Meeting Locals Over the Dinner Table When You Travel
A really rewarding part of traveling is meeting locals and learning about their city and culture from the inside. Half the people in your street might have a picture of them in front of the Eiffel Tower, but probably none of them will have learnt what French high school kids are studying in math or whether or not French people serve baguettes up with dinner.
It sounds great, doesn’t it, but how do you meet locals if you’re only in town for a couple of days? Lots of people are in the same boat as you, and thanks to the internet, there are plenty of opportunities. Local people who want to meet travelers and share a meal can register on websites that you can access to make an arrangement, and an increasingly common way to meet up is to be invited to dinner at their house.
One such scheme is Meeting the French, where Parisian hosts will serve you lunch or dinner. You’ll get matched to hosts according to your criteria – perhaps the same age, or a similar profession, or shared hobbies. In Meeting the French your hosts don’t actually cook for you, but you pay for their dinner from caterers, delivered into their home. This one’s pretty fun, because you can read about your hosts and see their pictures before you decide who to meet, and yes, most of them speak English.
If you’re heading to Scandinavia instead, then you can hook up with the Dine with the Danes project. This time your Danish hosts will prepare the dinner for you, mostly in Copenhagen but with some families outside now joining the scheme. You need to join their scheme as a member, for a small charge, and then they’ll hook you up for your Danish dinner. Dine with the Danes has been running for nearly a decade, and there’s been plenty of warm feedback from previous guests.
And if you’re touring Britain, then you might want to give Home Dinners in Wales a try. Hosts in Cardiff as well as countryside north and south Wales are ready to meet you and share some Welsh culture. They specialize in serving up some particularly Welsh food, too, like cawl broth or Welsh lamb, all home cooked for a reasonable cost.
So why should you sign up for an evening with a family of strangers? A thousand reasons. Not only can you satisfy your curiosity about the inside of an apartment or house in a foreign country, you can also chat openly about your different cultures and get a taste of really authentic local foods. And you might even create a friendship that will last beyond one dinner.
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(cc: photo credit: Ali Saifaldeen (Away))
Categories: Restaurants and Dining
