The chile pasilla is my favorite, a deep, dark purple the color of intense grief or memory. It is wrinkled and weathered, a mirror of the aged face of the woman who hands me my change and my chile and says, per Oaxacan custom, “Que te vaya bien,”

The chile pasilla rests atop a bouquet of squash blossoms, whose airy, floral looks—delicate orange and green lilies–betray the hearty vegetable flavor they take on when sautéed in oil.

I’ve always thought squash flowers were embarrassingly sexual vegetables. They start out innocently enough, small bodies fanning demurely into star-shaped flowers, but the second they hit the heat of the pan they give way entirely, losing form and caving to the oil, until they are limp and languid. Their pistons remain crunchy, but the rest of the flower goes soft.

The still virginal squash flowers cover up a layer of moss green and bumpy avocados, gently prodded between fingertips for ripeness. The avocados jostle guayabas, small Mexican guavas with a flavor like a yellow exclamation mark.

The guayabas rest gently beside the cecina enchilada, thinly sliced pork that has been rubbed with chile. All—cecina, guayabas, avocados, squash flowers, chile pasilla– are sided by a wall of tortillas. The tortillas are warm and keeling over a bit, emitting moist fumes with a faint starchy smell.

This is my dinner. Chile pasilla soaked until it is soft once more (memory and grief released) and ground into an earthy, smoky, salsa. Squash flowers tossed into the pan to lust and wither. Avocados cut cleanly in halves and sliced into crescents. Cecina fried, letting off waves of rich, red, animal smells, the spiced enchilada rub creeping up into one’s nose. Guayabas blended to make thick, acidic margaritas, the type that make your eyes squint and your tongue ache a bit before the sweetness and alcohol kick in.

This process—the journey round the market, the jostle of vegetables in the bag, the feel of warm tortilla flesh pressed into one’s hand, the slicing through soft avocado, the colors and smells blurring in the pan, the smoke of the pasilla cutting through the nose-watering spice of the pork, is the evocation of place.

It is Oaxaca conjured through a handful of ingredients, an hour in front of the stove, a half-hour of chewing and laughing and exclaiming.

If I cannot be Mexican (for as much as I love the heavy r’s and spiked sentences of Spanish, the land here, the people, I still have a streak of undeniable Americannness that prevents full assimilation) I can literally get the country in my blood.

And perhaps the piquant jalapenos soaked in white vinegar and the cups of crunchy hominy with mayonnaise fuel not only my ability to walk and breathe and think, but also the tingle I get down my spine passing a church whose religion I’ve never practiced, the nostalgia I feel walking past the bright fading walls of a city I did not grow up in, the surge of longing that grips me when I go running on the dusty soil of a foreign country.

Salman Rushdie writes in Midnight’s Children of the way in which a character cooks her lust, her hatred, her bitterness, her passion into the dishes she prepares for her family. I still remember that novel when I am hovering over a simmering pan of softened vegetables, sprinkling them with cumin, fanning them onto tortillas.

Not simply eating, but cooking is an intimate and sometimes perilous (the love affairs that emerge from a steamy kitchen and all those heady flavors, the tossing and turning of North American stomachs confronted with distant spices) affair with a particular place and its people.

Which brings me to the point—even if you have never hovered with longing before the spice racks in the grocery store, or rhapsodized about the possibilities of a chayote, you might be surprised by the sense of connectedness you get from spending a little time with local ingredients in a local (hostel or hotel included) kitchen.

Think of the vegetables and breads and spices as an extension of the landscapes and the personalities you encounter and hope to develop relationships with. What better way to feel and come to know a place than to eat it?

This includes eating it from a distance—I remember finding Chinese Five Spice in an American grocery store and nearly gnawing away at the cap to get to the delirious smells of star anise and allspice. I made myself a stir-fry of heavily anise-infused vegetables and could almost make out the cluttered noises of rickshaws and bicycles passing in the dry air of Beijing.

All of this means that, in that sometimes maddening and occasionally gratifying quest to feel connected to a specific place on Earth, sometimes the best thing to do is poise oneself over a pan of local flavors, inhale, indulge, and let the food guide you.

Run.

Wait, you might be saying here, I am not the sporty type who looks as if she’s just bounded out of a Gatorade commercial at 7 AM.

To you I say, there are plenty of ways to run that do not involve the drudgery (which I admittedly love) of throwing on an old t-shirt and hitting the streets for 50 minutes of sweat and tears.

The Hash House Harriers offer one of the best ways to forget you are actually running. You’ll get caught up in the spirit of camaraderie, following a paper trail through the Malaysian jungle or the Australian outback or central Beijing. Before you know it, you’ll be beaming proudly as you pour beers over your head.

Here’s a tutorial video about “hashing”:

I suggested to my husband that we go on a Hash run in Borneo and the look I got in response was somewhere between contempt and utter disbelief that I could understand him so poorly. Yet, we ran (after intense bargaining) and even he, who thinks my addiction to running is some sort of genetic defect, loved it.

It’s all about the spirit of community, beer drinking, storytelling, and (don’t tell anyone) getting a little exercise in. The HHH are everywhere around the world, and usually have one to two runs a week.

For those of you who can imagine enjoying, or actually do enjoy, hitting the road for a run from time to time, mix it up by looking for international races. Race to a Zapotec archeological site in Mexico. Head to Bermuda for a half-marathon. Run an international marathon (down the Champs Elysees in Paris! Through Tiananmen Square in Beijing!)

If you’re bored with your running routine, or need motivation to get started, it might be worth it to aim for one of these races as a goal.

Photo by woodleywonderworks

Get creative and stay consistent with homemade routines.

Bond with a couple cans of pinto beans and a sturdy chair and commit yourself to using them for a series of exercises on a regular basis.

Even the major fitness buffs at your hard-ass neighborhood gym concede that you really only need to do a couple sets of weights and exercises three or four times a week to build muscle tone and stay fit.

Plenty of simple routines require little more than an improvised canned good, a jump rope (find a few here) and, of course, your own motivated visions of your sleek muscular self on some Brazilian beach.

Dance.

Tango, salsa, belly dancing, drunken disco gyrations, whatever. After a sedentary day in front of the computer, I crank up the radio and let loose (with only the dog as witness). Dance classes are taking off in popularity; here in Oaxaca alone there are classes in Arabic and African dance, modern dance, and, of course, salsa.

Photo by ronnie44052

They’re all good workouts, and force you to use your body in ways that you probably don’t in your day-to-day routine. Night owls can get their eat and drink on and then dance it off ‘till dawn.

Take a multi-day hike.

If this sounds daunting, I’ll affirm that all you need to pull this off are commitment and an altered, slowed sense of time. There are multi-day hikes in many countries that go between villages and cities and offer an intimate relationship with the landscape.

The Grand Randonnees in France are a great example: a series of trails that crisscross the country, they are usually well-marked and maintained, leading you through vineyards, lavender fields, tiny villages, and, yes, over the occasional mountain.

The hike adds a whole new dimension to the French travel experience, and goes beyond downing wine at your overpriced Parisian hostel.

Head to the local bookstore or look up hiking clubs to see what’s available vis-à-vis longer trails. Ask locals if it’s possible to hike between villages and whether you could get a guide, detailed maps, or both.

You don’t have to go fast and you don’t have to lug 40 pounds of gear up unconquered peaks; you simply have to walk, and (ideally) lose yourself in it.

Start a random activities night.

There is a lot of room for creativity here. Hipsters may opt for kickball, sportier types rugby or soccer (a friend of mine played nude soccer on a weekly basis in Vietnam), and more whimsical, creative, and/or nerdy types an improvised games night.

Being the latter personality I, along with a host of grad student friends, started up a games night in Madison, Wisconsin, in my last year of school there. Red Light, Green Light, Capture the Flag, you name it; count on a lot of nostalgia and a certain degree of physical activity.

So don’t despair, even if you’ve fallen off the fitness wagon. Think outside the jock box—tango, trek, get into a wild game of freeze tag—and indulge yourself in a big ol’ bag of cheese Ruffles and an oatmeal stout, as I’m going to do as soon as I finish another solo dance marathon in the living room.

Community Connection:

Interested in learning to dance? Check out our latest video, Learning to Dance Tango. Or maybe you’re more the running type? Give our 10 Tips for Beginning Marathoners a try.

We pull off the highway through a quaint 19th century town called Cambridge, where the buildings still have the flat brick storefronts of an early frontier town, and people’s accents have a country twang to them—not quite Southern, not Minnesotan either; distinctly Ohioan.

We get pie at Theo’s Diner. One slice of chocolate peanut butter and one of cherry, both smothered in whipped cream. It is delightfully in defiance of the food pyramid and the paranoid foodie trends of the nation’s urban centers.

The waitress calls me “Sweetie” and looks concerned when I don’t finish the last bite. She’s got on pale blue jeans and her hair is a bright blond and all styled up in case some cute farmer, trucker, or local boy comes in looking for something other than pie. She is all business at work, dishing out and picking up hamburgers and fries and sides of green beans and mashed potatoes, all with a red-lipsticked local smile, and that Ohio twang.

Photo by seamusiv

As we pull out of Cambridge, we enter the county roads, where we’re occasionally stalled behind an Amish buggy trotting along at a 19th century pace. We take in the pastures where the goldenrod and Queen Ann’s Lace of summer are beginning to fade, and the grasses are taking on the rusty colors of fall.

Photo by RebeccaPollard

There are cows and horses grazing in the distance, and the textures and colors of the land bring me back to this local place, this base layer of home that I simply can’t peel away, no matter how many other homes I accumulate on the road. This time I am coming back from a year in Beijing, and I am in need of my family and Ohio’s solitude and anonymity.

I know tonight we will sit on the front porch, and watch the sky darken pink to blue to midnight over the pastures to the sound of crickets. Maybe the neighbors will come by with salsa they have canned, or a few ears of corn, and we’ll chat for a few minutes about their new dog and my trip to China.

When it gets dark, it will get cold, the first delightful chill of fall before the serious cold of winter. We’ll go inside, and snuggle into our beds in the silence of that deep Ohio night, lost somewhere in the middle, in the heart of it all, which no one knows about and where no one seems to go.