The best way to tour a city is through its grocery store

When I land in a new city, I spend the first day with no plan, just wandering about. It's surprising how much of a feel you can get for the texture of daily life in a city by doing this.

From my perspective, food and all the rituals and customs around it are some of the richest parts of culture, so I also like to go to grocery stores like this article covers. Another half-day is dedicated to a food tour, which is a fantastic way to learn about a new culture. In my experience, often the tour guides have lived in that culture for many years but they're not originally from there, so they can do cross-cultural translation for you, pointing out things you might not expect. And the best tours also include walking around the city and seeing cultural highlights.

> foreign McDonalds. Always fun to see what local items they have.

That's a good point. It's funny for Americans to see beer there, in, say, Europe.

Yes! Walking into a grocery store is one of the best things about traveling. It is one of the few genuine everyday activities that are easily available to a tourist, but is going to be quite different to what you’re used to from home, sometimes in surprising ways.

Hopefully this will not disappear entirely as brands and chains become more and more homogenized across the world. One of the saddest examples of this is how nearly every brand of ice cream in Europe became part of Unilever’s ugly “Heartbrand” in the late ‘90s. Now anywhere you go, you will just be offered the same Magnum, Solero, Cornetto. Who wants to take a vacation photo eating an ice cream you could find in your local store at home?

Spanish grocery stores are incredible, you really get a feel for the tapas culture. Everyone stops by after work just to get their late afternoon meal/snack and breakfast for tomorrow. You can't go wrong with any of the I was in Kyoto a few months ago, and wandering through the Kyoto Co-op grocery was super fun. So many kinds of green tea I had never heard of, and again, there's a sense of the Japanese minimalist cooking culture. Almost no one in Japan owns an oven, and most places I've seen just have 1-2 standalone electric burners, so baking either isn't done or it'll be something small in a toaster oven.

I love grocery shopping in general, but if you're abroad I'd highly recommend checking out local grocery stores.

Indeed--there's a halal market I just discovered today that has the most reasonably priced semolina and spices I've seen. Ignorant me believed that semolina came only from large retailers or specialty Italian shops (i.e. sellers of expensive cheese and wine).