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Hi everyone, hope you have had a good week! While I am in NYC I have a couple of awesome guest posts lined up for you looking at travelling, staying healthy and managing with a vegetarian or vegan diet. Today’s guest post is from the lovely Nicky from Disco and Love:

Hey everyone! I am Nicky from www.discoandlove.blogspot.com and I am honoured to have been asked by Laura, whilst she is living it up in NYC, to talk about how I coped with being a vegetarian whilst on my trip to Paris with my family.

I have eaten a vegetarian diet for almost 6 years now and eat mostly vegan purely for taste reasons except for greek yogurt and cottage cheese as I need plenty of calcium for my bones. Before going to Paris I wasn’t entirely aware of the French cuisine other than the famous ‘frogs legs’ and ‘snail’ dishes that people joke about. When I arrived in Paris though it soon became known to me that their cuisine is very much meat based. Every French bistro we passed had meat and more meat and if it wasn’t meat, it was fish and seafood which I also don’t eat due to an inherited intolerance to seafood. It seemed like the only way that I was going to get by was to find other types of cuisine which was a shame to have to do as I like to eat the traditional dishes when I’m in a country!

Lunches were easier to deal with as salads are available anywhere in the world really so I settled for some lovely lunches – especially one at a place called ‘Cojean’ in the famous Printemps department store.

Cojean are known for being a healthier, stylish fast food type café and they certainly had quite a selection! I ended up getting a limited edition festive salad (as I went at Christmas) which was a mix of lentils, chopped up apple, raisins and pomegranate served on a bed of greens along with a big bowl of mango and papaya. It was delicious!

However dinner was obviously where there were more problems to find food that I could eat but I also had to consider my family who are not vegetarian – my Dad and brother are big meat eaters (and I won’t change their decision on what they prefer to eat as this is their choice) but my mum is more vegetarian in taste. We ended up settling for Thai one night, Chinese another night and the last night we did find a French café that was a chain of restaurants called Le Paradis du Fruit, whilst not exclusively vegetarian, were seen as ‘healthy’ and therefore offered plenty of vegetarian options. They did lots of dishes with quinoa, avocado, hummus, falafels, lots of veg and fruit so I was very happy and at the same time, so were my meat eating boys!

However some things I learnt from the trip which I will take into consideration when travelling to Europe:

• Be prepared by packing some snacks – I ended up going into a supermarket and buying dried fruit and nut bags, cereal and yogurt to keep me going!
• Research beforehand names of restaurants in the area where you know the menu if you can see it online
• Learn how to say ‘I am vegetarian’ in the language!
• Ethnic cuisines (i.e. Thai, Indian, Chinese etc) always offer some type of vegetarian dishes so if in doubt, look for these!

I did have to treat myself to the famous Laduree macaroons of course!!

Yum!

Thanks Nicky! What are your experiences of being a vegetarian / vegan abroad? What’s the best thing you’ve eaten while travelling? That’s for all of you to answer not just the veggies! I have to say that eating pizza and ice cream in Italy was amazing!