While walking down a slender cobblestone roadway anywhere overseas without an unromantic thought in your head and staring with that fabled wide-eyed-wonder at completely everything, the chances that you are absorbing more sights and sounds and smells than you ought to be are pretty good. But, you want this to soak in. You want it to change you. To enlighten your normal existence and latch on, hoping that when you land at Bluegrass Field, you will still be glowing with that, "I have just eaten guinea pig in Ecuador and I have slides to prove it," look about you.

Granted,you may find it difficult to find prepared rodent in Lexington to serve to your amazed and delighted friends, but to set a full table of exotic repast while exchanging tales of journeys abroad is very easy in our increasingly ethnically diverse town.

The food in other countries is amazing. Whether it is amazingly bad or amazingly good is really up to you, but that first experience with another culture's typical dinner fare is so exciting. If you are dining out, what do you order? Do you run way out into left field and take the food advice of a local, ordering something you have never heard of, much less could never spell - or do you play it safe and not stray too far away from the steak and potatoes?

As the guest at someone's home, choices are obviously limited to what you can try, but it is so much more exciting in this instance to know that someone who assumes that you are a first timer has chosen a meal that should seduce you into a love of their country's cuisine. Let us say that they choose the perfect lighting, maybe the high noon orb filtering through the trees or chubby little oil lamps on a mantle. Add the perfect music and lots of nostalgic chatter to accompany the initiation and like a child hearing a particularly naughty expletive for the first time, you must try to repeat it.

Before the aura fades and the memories are replaced with dot matrix ramblings, you will want to find out how to recreate your experience. I bring all of this up to tell you what I have lately been telling anyone who will listen; we have wonderful markets representing many corners of the world, right here in Lexington. They are overfilled with not only interesting ingredients, but cooking supplies, cookbooks, ready-to-eat meals, and an extremely helpful staff that will assist you in finding what you want.

But that is the real question, right?

What do I want?

Going into an unfamiliar grocery store with new smells, strange cans of who knows what, and someone speaking another language in the background can be a little intimidating, but not knowing what to ask for once you get there may send you over the edge.

First of all, start with what you know. If you had chicken curry at one of our local Thai restaurants and you know that you would like to make it at home, then a Thai grocery store is what you need. It is a fairly simple dish, the ingredient list is small, and it will get you into the grocery to see what else they have available.

In many cases, these specialized stores are the only places that you can find some of the ingredients that you may need to recreate your adventurous meal. If you look into your shopping bag and find quail eggs, baby bok choy, fermented black beans, or nori, then you have probably not been to the local chain.

I have seen more than one person walking around a Japanese grocery store with a basket on one arm, an open cookbook on the other, and a please-help-me look on their faces. They have jumped in with both feet and will soon be running home to test their skills and possibly new favorite recipe.

I really enjoy these markets. For me, this love affair started in a Turkish neighborhood in Amsterdam. I was standing on the sidewalk, on a bleak but film-noir-beautiful kind of day, trying not to stare into a shop that had pheasants, feathers and all, hanging from their ceiling. I was trying, but it was really difficult because the birds were so beautiful. I probably could not go into that store even today but give me one with odd-looking fruit and spices that I have never heard of and, well, I am transported.

Reluctantly, I am not able to include every type of ethnic grocery store in town right now due to space and time, but I wanted to recommend the concept. In coming weeks, I will get around to them (and neighborhood groceries, and country groceries, and the produce markets, etc.) and bring back news in more specific detail - along with recommendations and reports from the front.

Please email your culinary heads-ups to Karen at kworkman@aceweekly.com.