“It tastes like vinegar. ”

“We didn’t add any vinegar.”

-Amy Cao and I tasting our homemade ceviche at 5am before she had to catch her flight back to the US

Watch the latest episode of Amy Blogs Chow’s Stupidly Simple Snacks as the two of us take over my kitchen in Quito to make Ecuadorian ceviche.

What could be even better than traveling with your best friend?

EATING (and then trying to cook) while traveling with your best friend.

When Amy Cao visited me in Quito and brought our replacement video camera after the first one became a casualty of bus robbery, it was a bit of a working holiday for her. Amy’s a non-cooking food-writer-turned-food-show-host who produces charmingly comedic Stupidly Simple Snacks videos for the many of us who, like her, are handicapped in the kitchen.

Since Amy’s life and profession revolve around food (as have many of our best conversations in the eight years we’ve been friends), we spent a lot of time eating.

Eating our way through Ecuador

We toured Quito by day, ducking into tiny mom-and-pop restaurants for set lunches that cost $2. If we were feeling really good about ourselves, we’d splurge on $5 ceviche. At night she’d visit me at work at Uncle Ho’s to dine on fresh shrimp rolls and Vietnamese coffee as she kept up with her website via MacBook.

The professional version

We wandered through local markets drinking exotic fresh fruit juices like taxo, naranjilla and tomate de arbol. We devoured regional dishes like shredded pork with buttery mashed potato cakes topped with a fried egg, not caring that our lunch’s source (a giant fried pig’s body) was staring us in the face. We ate 50 cent cheese empanadas on the bus and sampled $20 guinea pig at a 5-star hotel. In short, we did what we do best: talked at length about the world and the lives we spend traversing it over a long, lovely meal.

It wasn’t all mangos and banana smoothies though. On Amy’s last night in Quito, we decided to roll up our sleeves and take over the kitchen in my apartment in Quito (although, good roommate that I am, decided not to “borrow” Freddie’s orange for our recipe). We filmed the debacle – ahem, culinary success – and Amy created a video so you can laugh along as we endeavor to make Ecuadorian ceviche. And yes, we’re in our pajamas at the end of the video (and yes, we have matching shirts that say Up with Life/Down with Oil in reference to Ecuador’s endangered Yasuni rainforest) because we went out for a celebratory dinner at a hillside hacienda for Amy’s last meal…and then she dragged me out of bed at 5am so we could taste our masterpiece and film ourselves eating raw fish at dawn before she flew back to NYC.

Armed with our ingredients

See what we concoct in an unexpected culinary comedy when this Jet Set Zero cast member stirs the pot with Amy Blogs Chow.

During the last few weeks of June, fortune smiled up on me and I was able to share the incredible experiences that Ecuador has to offer with my longtime friend Amy Cao, NYC food writer and creator of the mouthwatering Amy Blogs Chow.

Amy and I met at Boston University when we were college roommates nearly eight years ago and quickly became inseparable. Between our bicoastal lives and global travels, time and distance eventually caught up with us. Neither of us could believe that 2 years had passed since I had last seen her during my first trip to South America when we traveled together from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro.

It’s hard to explain the incomparable feeling of sharing a travel experience with someone you love.

How the joy captured in the moment is joy doubled, and forever encapsulated in your shared memory.

By the same token, the tense moments, the will-we-or-won’t-we-make-the-bus/get-robbed-at-the-ATM/find-a-hotel-at-10pm-in-a-new-town anxiety, the clumsiness of fumbling through language barriers and cultural divides, are made much more bearable – and even laughable – when you encounter them with someone you know and trust.

When you return home and start to tell your stories, try to convey the places you’ve been and how they’ve changed you, you find that despite your photos and flowery adjectives, no one else will ever understand those moments. Stumbling across markets filled with acres of vegetables and babies playing on potato sacks, their angel faces caked with dirt. Riding in the back of a truck on a bumpy dirt road past cows and laundry drying in the sun on the way to somewhere beautiful. Smiling at an old lady whose twinkling eyes crinkle at you as they wonder what faraway land you come from.

No one else will be able to recall the wind in your face, the sun smiling blindingly upon you, the realization and absolute conviction that the world is, indeed, your oyster.

There is much to be said for experiencing that moment on your own, for feeling every ounce of your personal power, and knowing that you can take on the world – and succeed. And yet the more I travel, the more I find that there is to be said for stringing that moment between two souls, for allowing the bliss of traveling to expand as it is shared -  until it encases both of you in a memory that you will carry forward together.

Have a taste in Episode 4.

“If I was doing any better, I’d be you.”

-James from Colorado, after Amy Cao asked how he was doing

“I got a haircut, got a book, got a wife. Not too bad for Thursday.”
“I got an ice cream.”

-Freddie and Amy Cao comparing their day

As we reported earlier, our camera was stolen recently.

You can probably imagine that it’s kind of hard to make a show about living abroad without a video camera.

And so much has happened! Laurene quit her job, Ryan and I took a boat ride on a lake named after a guinea pig, Ryan and Freddie went to the coast, I found a job, Laurene started looking for other jobs, Ryan got thrown into a jail on wheels, the boys went on an Indiana Jones adventure in the jungle, the World Cup began. And so on. All those little things like Life.

While the powers-that-be behind Jet Set Zero have been researching every possibility to get us a new camera as soon as possible, they’ve encountered headaches and hurdles like customs, duties paperwork, and exorbitant shipping costs.

Enter creative solution #1: Find a courier to fly down with the camera.

I jumped on the horn (ok, the internet) and contacted my best friend Amy Cao, a food writer and blogger in NYC. Would she be available to fly down to Quito with the camera on a moment’s notice? An email response from her later, it was a done deal.

She arrives tonight into Quito, and the show will go on!

Food writer Amy Cao arriving in Quito soon!