For quite some time, I wanted to write something following Bourdain's suicide, but I never got to it.Partially because I don't really think there is anything that I could write about that would add anything meaningful to the debate, but mostly because he was sort of a hero to me. In my mind he was an embodiment of everything good and bad in life - he made good decisions, he made bad ones; he talked about the hedonistic aspects of life as honestly as he did about the nasty painful ones. He had dined at the best restaurants in the world, and still loved his In-and-Out, he took President Obama not in the equivalent of Per Se or Alinea, but to the small shack in Vietnam. His shows felt real and some of them (like the Croatian one, or the Seattle one) sometimes even felt like he was channeling some of my experiences from those places.

Thank you for everything you have left us with. You have viewed the world in a way most of us will never comprehend, but you made these remote places closer than they actually are.