The best travel experiences of my life: 50-41

This is the third installment of the top 70 travel experiences of my life that begins here.

50. Hatikva market, Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv offers a good example of how easy it is to miss a city's best market by doing limited research. Search online or peruse any travel guide for Tel Aviv markets and the names that will come up over and over again are Carmel Market in the city center and the Jaffa Flea Market. We went to both of these and they were pleasant enough but clearly geared towards tourists. Mei Ling and I know that we're going to see the best stuff where the locals shop. The way we found Hatikva market was to ask a cabdriver where the Israelis bought their food and we weren't disappointed. The large market in a nondescript blue collar neighborhood had all the frenzied activity and gore we'd missed at the tidy tourist markets with their falafel and hummus. Much to my consternation Mei Ling started buying all sorts of awkward foodstuffs like calf brains and rooster testicles but I've learned to just let her run with it. Surely enough we came across a guy with a small outdoor kitchen who willingly agreed to stir fry her collection of offal. As I watched I suddenly felt a searing pain in my right eye and instantly realized that a rooster testicle had exploded and ejected boiling juice into my eye. As I struggled to open my eye I was certain my contact lens had melted to my scalded eyeball and our vacation was over. Someone guided me to a tap and I held my eye under cool running water for a few minutes until he pain had subsided. Much to my surprise there was no lasting damage and for good measure the offal fricassee was delicious.

49. Rooftop breakfast in Sulmona, Italy
The central province of L'Aquila isn't on many people's short list of places to visit in Italy, but it was the site of two of my greatest travel experiences. There weren't any Airbnb's available on short notice in Sulmona but I was fortunate to find a room in a B&B in the heart of the town that was one of the best I've ever stayed at. In the morning we went upstairs for our breakfast and found ourselves on a beautiful terrace with unobstructed views of the town rooftops. Beyond the neat rows of clay shingles and the church bell towers was the Maiella massif, part of the Apennine range. The view was breathtaking in every direction. Breakfast was colorful and delicious and included a tapenade that our host had made from olives she had picked herself. I could not imagine a better way for us to have kicked off our last day of an amazing month-long Adriatic road trip. Little did I know that we still had one of our top ten all time travel experiences still ahead of us that day.

48. Seafood restaurant in Hangzhou, China
One of my favorite things to do in Chinese coastal cities is to go to a seafood restaurant that looks more like an aquarium than a place to eat. Chinese people love to eat food that was alive just minutes ago, which is why you'll sometimes see a well-dressed office worker going home on the bus with a live chicken in a cage. Many seafood restaurants have a huge variety of live fish and shellfish on display and I've never seen a selection like I did in Hangzhou, a close neighbor of Shanghai. Having Mei Ling with me meant nothing was off limits, not even the silkworms or horseshoe crab. The crab was particularly fascinating, with delicious glutinous roe filling the crevasses in the shell. As with all my best experiences in China, it would have been impossible if unaccompanied by someone familiar with the culture and fluent in Chinese.

47. Atwater Market in Montréal, Canada
Yes, it's another market and it's far from the last. Markets are one of the first things I research when I decide to put a city on our itinerary. There's no better way for travelers to integrate themselves into the natural daily life of a city. There's always new and unusual things to see and taste, people to talk with, and energy to absorb. The main produce market in Montréal is Jean-Talon in Little Italy but by far our favorite was the much smaller gourmet Atwater Market near the Lachine Canal. Not only was there excellent produce and a very appealing food court, but the indoor delis had the most appetizing selection of prepared food one could imagine. The self-catered lunch we put together in the market was one of the best meals we had on that entire road trip.

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46. La Rocca di Cefalù, Sicily
This massive rocky outcropping looms over the small coastal town of Cefalù as if to challenge visitors to scale it. After debating anxiously with myself if we should attempt it with three kids under five, I decided we would go for it and as usual I was rewarded for taking the bolder path. The climb was grueling but never hazardous and the ruined fort and views at the summit were magical. Possibly the best part was the feeling of accomplishment from overcoming such a strenuous physical challenge.

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45. Michelin three star restaurants, New York City
In 2013 we decided to reward ourselves for becoming a family by eating in four of New York City's most renowned Michelin three star restaurants on consecutive nights. We got off to a bad start with a heavy and uneven meal at Per Se, followed by much better outings at Jean-Georges and Daniel, and finally a spectacular dinner at Le Bernardin. It's impossible for the food itself to justify the the exaltation these restaurants are held in and their exorbitant prices, but it was a unique experience to eat at so many of these venerable institutions in one of the great culinary cities of the world. Ironically enough, on our last night in the city we ate at a relatively unheralded Italian restaurant that we both agreed was at least the equal if not superior to anything we had had the previous four nights.

44. Old Town Square in Prague
It probably won't come as a shock that Prague's Old Town is quite beautiful. Those millions of tourists show up every year for a reason. At the center of it all, Old Town Square is on another level from the main squares of other renowned European cities. The sheer number of glorious and historic edifices in a variety of architectural styles is overwhelming. The gothic Tyn Church immediately catches the eye with its wicked-looking black spires, but there is also the fascinating Astronomical Clock and the imposing baroque St. Nicholas Church. Somehow all of these diverse structures come together harmoniously to create a space that might better be suited to a fairy tale than our modern Western society. It took us ten minutes standing in the center of the square just to soak in the immaculateness of what we were seeing.

43. Mt. Ulriken in Bergen, Norway
Despite being Norway's second-largest city, Bergen has less than 300,000 inhabitants. It didn't take us long to walk through the interesting parts of the town, leaving time to explore one of the famous mountains that surround the city. Of the two that are accessible by public transportation we chose Mt. Ulriken, which has continuously-running cable car. We were amazed by the expansive panorama of town and sea once we disembarked. On the other side we saw people picking their way through the rocky hillsides and decided to see how far we could get. We made some pretty good headway along the choppy trail and eventually summited a hillock with far-reaching views over the otherworldly landscape. For a few minutes there were no other humans in sight and it felt as if our little family had landed alone on an uninhabited planet.

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42. French language immersion in Nice
The summer after I finished medical school I spent a month in Nice doing a French immersion course. It was a final blast of freedom before embarking on a grueling surgical residency. Although I made my decision impetuously and blundered into my chosen school and location without much consideration, virtually everything went right. Nice was a fascinating city, the beach was a hive of energy, and the director of a Brazilian modeling academy had chosen my school for the French education of his charges that summer. The month went by so fast that my head spun once I realized I would be returning home the next day. It was six years before I had the chance to try something similar, this time with Spanish in Barcelona. There weren't any Brazilian models this time around but I did have another of my top travel experiences of a completely different nature.

41. Iguana roti in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad
One of the many great things about Mei Ling is that once she puts her mind to something she will pursue it with fierce determination. Before our first visit to Trinidad she had read about the locals hunting and cooking iguanas and she decided she wanted to try it. She started out asking our cab driver at the airport and when he acknowledged having family who hunted iguana she convinced him to give us his phone number. She bugged him a couple of times over the next few days while we were doing Carnival activities and he seemed to be putting her off. I told her to leave the poor guy alone because I couldn't imagine any reason he would want to inconvenience himself for a couple of pushy American tourists. However on our last night he gave us a call and told us his sister-in-law had a freshly killed iguana if we wanted to come over for dinner. Mei Ling answered that not only were we coming over for dinner, we were going to help cook. Soon we were in their kitchen doing our part to butcher the iguana and roll roti pancakes. I can't claim that the iguana was delicious - it wasn't unlike other small animals that are hardly worth the effort of separating them from their bones, but the experience was incomparable. I'd rather spend an evening with a local family when I travel than see all the tourist attractions put together.

To be continued with the best travel experiences numbers 40-31.