Q&A: Tips for world travellers

Q
I am writing to you from agricultural heartland (Gippsland, that is) and hoping you might be able to give a coupla tips for surviving a visit to Washington DC. Naturally, the idea of eating in America inspires a degree of terror in me and I thought just maybe you might have a few clues? We are also visiting the Big Apple for the first time and would love to eat well there too.. I have heard this is easily achieved.. however after paying the diabolical hotel bills I suspect we will have to choose some ‘cheap eats ’.. anything like Ichi Ni there? Or ??? Over to you, Ed.
Robbie A.

A Travel guidebooks are notoriously bad on food.

But the web can help you. Urbanspoon is a pretty good eating site. It has an iPhone app with a brilliant pokie machine like interface and can geolocate what’s near you. Another one to look at is Yelp.

Otherwise try sites such as Tripadvisor where people rate restaurants.

Or there are the really hard core food forums such as egullet.

Also people are using twitter from their mobile’s and asking for local tips. You could check out this blog post for tips

Also you could search local blogs – something like “Washington restaurant blog”

If you do have a web enabled phone don’t use global roaming. Get it unlocked and buy a local SIM card. I was charged $3,000 by Optus for what would have been $17 of usage locally and the company said it couldn’t help me on data costs before I travelled. As it turns out all Telcos charge over $20,000 a gigabyte.

Finally, don’t forget in the US to tip at least 15%.

Good luck.

Anyone got any other thoughts?

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