If you were to visit Giza to see the Great Pyramid, you can easily dine at a Pizza Hut, stand in line for souvenirs, and meet a professional guide who will take you to Instagrammable sites. But ion you want to get to know a place you've never been to before, it's better to go where the people who live there go. Food is universal, but whether it's a Mom and Pop store or a chain, you'll find local flavors at the grocery store.
Grocery stores have the gritty, hustling authenticity of a bodega or street cart with the propriety and promise of Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. And they offer a tourist-free paradise for people-watching, especially the kind of locals tourists never meet — parents, the elderly, 9-to-5ers, paycheck-to-paycheck poor. Restaurants and hotels and cruise ships and airports are fine places for food, sure, but they are always best-foot-forward posh and consequently fairly performative and predictable. I don’t want to go all the way to Shanghai to eat a Caesar salad or a pork chop.
It helps if you speak the language or have a friend to guide you, but even if you don't, the real treasures of an unfamiliar place are the foods that are offered. Read what a traveler can unearth by visiting a supermarket at New York Magazine. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Jozefsu)
Another fun activity while traveling: visiting small town libraries--the smaller, the better.