Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

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are sort out of the normal places that people, tourists go, 
um, but, uh, to go with small groups of people and meet 
chefs, meet home cooks, learn from them the things that 
are important to them in terms of how they cook, the 
traditions that they have, the kinds of ingredients that 
they use, and it really, really gives you, um, a real 
eye-
opening
lesson in what a real culture is like—very dif-
ferent from reading about it in a book or a magazine. (I) 
mean, the best thing would be to go and live in a place for 
a long time, but some of these sorts of experiences, you 
really get to meet people who are very passionate about 
the things that they do in their everyday life. And food is 
something that, I think, is worth having a great passion 
about.
INTERVIEWER:
Where have you been on some of these 
cooking vacations?
WOMAN:
Well, I’ve been a number of diff erent places here 
in the United States. Um, (I’ve) been to New Mexico, for 
example, uh, California, uh, but I really have enjoyed 
traveling in Europe in a number of places where cook-
ing and-and travel come together. I’ve been to Spain, 
I’ve been a couple of times to diff erent places in France. 
Mostly I’ve been to diff erent places in Italy, uh, and from 
the-the north to the south: Sicily, Puglia, Rome, Venice—
various places like that, and each experience is really very 
diff erent, and that’s been something that-that I’ve, the 
education of learning about a country through its food 
is something I’ve found really fascinating. As Americans, 
I think we often have this impression that the food of a 
country is a single thing, defi ned by two or three sort of 
ingredients. We-we may think of Italian food, for exam-
ple, as just spaghetti and meatballs, um, because that’s 
kind of the way we were raised to think it’s just one single 
thing. Well, it’s not. It’s the-the food of even of a country, 
which, Italy is not a very large country geographically, 

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