In My Kitchen with Paula

Culinary Adventures Part 2: Paula's Method of Travel and Connection

• Paula Mohammed • Episode 26

Share episode

Ever wonder how to create deeper connections through travel — and how food can be the key?

In this special solo episode, I’m continuing a three-part series where I share my personal story, travel philosophy, and the principles that help me discover the world in a more meaningful way.

This week, I’m diving into the power of micro-moments — those small, spontaneous connections that can transform a trip — and how they’ve shaped both my personal adventures and the foundation of In My Kitchen.

From a terrifying scuba dive in the Azores to an unexpected four-day friendship that followed, I’m sharing the real, unfiltered moments that taught me to let go of expectations and let connection lead the way.

In this episode, I share:
🌍 Why micro-connections are essential for our well-being — backed by science
🇵🇹 A wild story from the Azores that changed how I travel
✨ The 3 trip-planning principles I swear by

This episode is for anyone who’s ever felt the magic of an unexpected hello or shared a meal with a stranger-turned-friend. If you’re looking to bring more meaning, connection, and deliciousness into your travels — this one’s for you.

HELPFUL LINKS

SUBSCRIBE, RATE & REVIEW

If you love this podcast and want to give me your support, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This goes a long way in helping me get in front of other culinary adventurers like you.

Just open up the Apple Podcasts app and go to “In My Kitchen with Paula”. Or, in this episode, click on the 3 dots in the right corner and click on “Go To Show”. At the bottom of the show page, you can rate and review.

SAY HELLO

In My Kitchen creates connections one dish at a time, by exploring culture through food. I do this through unique culinary workshops, speaking engagements, and of course, this podcast.

I'd love to hear from you! Connect with me in one of three ways:

Paula Mohammed: Hi, I'm Paula Mohamed, and welcome to In My Kitchen with Paula. This podcast is a gathering place for culinary adventures who love to travel. Every week, we'll come together with chefs, cookbook authors, talented home cooks, and everyone in between to talk about their story and their unique dish. Using food as the vehicle, we'll take a ride into the ins and outs of their culture and country.

Come on, let's get this party started.

Welcome back to Culinary Adventures Part 2, Paula's Method of Travel and Connection. Last week I shared with you a little bit about me and my background, the story of In My Kitchen, and how I ended up in Portugal, and what that experience was like for me back in 1998. Throughout these three short episodes, I'll be using that time in Portugal and those stories as a common thread, highlighting what I'm talking about in each episode.

Today, I'll be sharing with you the importance and the value of connection and connecting through micro moments in our day to day lives and with traveling. And also how was that born in me and why did it become such an important thing? So much so that I started In My Kitchen and really wanted to help other people create deeper connections to the people and places they visit. And really connect cross culturally using food as the vehicle. So let's just get right to it and I hope you enjoy.

Why do we seek a deeper connection to the people and places we visit? Why is this and slowing down so beneficial? A very simple answer: connecting and slowing down increase our well being; helps us create positive emotions and flourish. Connections are one of the most impactful things we can do for our well being or to thrive.

This can be a series of micro connections, like I mentioned in my last episode. According, actually, to Dr. Barbara Fedrickson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, and well known for her broaden and expand theory of positive emotions, micromoments of positivity are a key to improving long term well being.

So this isn't just a short quick fix. I think that's really key, is it's improving long term well being. The concept is that repeated brief moments of positive feelings can provide a buffer against stress and depression and improve both physical and mental health. A little more evidence for you: reaching out and connecting with others helps us not only to survive stress, but also to thrive through stress. And I learned about that through Kelly McGonigal, who is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University. And this is from her 2016 TED talk titled How to Make Stress Your Friend. And I'll add that link in the show notes. Finally, if we need another reason: simple as this, and this is evidence based, creating connections help us thrive. And that is directly from the founder of Applied Positive Psychology, Dr. Martin Seligman, Director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Obviously this does not only apply when you're traveling, but this is my thing and what In My Kitchen is all about: connecting across cultures using food as a vehicle. It has worked so well for me in so many ways. I really hope it does for you too. 

A quick story from the Azores Islands to highlight this. If you listened to the previous episode, you'll recall that I continued on in Portugal after things didn't go as planned and stayed on and lived there for about four months.

I did end up going to the Azores Islands, which are the Portuguese islands off of Portugal and is actually the first land sailors will see when leaving New York. I really wanted to go diving in the Azores Islands. I did this on my second day. There were no tourists on San Miguel Island when I was there. It was like being in Portugal 50 years earlier. I rented a bike and rode up to the one hotel that was actually shut down for the season and found someone that would take me scuba diving. "A guide." I'm, I can't see me but I'm putting that in quotation marks. He was going to take me scuba diving the next day. We set a time and place to meet and that was that. 

I had a rental car so I drove up there the next day as I planned to continue on with some more exploring of the island. Like my other preconceived expectations in regards to my experiences living in Portugal, my dive experience did not go as planned.

Unbeknownst to me, there had been an earthquake the day before, but I was unaware, and the guide continued with the dive, so I just followed him. I should have known this was a bad idea when a piece of twine was part of my dive gear. And I did the full on, intensive, six weeks, PADI dive course. Alarm bells were going off, but I was too stubborn and too determined to have this story that I wanted to bank away.

I remember at that point thinking and questioning the air quality in the tanks and quickly stopped pondering it. Furthermore, we had to hike down a cliff to get into the water. It wasn't a safe entry and it was very precarious.

Once we were in and down and diving, so to speak, it was murky and not clear. And again, I should have questioned why this was the case. To make a long story short , we surfaced and got trapped in a series of nonstop rogue waves that swept us off the rocks. It swept us off just as we were trying to climb up the cliffs.

So we were just about to get out of the water and had to take our flippers off. Now for those of you who are divers, you know that, I believe if I remember correctly, the last thing you take off are your flippers. So anyway, we were slammed into rocks. We had no flippers and that's your main point of control.

And on top of that, the guide reaches over and releases my weight belt just when I was going to retreat to the safety of underwater. I, to this day, I don't know why he did that. This story goes on and on, but I'll just say it was a very close call and it was the moment when I stopped trying to force a story in my life.

It was a good, albeit, scary lesson. It ends with me having a shot of brandy as I was in shock. And then basically getting in my car quite shook up with bleeding knuckles and continuing on into the middle of nowhere to go and do a hike I had planned. I do not know why I didn't do the sensible thing and just go back to town, but I'm actually glad I didn't.

On that hike, I met two brothers and a girl. She was the girlfriend of one of the guys who were originally, I think they were from Germany. I can't remember Denmark or Germany, but they had sailed their boat over from New York. I can't remember the whole story, but they had been traveling for quite a while.

They actually reached out to me on that trail and said hello on the hike. And I must've looked a mess and I was feeling miserable. I honestly felt like Portugal was just drop kicking me in the ass over and over again. I was questioning, you know, if there was some bizarre, supernatural thing happening where Portugal really just didn't like me.

I'll always be so grateful, though, to those guys reaching out and to that connection that was made. And it could have just ended as a brief hello, and that's probably all they were expecting. But it didn't. It went from a micro connection to four days of traveling the islands all together. I went from feeling very alone, sad, and shook up to having a wonderful experience in the Azores with great memories to look back on later.

When they reached out to me, I actually, I burst into tears. It was just that one act of kindness after what I'd been through, and then I continued to tell them my tale. One of my fondest memories is , after a couple of days, or I'm sure we did this more than one day, is having a beer with them and fresh prawns that were cooked in garlic and wine.

We sat at a little cafe table with our feet in the sand, sunglasses on as the sun was setting, sharing stories, drinking beer, and having some of the best prawns of my life; probably tasting that much sweeter because of the company I was with. Many of you have had similar experiences, I'm sure in those backpacking days of our twenties.

I think that is one of the most valuable experiences from those days is learning to connect with strangers, right? And again, oftentimes it was over a beer. It was sharing a watermelon on the Brindisi ferry going to the Greek islands. It was eating gyros or gyros together on the streets of a Greek island after a night of dancing the night away. The connections we created and the foods we tasted make those memories so much sweeter. 

I hope this will encourage you to break bread with people on your travels and at home, collect those micro moments of connections, like collecting pennies in a jar, because we now know that this actually will help our overall well being in the long term.

I want to shift gears here a bit now and move on to my trip planning principles. It's not like I sat down one day and said, this is how I'm going to travel for the rest of my life. These are my principles. No, that happened when I wanted to create a signature talk and decided to do it around the way I explored culture through food. But prior to that, I just started doing these things naturally. 

Looking back now, I can put it into a bit of a framework. My first trip planning principle is let it marinate. I immerse myself in the culture as much as I can beforehand. Sometimes I don't have any time, like this trip coming up to Portugal. Yes, I've been there before and lived there for a while, so it's a little bit different. But it's going to be everything pretty last minute.

But I have a tool that helps me marinate even when I don't have the time, and that's going to be talked about more next week. I immerse myself in the culture beforehand, so I'm already in it when I land. I've been doing this marinating thing subconsciously for years, and doing this will actually increase the overall pleasure of your experience of your trips. It extends the time. So we're extending the build up and creation of all those wonderful positive emotions. We all know how juicy it feels to have something to look forward to. I also do the marinade because it allows me to really leverage my experience just through the learning and getting a sense of the culture, cuisines, the norms, etc.

I don't have the luxury to travel like I did back in 1998 when I can go away for four months. So this helps to reduce the culture shock and really helps me feel immersed and part of the experience as soon as my feet touch the ground. I'll talk a little bit about how I do that in next week's episode. 

My second principle is let it bend. This is where we can allow those micro moments that we talked about earlier to happen. And we know the more of these moments, the better.

Back to Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, her studies also showed that these connections with other people, even strangers, improve our health and the other person's health. This is called positive resonance. And according to Fredrickson, the more you connect, it increases the odds of living a long, healthy life. And for everyone that's watched the Blue Zone series on Netflix, or have read the books, we see that in Dan Buettner's Blue Zone Theory as well. 

What do I mean exactly, though, by let it bend? It's going back to what I said in last week's episode, back in my event days, where I learned the importance of systems, and having the systems in place allowed me to move through the chaos. This is something similar; having kind of the right planning ahead of time, or a couple of tools that we'll talk about next week, it then allows me, when I'm in the moment or away traveling to be more flexible. It's given me the confidence to see opportunities in spontaneous moments and that, that chance to discover things that sometimes I might just not see because I've got my head in Google Maps or I'm determined to do a dive trip that's not going to work out so well. It's, it's being flexible is basically what that's all about. 

My event days also trained me to embrace the idea that nothing ever goes exactly how you planned. And that leads me to principle number three, let it unfold. Embrace spontaneous discovery versus seeing what you're supposed to see. And having the right tools give you the bumpers to let things unfold.

Basically, let go of the expectations. I have learned this important lesson through years of life experience. A perfect example were the expectations I held on to so tightly for my live abroad experience in Portugal. 

Okay. So principle one, we've marinated, we've left room for connection, and now we get to flourish.

 And why is this flourishing? Well, according to Dr. Sigelman, he states and studies show that to flourish, you must have these three states, positive emotions, engagement or interest, and meaning or purpose. So we have the positive emotions, a lot of that going on from the marinating and the actual experience of our travels.

We have the engagement and the interest and we've left room for those micro moments of connections, bringing us meaning and purpose. Again, in my opinion, best way to connect is over food, over a shared meal, cooking together. Do a cooking class abroad or before you leave. Going to the market and meeting the vendors. Smiling and chatting with the person serving you your Cataplana clams.

Those moments give your trip meaning and purpose and therefore now we are flourishing and will continue to flourish well after this trip. You can go home and continue to build those positive emotions and continue creating meaning and purpose. Something that I actually really like to do is record in my travel journal, in detail a special place when I'm in it or something that I was eating or an experience and I'll record it in detail describing it. So later on back at home on a rainy Vancouver day, I can pull that up and visualize it again. It's visualization is like a meditation tool and it just brings back all those good feelings, whenever I need them or want them.

 Another way to keep the good feeling going is you can host friends and family over for your Portuguese dinner with a cataplana that you brought back from Portugal. Or, I used to love and still do love bringing ceramics back, so dinner plates or platters from the different places that I travel.

Set the stage with the invitation, right from the get go. I love doing that. I haven't done it for a long time, so I'm thinking I'm well overdue and will do it after this trip. All that to say, I hope by practicing these principles and trying out my steps that you're going to hear about next week, you will create those deeper connections to the people and places you visit and flourish. 

People on this episode

Contributor

Paula Mohammed

Host