Solfire Travel

The other day I was sitting across from my wife, Mel, looking at the meal that I thought I had ordered. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if this was the meal that I had ordered since the one in the photo looked nothing like it and was quite a lot better than this thing on my table. I started scouting the room to find a waiter until I noticed how Mel was looking at me. She’s not as much of a complainer as I am, you see. If I’m not happy for with what they’ve given me and I don’t think that the kitchen staff would put my food down their pants in a horrid revenge attack then I’ll say something and complain. Mel, on the other hand, will just do a silent protest and never go back to the restaurant again.

There’s a show on TV, called Hell’s Kitchen, where amateur/professional chefs battle to become a chef in one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants. Just about everyone sends their meal back if there is the slightest thing wrong with it. It just doesn’t seem realistic but I guess it makes for more drama on the show. When I’m out, the only person I’ve seen complain about their food.. is me! I don’t even do it that much but just want to make sure that I get what I paid for.

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Now that you’ve arrived in a new city what should be your next move? As you’re new in town and know noone, most likely you don’t have any ideas. Don’t worry, many travellers share this common problem.

So how can you find out what you should do in the magnicificent place you’ve arrived at? If you’re staying at a hotel, you could wander down to the lobby and find the concierge. Some of them can definitely point you in the direction of where the other tourists are. Just follow that herd over there! Otherwise, there are a couple of approaches that they like to take; they either ask a neverending series of questions about your likes and dislikes, your ideal holiday, the size of your bank account.. you get the idea. Yes, that could be seen as a valid approach but by the time the interrogration is over, you probably would have forgotten what you had originally asked them.

The other approach that the concierge may take is to throw (not literally) their neverending supply of leaflets at you. These have been given to them by the hundreds of company’s that want to take money off you to show you how to be a tourist there. There are bus tours, walking tours, helicopter tours, ghost tours.. whatever you might think you need. That’s fine but once you’re back home, you may still find that you have no idea what it would be like to live there.

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