As part of Postcards from the Edge, our ongoing collection of tales regarding travel mishaps and mayhem, we checked in with Emily Gould (the current jauntsetter of the week).

In her answer to the question that prompted this series (What's been your worst travel experience?), Emily does so much more than tell us about a not-so-great experience. Her answer is full of some pretty useful perspectives - on everything from the geographic liberation of being a writer, to which airline to avoid in Russia.

See below for the details from Emily, and feel free to share your own terrible travel tale with us, as well,  below. Catharsis-by-commenting is good.

xo,

your jauntsetter team

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I have to preface this by saying that until about a year ago I had really never been anywhere. I was one of those people who, when asked to tally the times they'd been out of the country, counted Canada to pad the total and even then the total was still "two." Also I'd been inexcusably reluctant to visit places that are basically as easy to get to from my apartment as the Cloisters, such as Philly. And then this year for various reasons I have gone to Mexico and Morocco and Moscow (x3), and also I've taken a bunch of shorter domestic trips. In my early 20s I used to think I hated traveling but maybe I only thought that because I had the kinds of jobs where if you even missed a day you felt like you might never catch up, so there was a lot of pressure on every hard-won vacation day to be maximally fun and relaxing. The major perk that leavens the scariness and instability of a freelance lifestyle is that you really mostly can work anywhere and ever since I figured that out I have been doing so and enjoying almost every minute.

However some minutes that I did not enjoy occurred on my second-to-most-recent trip to Moscow. I'm going to put the moral of this story right up front: if you are visiting Moscow, avoid eating in restaurants as much as you possibly can. It's not that Russian food is bad - it's not, homemade Russian food is delicious - but Russian restaurant food, in my experience, is mostly wretched. It is always hilariously overpriced, especially considering that it is almost always disgusting. Sometimes it is even poisonous - more on that in a sec. The badness of its fancy restaurants is not Moscow's fault, really - the idea of restaurants was imported relatively recently and so they are basically just there to cater to tourists. Instead of eating in restaurants you should live with your boyfriend and his grandmother and eat the food that they or you or their cleaning lady cook, supplemented by pastries.  If this isn't possible you should try to only eat in humble, homey cafes and bakeries. If a place has an English menu available, run.  

There was an English menu at Uzbekistan, a very fancy Moscow restaurant that celebrates the native cuisine of that country and also a famous movie called "White Sun of a Desert," which is about bandits, I think - there are props from the movie and mannequins dressed as desert bandits in several of the cavernous dining rooms. This restaurant takes up most of a city block and looks like a very garish embassy from the outside.  We ate there on the last night of my visit as a special treat, which, I don't think my boyfriend had realized exactly how special it would be until we were seated and he opened a menu and looked at the prices.  The color drained from his face; I thought he might be sick. Coincidentally, he got the opportunity to see the exact same thing happen to my face several times the following morning as we made our way to the airport, because the food at Uzbekistan - maybe the veal salad? - while actually very tasty, gave me the worst food poisoning of life ever. 

I had realized that things weren't okay on the Metro on the way to the airport train, but had managed to keep everything inside my body til we got to the train station. You, if you are American, would expect there to be a public restroom in a train station but instead there was a subterranean warren of pay toilets presided over by a scary old lady in a booth, to whom I frantically tossed whatever spare change I had in my pocket.  I dashed down the hall to find squat toilets, really filthy ones, with little half-wall 'stalls' around them that concealed absolutely nothing.  I spent a vivid and horrifying time there doing everything that can be done into a toilet until I realized that I was about to miss my train.  So I got on the train, where I continued going #4 until we reached the airport - luckily the Sheremetyvo Express has very clean, modern, lovely bathrooms, which is great, except now I will forever associate that train with being sick. The next time I went to Moscow I felt psychosomatically nauseated just from contact with this train. And also I guess from eating the plane food on Aeroflot, which, don't fly Aeroflot. Those are my two top Moscow travel don'ts.