the beach. It was warm and breezy. When we ordered we got a paella large enough to feed six — or so it seemed. It was beautifully presented and we tucked in with gusto. But the experience got even better when a thin man with very few teeth came to our table and started to play the Spanish guitar. While we knew it was probably a cheesy tourist gimmick the guitar added the right setting for our Spanish meal.

Garlic Pizza, the Alps

What’s exciting about garlic pizza, you may ask? This is one case where the context made the dish exciting. A friend and I had been visiting Nice when she had a problem with the car. It was a Saab and had to go to a registered dealer. The problem proved to be easy to fix but quite costly so we emptied our pockets to pay for the repairs so we could resume our trip to Germany. We left just enough for emergencies. We set off, driving through the night across the Alps, sharing a bottle of water and waiting until the last possible minute before getting something to eat as we knew that would be the last meal we would have for about eight hours.  At last we happened upon a little mountain cafe. We went in and looked at the menu — all we could afford was the garlic pizza, but we were so hungry that nothing had ever tasted that good.

These are just a few of my food travel experiences, have you got any to share?

(Photo: vanaclocha)