Welcome to Hungry with ideas!

A little background to get started

Hi there!

I’m really excited to share my new newsletter Hungry with ideas with you. If you’re wondering how this mysteriously ended up in your inbox, it’s likely because you were subscribed to my first newsletter “Quarter Century” back in 2021.

That was a year-long experiment and I learned a lot from it, but I shut it down to focus on my work as a video journalist. Over the past two years, I’ve missed having a place to write, and at the same time, I’ve collected countless travel stories, recommendations, photos, and videos to share.

I plan to keep Hungry with ideas as a place to share past and current adventures for the foreseeable future. If you’d like to give me a bit of encouragement, feel free to share the newsletter with others who might find it interesting. Thanks for joining me!

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Côte d'Azur, January 2022

It’s fitting that I should launch this newsletter today as September 17, 2019, was the day I visited Nice, France, where I now live, for the first time. I came to visit my now husband, Mohamed, and he always jokes that if he lived in the middle of nowhere we might not be together today.

I can’t deny that it’s easy to convince people to visit Nice. There’s a bit of an aura around The French Riviera (or Côte d'Azur). It’s the type of place that looks glitzy in TV shows about celebrity homes in the South of France, but it turns out turquoise water backed by grey mountains is a strikingly beautiful scene even if you’re not viewing it from a yacht.

A lot has changed for me since 2019. I came to France as a teaching assistant, got stranded here during Covid (“stranded” as in my visa got extended and I chose to stay), and ended up building a video production company that has given Mohamed and I the flexibility to work and travel across continents. Better yet has been the people we’ve met and the experiences they’ve shared with us.

Here are some of the stories in the queue for Hungry with ideas:

• How to eat for 4 dollars in Singapore, one of the world’s most expensive cities

• An entrepreneur changing the lives of women farmers in Bali

• Questionable dancing at Egyptian weddings

• The famous German food made with a cleaning chemical

• Happy honeymoon dear, let’s eat this Italian cheese made of live worms!

• The Spanish party where getting burned is kind of the point

One of the biggest reasons why I decided to start writing again was the fact that when I turn on my TV in the evening, the world seems like a big and scary place full of bad people doing bad things. But when I sit with that idea for a moment, I realize that of all the people I’ve met in real life, the vast majority have been kind, hard-working, and generous – and that has remained consistent from Sweden to South Korea. Over the past few years, I’ve learned that cultures are different in many ways, but the threads that unite us as humans are remarkably strong.

I hope this newsletter will make you laugh and offer a new perspective, or at least provide some cautionary tales (don’t go to Indonesia with a damaged passport) and a bit of culinary escapism. I’ll send out the next edition on Sunday and weekly after that. Until then!

– Anna