One of the fine things about going on holiday is the nouveau gourmet. Trying out the new restaurants, bars, cuisine, the different variety of dishes available.

But one of the advantages of doing a home exchange is that you can actually learn to cook the new dishes yourself, with the fresh and correct ingredients from that region!

If you stay in a hotel your certainly don’t have the facilities to practise the new culinary tasks that the new location or culture have set you. Even if you take some vacations by staying with a friend, you don’t reeeeally have the freedom to put your Quiche Lorraine to the test.

But if you do a home exchange, you’ll have every kitchen utensil you need at your disposal, and you’ll have the space and time to try new things out. For example, fresh shrimps from the Galician coast in Spain. Learning how to cook them and trying them out with the real McCoy ingredients. Real Italian tomatoes as you learn to weave a real thin, crispy, home-made pizza base.

This gives you the opportunity to take what you see and experience on holiday right into your heart. It gives you the chance to learn new cooking skills, and to walk like a native for that one day as you plod the route to the open market, in the sunshine, watching the people go, listening to the strange words in the music of a foreign language… Then to go home, and really live as someone within that culture, going through the same motions as them, preparing the local tradition foods.

It’s something that is a particular treat for the Brits of the North Americans, as our food markets are already so globalised that the notion of a national dish is pretty much forgotten.

It’s also a great thing to do with your partner or family, and it makes a wonderful memory that you can take back with you into your own home and keep hold of forever.

One of the annoying things about changing currency is the short change that you get left with that you can’t convert back. It’s particularly irritating. I personally have the habit of keeping the loose change of the foreign currency floating around in my purse for about a month after taking the vacations. Only to wind up pulling my hair out and having to muffle my screams of frustration with my sleeve everytime that I come to pay for something in a shop. And then end up burying it in the garden in an act of irrational anger.

Home exchange has many advantages, great and small. One of the mini-advantages is that you can leave your small change in the home that you’ve stayed in, and if you’re lucky the other family will leave theirs in yours. This not only saves you the horrendous extended stress period post currency change, where you have this money but you don’t really quite know what to do with it. But it also means you´ll have some small change to work with when you get back. (Let’s face it, the idea of guarding the money in a safe place for the next year without forgetting it by the time the next round of holidays comes along, is a little steep.)

So home swapping could potentially solve the niggling problem of the loose change that comes flooding back after a holiday. Also, things such as having fresh milk in the regrigrator. Cheese. Fresh bread. A nice cup of tea and a cheese toastie is usually just want you need when you get back late at night after a day or two spent travelling. And lo and behold, if you arrive back home and there’s nothing there, it puts a dampener on things. Having the home family having just left means that not only will your house be sparkling clean when you arrive, but also that there’s a good chance there will be fresh good and milk left over.

Just a couple of the mini-advantages that home swap has to offer…

Do you know how much is the average price for a lunch or dinner at the restaurant?

We did a little research about the cost of eating out, since when we’re on holidays we usually like (or we’re obliged) to get out to eat: in fact very often the meals are not included in the hotel’s price.

Well, looking for the Italian restaurants prices it seems that an average price would be around 20 Euros, depending on the popularity of the city we’re in (Florence is much more expensive than Taranto for example); in UK the prices are higher: in London, the so called low cost restaurants, can give us a meal for 13 pounds, thought the average of normal restaurants in London is around 37.72 pounds… A quite big amount of money for a middle worker. In France, if we consider the popular Paris, the prices vary from 20 to 50 or more Euros. For sure there are a lot of Mc Donalds all around the world, but you can’t require from your stomach to relax on holidays eating always at Mc Donald. On holidays one needs also to eat well, with pleasure.

And if a lucky family can maybe afford eating out every day on holidays, the average current family can’t. At most, once or twice a week. Do your accounts: eating out every day in Italy, considering only dinner (therefore supposing not to be hungry at lunch!) would cost –for two people, for 7 days and taking into account an average price of 20 Euros- 280 €. If after that you wanted to have something for lunch too, the price would be quickly doubled…If you think of numerous families then…

Well, think that this cost potentially –in a home exchange- can be deleted. And if it’s true that, on one hand, cooking your own food sometimes can be tiring and boring, on the other hand, the money saving and the tranquillity or comfort you get from cooking and eating in a fully equipped kitchen is worth the effort. At least 280 Euros saved.

The cost of a shopping at the supermarket is much cheaper: with the same amount of money an entire family could eat abundantly and in a well balanced way for more than a week, without giving up sweets or tasty morsel.

How much can you save then house swapping? A lot: not only in accommodation, not only thanks to a possible car exchange, but also in food, since we can eat comfortably at home, without having to spend a lot of money for restaurants. It’s sure that sometimes it’s a pleasure going out to have dinner and being served: but what a home swap gives us is the possibility to choose what to do and to save some money in case we had the need or the desire to do that.