Soup Diary 100404

One of the joys of traveling is trying new foods, or encountering variations on things you may be familiar with. As it turned out, the soup I had in Europe though was a big disappointment, at least in Germany. I imagine that somewhere in the country someone makes a hearty, flavorful kind of soup, but you wouldn't know it on the evidence of what I sampled. Actually, the food we had in Germany overall wasn't that hot, except for the quick doners (pretty much the same thing as gyros) we picked up in train stations and from street vendors. The two soups I had with dinner the first couple of nights were vegetable and leek, and both were very thin, bland, and unexciting. In fact, they were little more than wan broth with a a few chunks of carrots, beans and corn in the first case (not even close to the stock picture above), and sparse leaves of onion in the second. I expected a lot more, but then maybe soup isn't really a big thing in Germany. Their loss. Things were better in the Czech Republic, but I'll save that for a later post.