travel Archives - The Cracked Door

Why I Left NYC to Travel the World—and Why I Haven’t Stopped

In July 2024, I left my life in New York City and decided to travel the world. It has now been two years. So far, I have been to three continents on my way to travel the whole world. Why did I decide to do this, and what makes me keep going?

At the end of 2023, I had five months paid time off work, and I decided to travel throughout East Asia. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I decided to use it to see a new part of the world and its cultures, choosing East Asia more or less at random.

The trip was an eye-opening and transformative experience in so many ways. For example, getting out of my normal rhythm of life for an extended period and seeing the different ways others in other cultures chose to live their lives made me realize the extent to which my life at that point working as a data scientist in New York wasn’t working for me. I would excitedly start a new job at a new organization for a year or two only to then become frustrated and move on to another place. I was stuck in a cycle, moving between job after job. I was not fulfilled. My Asia trip showed me that something has got to give.

I concluded that I felt far more fulfilled while traveling. I really enjoyed both seeing new places and having relationships, but most importantly, I enjoyed meeting new people from different places and learning about their stories. There’s something about hearing the struggles people encounter in their lives and how different people navigate those struggles that helps center me. I wanted to continue talking to people.

I also saw how different people in different cultures experience the problems of life. In my experience, many of the struggles that people have to navigate in life are surprisingly similar in different social and cultural contexts around the world, but the strategies given to them for how to navigate them and the tools they have with which to navigate them vary widely. Over time, different people thus develop different habits and dispositions for how to respond to situations. Because of this, people experience similar patterns across cultures in the problems people experience throughout their lives, but the approaches people use to navigate these problems vary widely.

Another factor that I think contributes to the fact that I am traveling the world is that I have always had a leaning towards breadth over depth. I think I am an intellectual at heart. Some intellectuals have their single area of focus that they love. Academia, in particular, encourages this; for example, PhD programs tend to force people into a hyper-narrow specialization of a specialization of a subfield of the field they are interested in. This is an intellectual depth-focus. I am the type of person who is interested in many things, jumping around between interests and passions. At its worst, it spreads me too thin, preventing me from adequately exploring one endeavor long enough to bear useful fruit, but at its best, it allows me to notice new connections between different spaces.

This breadth has been what I have been pursuing as I travel the world: talking with more and more people from different parts of the world as I travel. Other travelers I have seen, for example, choose one part of the world to travel to for several years, but right now, I think I would get too bored doing that.

The Successes and Failures I’ve Had

As I travel, I talk with people about what it is like being them. I listen a lot and try to enjoy each place on its own terms. Or, that’s my ideal at least. I’m not always successful, but that is what I strive for. One of the biggest compliments I will get is when people tell me that I am not like a typical foreigner who visits their area because I show an interest in their lives and perspectives, asking about deeper questions. Such questions may not click with everyone, but for these specific individuals, they tell me that they appreciate how I want to know them as a person. Evidently, most foreign visitors do not.

At the same time, sustaining that kind of energy long-term is not easy, and I have found that pacing myself is crucial when traveling long-term. I have had to learn to pace myself. This is a constant struggle for me. Because I am highly motivated by my passion and curiosity, I can be the type of person who tries to do too much. I am well-known for getting swept into too many activities until I exhaust myself and need to pull back how much I try to do each day.

A one- or two-week vacation is like a sprint, and traveling for years is more like a marathon. In a week-long vacation, I can do activity after activity if I want, collapsing when I get home, but obviously every single day for months or years can’t be some grand adventure that expands my understanding of myself, humanity, or the universe. My mind would explode.

I have found developing some kind of consistency of one’s daily rhythm helps keep me grounded and centered, probably the single most important thing to do to pace myself. But how that consistency manifests will still vary widely depending on the environment. I constantly rework the details of your rhythm for your day in each new place you visit.

How I tend to work this out in practice is that I have different activities I do every single day (such as writing a haiku a day, journaling, a little bit of other writing, etc.) Having these consistent activities centers me, but how I do them each day varies at least a little, sometimes widely depending on where I am. As a morning person, I strongly prefer working on creative projects in the morning, when I first wake up. I may spend a half hour to an hour working on them before I go about my day. Then some other activities like journaling, I tend to do in the evening after my day has wrapped up. In each place, I work out different details of what incorporating them into the rhythm of the day looks like.

One thing I have learned is that I still desire to do, more specifically to create. Between this blog, my daily poetry, four YouTube channels, publishing a book, and a few other projects, I make quite a bit. I want to create and build ideas as part of my making a mark on the world.

This is a major difference with my first five-month trip throughout Asia: then I put life on hold, exclusively focusing on being in the moment. That was great for five months: a time to pause my life and figure out what I wanted to do. But, if I put everything on hold in life during this trip, it would simply mean I would not get to it. This is my life itself, not a break from it, so I feel a stronger desire (even pressure) to still incorporate the things I want to do with my life into it. And these creative projects are certainly a part of that.

Yet, they also take time and mental energy, pulling me out of the moment of traveling. Sometimes, I focus too much on them and find that I am no longer as in the moment. They can also exhaust me. The most important lesson in how to pace myself while traveling the world has been learning how to effectively navigate between being in the moment in the places I visit while also working on these projects.

The strategy I have found works for me is to split my time: time focused solely on where I am and time focused on my projects. Every week, I spend two days a week working on these creative projects, producing what I need to do to keep them going for that week. Then, the other five days, I spend going on adventures in the place I am visiting and meeting new people there. What kind of adventures I have will depend on where I am (for example, in cities, it may be visiting museums, historical sites, etc., and in a mountain village, it may be hiking or climbing a mountain, or diving if I am near a coral reef).

I used to set goals where I did a little of my creative projects everyday in the morning and then went out and about having adventures, but I found this distracted me: my mind would be split throughout the day. When I went out and about visiting adventures, I would really think about the tasks I did not finish that morning. This left me exhausted. By splitting which days I focused on what, on any given day, I could focus on exactly one thing: on “adventure days,” focus entirely on having adventures, meeting people in the place where I am, and otherwise being in the moment, and on “work days”, focus entirely on my projects.

I also traveled in bursts of a few months with longer periods of rest in between. For example, I may spend one or two months constantly traveling to new places every week and having adventures, and then spend a week or two resting. Beyond that, I find that about every six months I need about one to two months of a longer rest.

I get on what I call an “experiential overload” where I feel exhausted having to navigate new types of experiences and new cultures, and need a few weeks of constancy. Usually during this time, I do not even leave my hotel much, except to buy food and other necessities. I need a break from new things.

When resting, I often work heavily on my creative projects. For whatever reason, these projects give me something to do while I am experientially exhausted. Each type of activity allows me to rest from the other: creative projects allow me to rest from physical and social adventures, and adventures allow me to rest from the mental drudgery of my projects. On longer rest periods, I often do the more complex work of evaluating how to improve or overhaul an aspect of my creative project. During adventure times, I usually simply deploy the plan I set in motion (posting a certain type of videos or articles every week or every other week), and it is during these rest periods that I have the mental pause to be able to reflect on whether that plan is working and what improvements I would like to make to that plan.

Thus, I find my adventures tend to clump. I may have several week- or a couple month-long periods where everyday is an adventure, followed by periods when I have no adventures for a while. Both are necessary parts of my rhythm, allowing me to pace myself. At the same time, I frequently worry that my many projects overextend myself, taking me out of the moment while traveling. I have to pace myself: traveling the world is a marathon, not a sprint.

As I travel, I also find that what I am looking for changes. I have periods when I naturally tend to focus on different things. For a few months, I may focus on meeting people, but then go through periods where time in nature is my main focus. I tend to internally segment my journey into “epochs” based on what I tended to crave more of over those several month intervals. During some periods, I am inherently more extroverted and during others more introverted. If during one period, I focus on my creative projects, that will pull me in a more introverted direction. If during another time I crave socializing and a sense of community, I will become more extraverted.

I have learned to accept these different circumstances: my needs will change over time, and that’s okay. For example, about a year ago, I went through a more introverted period after a breakup, where I preferred being by myself with my emotions rather than spending time with others, and I felt guilty that I was not “getting to know” people in the countries I happened to be visiting at that time. I had to realize that it’s okay to be more introverted for a time. It’s a part of the process of long-term travel.

If I feel especially irritated or crabby in a given circumstance, it is a warning sign that I am likely exhausted from overexerting myself. I most likely need to take a step back by resting and determining what need is not being met and go meet that need (whether that means withdrawing, going on an adventure somewhere else, talking with friends back home, etc.). After that, I can reengage with the context or activity that made me crabby with a fresh mind. In general, I find my internal psychological state is the most significant factor in how I vibe with a new culture: if I am frequently getting frustrated in a new environment, it’s usually because I am exhausted. It’s not usually about that culture or community in itself. My exhaustion is coloring the lens through which I engage the context. I need to rest, rejuvenate, and then go back out, and then suddenly the culture will seem much better. I will be much more attune with what the people, environment, or other things in that specific environment have to offer rather than how they irritate me.

Why I Keep Going

The short answer is that I feel like I am still learning and growing from traveling, and I suspect as long as that feels the case, then I will keep going. I don’t succeed at this every single day, but that may not be a realistic expectation for long-term travel anyways. Overall, I still am and there is promise to do so.

Another important lesson that I have had to come to terms with is that travel can be very consumptive, and any form of consumption is ultimately vacuous. When people think about traveling the world, their minds often go to Instagram stories of the magic of daily adventures in foreign places, which make them think long-term travel is simply one iconic adventure after another. Everything in life is ultimately vanity, maybe especially in our consumerist, capitalist world, and this definitely applies to travel.

When people idealize traveling the world, they really think about the magic of their vacation. Vacations are short breaks from people’s normal lives, often not long enough to really experience the vapidness of travel and tourism. This isn’t bad per se. People go, consume experiences for a few days, and come back home. The temporary trips help them reset themselves and often recontextualize their humanity as they reenter their normal lives, clearly a good thing. This makes sense as a counter to people’s regular lives. For example, they can be in the moment for a few days in contrast to their normal, hectic daily lives; they can relax instead of running around; have adventures they can’t do where they live; and so on.

But when you spend more time in touristic spots, you often realize how superficial they are. They often foster at best superficial relationships with people there with at worst troubling power dynamics. Also, many typical tourist activities in different countries all tend to feel the same over time. For me at least, these environments do not provide good long-term ways to live life or engage with others or other cultures.

I still enjoy visiting places with a lot of natural scenery and/or historical and cultural significance, and often these places become “tourist spots” for understandable reasons. Thus, I will visit such places anyways, if the scenery or history seem worth tolerating the tourism of it. My best solution is to try to ask about and listen to people’s stories in the places I am. By asking about their lives, I often learn what life is like for the people that live there. Even the most artificial tourist spots are regular life for those who live there, and that becomes a practical way to connect that moves past consumption and my own tailored experiences as a “visiting tourist customer” (to some extent at least, not always perfectly).

But I will tend to prefer quieter settings where foreigners do not visit as much. I find it easier to talk to regular people who live there outside the tourist spots. It’s not impossible to have regular conversations with normal people in tourist areas, but sometimes, the “tourist as client” relationship can become the main way people who live in tourist spots are used to engaging with foreigners.

Visiting a beach for a few days allows one to appreciate the beauty of the beach. For some at least, living on the beach everyday makes it seem normal, like the wallpaper of their lives. I constantly travel to new places rather different from settling in one place, so I do not have to see the same beach everyday. But likewise, I can still become overexposed to wonder and to itself new types of places.

Growing up in the Eastern US, I see huge mountains maybe once every couple years during trips “out West” to see the Rockies. I would feel enraptured by mountains. Now, I see a new mountain range every several months and climb at least one mountain a month. Each one is majestic; don’t get me wrong, but much of the magic I felt when mountains were a rare, special experience fades away after I have seen so many.

Now, what I see when I see a new mountain range is how it compares with the other mountains I have seen before in the Americas, Africa, Oceania, Asia, etc. All mountain ranges have certain patterns in common yet also differences, and I think overtime the different mountains form a type of grid in my mind of characteristics: this mountain range has A and B, and the next mountain range I see has X and Y, but a third combines A and Y but neither B nor C, maybe introducing D in a rather interesting way. This applies to wildlife, foods, and many other things I encounter while traveling. It’s different from simply marveling at a new thing I have never encountered before, but it adds a richer dimension that improves my understanding of the world.

The other side of this is that the tourist industry tends to foster a specific, superficial kind of relationship. It may seem welcoming, but that only lasts for a week. Often for me personally, I tend to get sick of it even after a day or two. A crucial part of finding fulfillment while traveling long-term is to move beyond the tourist interaction and cultivate other types of relationships. I tend to do that by listening to people’s stories and trying to be with people in a genuine way. It is possible to do this in highly touristic places, but sometimes, visiting non-heavily touristed areas of a country make this much easier.

At the same time, even if the pleasure-seeking aspects of travel fade, on a practical level, of all major forms of material consumption, experiences fade the slowest. If you compare it to buying luxury items like nice cars or nice clothes, for example, the benefits of an adventure experience last longer (for me at least, but I suspect this is the case for most humans). This is one reason why for someone who dreams of material affluence, of being able to buy a bunch of stuff, once they get enough wealth to afford those things and now own them, they end up wanting more.

Buying experiences are also less likely to saddle someone with debt that they will have to deal with decades later like big single expenses like nice homes or cars, or buying many small materials things often do. Someone who primarily consumes experiences can much more easily cut back if money becomes tight for unforeseen reasons at a later point in life. So, if one is to indulge a little in consumption, for me at least, experiences seem like the best strategy.

At the end of the day, meeting new people and learning new things in the places I visit are the main two factors keeping me going. I am not always the best at receiving and cultivating that, but I am trying my best. I think as long as these forces encouraging me to keep going continue to outweigh the forces that might encourage me to settle down in one place, I will keep traveling. At a later point in my life, this may switch: I may feel greater encouragement to settle down than to continue traveling. And if they do, I will probably stop. But for now, I keep going.

How to Talk to People in a New Culture

As I travel the world, how do I talk to people in various cultures around the world and learn about a new place? I have a slightly different approach in each place based on the culture, but this is my overall approach as I learn the specifics of the communication style when I arrive somewhere new.

Who to Talk to

First, I figure out who I can talk to. The best people may vary widely depending on the culture, and it depends on whether that person has time. Staff members of the everyday establishments I frequent (like waiters and waitresses, store clerks, hotel workers, store clerks, security guards, etc.) are a low-hanging fruit, but I have mixed feelings about talking with them. They are paid to be around, and in some cases, there can be implied pressure to interact. In others, it’s fine. I find it best to sort that one out by ear.

In some places, asking someone to take your picture can be a way to strike up a conversation. They take your picture, and then you can ask them where they are from and what it is like living here. In a culture where most people don’t speak English, it can be hard to initially approach someone with limited linguistic overlap, and this can be a good way to initiate a conversation. Gesturing that you want a photo is one of the easier things to convey; almost everyone has a photo these days and understands the concept of taking pictures with it. Once done, then you already have your phone out, and you open your translation software and start a conversation. In heavily tourist areas, this technique may lead to you talking more with tourists than visitors, but it can still work well.

Otherwise, I might be simply talking to random people on the street. I find the best way to do that is to start tangible. For example, if someone is wearing a really cool shirt, ask where they bought it. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from a culture by learning what kinds of clothing people buy and where they shop. If you are at a restaurant and you see someone eating an interesting dish, ask them what it is called and whether they’d recommend you eat it or only think it’s okay.

What to Ask About

I generally prefer asking broad, open-ended questions about their experience living there. That said, I often start the conversation tangibly and use that to open up. Take the examples in the last paragraph: start by asking about their shirt or the food they are eating, and then if they are up for continuing to chat, pivot from that to learn about where they are from and what they think about living here. (And translation apps work wonders when you first arrive in a place; some apps like Google Translate allow you to download a language ahead of time, so you can still talk to people when you don’t have reception.)

The tangible question does a few subtle things. First, it presents a clear starting point in the conversation, especially useful for someone who does not speak the same language as me. Second, it provides me with a clear goal, humanizing me in the process. Humans tend to relate to stories, which we experience through a goal. I am at a restaurant in a new country, trying to figure out what to order, or I am considering buying some clothing. Either of these implicitly present me as a genuine human to the person I am talking to. It also demonstrates that I am interested in learning about the culture and their world here.

So, how do you pivot to broad, open-ended questions about their experience with the place? People’s answers to your specific questions often teach you things that you can then generalize into a broader conversation. For example, if they say, “I bought my shirt in China” when we are in Malaysia, I then ask if they are from China or were simply visiting China. If they are from China, I may ask where, and what it is like living there (or what it is like visiting Malaysia).

If nothing comes up to go off of, I just ask as a follow-up after they walk through the previous tangible topic we were just talking about. The two most common first questions I ask are, “What is life like here?” (or “Do you enjoy living here, or what do you think about it?” or “What are your favorite things to do here?” (or “What do you do for fun?”) The first one makes clear I want to learn about them as a person. The questions emphasize that I want to listen to their opinion or perspective.

The second emphasizes that too but can also trigger an activity-oriented conversation. Often people will go into their personal favorite activities, but some will go into listing the best tourist attractions. This can be fine, but in my follow-up questions, I usually try to keep the conversation about their personal experiences with the places: for example, “What is your favorite part about X place [that they just mentioned]”, “How often do you go where?”, “When was the last time you go there?”

Here are a few other examples of good starter questions that emphasize their personal experience. I often also use these as follow-up questions after asking what life is like:

1) What is it like working as a waitress [or whatever job they do]?

2) How long have you lived here?

If they give me a list of recommendations, I make sure those are written on my phone. Most often, I get out a new page and have them type up the names of the places. This is both because they will often say names of places faster than I can type them, especially when the place names are in a different language. This way I can record them to look up later. More importantly, however, having them write it down confirms that I am really interested in what they say and want to hear every word of it. It is a form of validation.

Being Shown Around

Also, I learn so much more being taken to neat places than going by myself, because I can listen to their take on it instead of only seeing through my own perspective. Even hearing people describe their favorite places is a window into their world. Sometimes, they will simply offer to take you to their favorite places.

Some societies are set up to navigate by yourself pretty easily (such as big cities with intricate public transit networks), but in some parts of the world, having someone drive you around is really the best or even only way to navigate it. In the latter, making friends who then show you around is the best way to approach it (or sometimes hiring a tour guide, although I do not generally do the latter). In my experience, in big cities, people are less likely to show you around themselves. The places where people will show you around tend to be rural, but not all rural areas are like that. It varies by culture.

To determine whether it is safe to go with them, I generally assess two things: 1) how well I know them, and 2) what I sense their self-interest is. On how well I know someone, the most important factor for me is knowing some of their other interpersonal connections. For example, have I met their friends or family? Do I know where they work?

If I met someone at their job, for example (say a waitress or waiter), then I know where they work. If they do something really bad like rob me (assuming I am still alive), then they are now identifiable to the police who can use that to learn their name. That helps me feel secure. But for a complete stranger I met in a big city who could in theory rob me and blend back into the crowd, I may have my guard up a little more.

Knowing their friends and family is similar (although that can be more likely to be deceptive in an extreme situation). Friends of friends are great (say one of your friends knows someone who lives in the place you are about to visit): I now have a social network and can feel much more confident.

The second way I evaluate safety is in terms of what the person’s self-interest is. Everyone has a set of self-interests or motivations. Why are they interacting with a foreigner (me)? These can range from virtuous motivations like wanting to talk with someone from another culture to learn more about the world, hospitality/graciousness, just a desire to be nice, or just enjoy explaining their world. They can also have self-interested motivations like forming connections that can help them find a job in or move to another country, or they want you to pay them to give you a tour. A given person can have a combination of motivations.

Different travelers tolerate different types of motivations. For example, I do not like the motivation of trying to get money from me that much and tend to stay away from interactions where I sense that is their primary goal. In tourist areas, people may offer rides or offer to show you places with the understanding that you’ll pay them for it, and I will generally stay away from them.

At the same time, specifically getting a sense for people’s self-interest is most useful in understanding what they may or may not do. For example, someone who is interested in connecting with you because they want an international friend are a lot less likely to rob you. They may have other interests that you have to navigate, but making sure you have a fun time connects heavily with those motivations. Knowing this provides a type of safety.

Similarly, someone who wants you to spend money for their services generally sees you as a potential buyer. They may try to upsell you or rip you off, but they are less likely to downright rob you. Like I said above, though, I tend to be more skeptical of those with this motivation. I may complete an exchange (getting a ride or buying something I need like water) from someone demonstrating this motivation, but I am less likely to have a longer interaction with them. Other travelers may have a different opinion or strategy for how to respond to people’s motivations, though.

All of this is how I learn about different people from around the world. The people I meet are the real gateways for me into understanding the world and various cultures around the world, much more than visiting the key sites, eating the food, or other things. This is both because learning about how people in a place think about their lives, their society, and their culture tells me so much more about the place than just visiting it myself, but also because they will be quick to show you the best places to visit, the best foods to eat, and the best other things to do anyways.

How much does it cost you to travel the world? How to Know Whether You Can Afford to Travel the World

This is one of the most common follow-up questions I get asked when I tell people that I am traveling the world. Surprisingly, it’s a lot cheaper than you’d expect.

I find that on average, it costs about USD $20,000 a year to travel the world (or roughly $50 a day). For those of us from the Western countries, it’s far cheaper than a regular life at home. It’s much cheaper than living in New York City for a year, where I was before.

This isn’t necessarily the case for those in places with a cheaper cost of living, but for anyone from those places, keep in mind that there are ways to cut this in half or a quarter. Some people travel even more cheaply, but I find $20,000 to give me the right balance of comfort without spending too much/being too extravagant for me personally.

I base this on a rough ratio of 8-9 months in Global South countries (which tend to have a lower cost of living) and 3-4 months in the Global North or upper income countries where things tend to be more expensive. I personally like this ratio and tend to be more interested in visiting Global South countries anyways. $50 a day is hard to sustain in Western countries. For example, on a recent trip to Australia and New Zealand, I blew well past that. But in most of the Global South, one can spend much less than $50 a day, so it averages out at the end of the day (or at the end of the year).

Most people’s reference point for how much it costs to travel are vacations. That’s the only form of travel that they do. But, long-term travel is far cheaper than a couple day or couple week vacation. The longer the trip, you are better able to lower the cost per day. Here is how to reduce three major costs when traveling long-term: transit between destinations, lodging, and food.

Transportation

Transit is often the most expensive portion of a trip. If someone wants to visit a far-flung part of the world, most likely they will fly there (unless they prefer taking a long time to get there). Flights are often one of the most expensive single purchases.

When traveling long-term, though, you fly sparingly. You may need to initially fly to the region of the world you want to visit, but once you are there, you can mostly take buses or trains between places. For example, if you’d like to visit Southeast Asia, it’s best to pick a city in Southeast Asia that has the cheapest flights you can find. If you’re coming from North America, though, that flight is still likely to be pretty expensive: maybe $1,000-$2,000. That’s a one-time purchase, though. Once you are there, you can go between cities or districts by bus (or sometimes train), often for under $10 or $20. Such bus rides may take several hours, but they will get you to the new destination.

Island regions like Oceania or the Caribbean form exceptions to this: sometimes the only way in and out of an island is by flying. You often need to fly between the islands, increasing the complexity of visiting those regions, but for most of the world, you have to pay the upfront cost to get there, and transportation is pretty cheap after that.

Now, I only need to buy expensive flights when I jump to a new region of the world. For example, if I am done with the Old World and want to cross an ocean into North or South America, that jump will require another initial expensive flight. Otherwise, once I am in a region, I can move over to a new region slowly with local transportation.

In general, traveling switches the trade-offs one has to make when on vacation. On a vacation, people often really want to visit a specific location: they want to visit that city they had always wanted to visit or that specific national park. If they don’t visit it on their week or two-long vacation, they won’t see it, and in some cases, they could well never have another chance when they are in this region of the world anyways. Thus, many find it worth it to eat the cost and just visit that place on their vacation. This puts you at the mercy of the market on how much it costs to fly to that location.

I still have my top destinations, but when traveling the world, there are multiple places A, B, and C that I also want to visit even if they are not my favorite. If one of them happens to be cheaper, I can go there next. Once there, maybe the price to go to my favorite destination will suddenly go down. I can wait to see my absolute favorite places and visit the cheaper place first because I have more time.

Lodging

For most people, the next largest expense when traveling is lodging. Lodging is often cheaper when you do long-term stays of several weeks or even several months rather than several days. Most often the price per day goes down.

It is usually also cheaper in the long run to choose places with a kitchen rather than hotel rooms. That way you can cook meals yourself, which significantly reduces daily costs. In much of the world, I find Airbnbs to be the cheapest option, and generally staying in a home provides you a kitchen with which to cook your own food. But in some parts of the world, Airbnbs are unusually expensive and in other booking sites might be cheaper, so it does vary.

I rarely stay in hostels, only doing so if I absolutely have to (and I’ve only had two in two of the 36 or so countries I have visited so far). I’m not 19 anymore and find that I prefer my own space. I am naturally social while I am out and about, so when I go home, I prefer a quiet place to unwind when I need to be by myself. That said, some people can cut my $20,000 a year expense in half by staying in hostels, and others by a quarter by mixing hostels with pitching a tent somewhere some nights. That’s great for them, and I do enjoy both camping and communal living. But I can only handle doing it for a few nights before I prefer the comfort of my own place. It’s worth it to me to have my own space.

Food

Learning the local cuisine is a fantastic idea, yet cooking your own food is much cheaper than eating out all the time. Unlike on a vacation, where most people eat out every single meal, generally, I find balancing tending to cook your own food most foods to be the cheaper option. In some places, I try to eat out maybe one meal a day, and in more expensive parts of the world, one meal every few days. In most places, though, whether that place has a high or low cost of living, I generally find that I can buy a week’s worth of groceries for the cost of a single meal at a restaurant, so if you do the math, eating three meals a day, that means eating out is 21 times as expensive than cooking on your own.

The other trick with food is to determine cheap but healthy foods you like in the places you visit. Some foods are also healthy and generally cheap everywhere you go, making them my go-to foods to first look for when in a foreign country. I have found, for example, that rice and lentils are generally cheap everywhere and a really healthy source of carbohydrates and protein respectively. They also keep for a long time and are portable if you need to carry leftovers to your next destination. Thus, I often use them as my basis for the dishes I cook, adding spices and other flavors that I can find cheap in that locale to build the dishes I cook myself. (Eggs too are often a good cheap source of protein, but I prefer lentils because they are more portable and don’t go bad or break easily.)

Similarly, the cost of different fruits and vegetables will vary widely in different parts of the world. Often the trick with fruits and vegetables is to just walk through the grocery store or market and see which ones are cheap at that time. Buy those and try them. You may learn about new foods you’ve never heard of. At the same time, there is one fruit and two vegetables that are almost always cheap: bananas, carrots, and lettuce/cabbage (and sometimes oranges). When in doubt, look for these.

In the world of healthy fats, peanuts tend to be another cheap option no matter where you go. If you check your labels properly for the peanuts to ensure no added sugars or other unhealthy additions, all of these tend to be rather healthy as well.

So, lentils, rice, bananas, carrots or lettuce, and peanuts have become my go-tos. These are almost always cheap in pretty much every country I visit. It’s especially helpful to have a list in your head when all the food at a grocery store is in a foreign language. For example, if I don’t have time that day to wander the fruit aisle looking at every fruit, I just grab some bananas.

Finally, be aware of which places sell the cheapest foods wherever you are, because it varies between cultures. In some cultures, supermarkets are the cheapest places to buy food. In other places, street markets where farmers sell what they grow tend to be much cheaper. Sometimes, some foods are cheaper to buy at the grocery store, and other foods like fresh produce are cheaper to buy at a market. It will depend, so one aspect of learning to shop in a new culture is to figure out the best combination of places to optimize costs.

Conclusion

These are the techniques I have honed to reduce cost while traveling the world without destroying the quality of my experience. Different people have different preferences, so if you do travel, you should explore what techniques work best for you. Either way, traveling the world is surprisingly cheap. When people think about how much it would cost to travel the world, they often take the cost of a vacation and extend it to their whole life, but the cost per day of long-term travel is a lot lower than a vacation. At around USD$20,000 a year, you may even find that traveling the world is cheaper than living for a year in wherever you call home.

A Safety Guide for Travelers: Avoiding Petty Crime on the Streets

Traveling the world, I have been to a lot of places. This is a basic guide to how to stay safe in a city environment considered “unsafe.” I will focus on how to avoid being targeted for a petty crime like muggings or other theft while physically on the street, not organized or systematic crime like gang violence or political unrest. Petty crime is what a traveler is most likely to encounter when visiting a new city.

How to avoid being a target of petty crime:

1) Listen to people who live there

In most places with safety issues, local residents will warn you and otherwise advise you on how to conduct yourself. For example, in some cities, multiple people have told me not to take your phone out on the street for fear that someone will nab it. If you make friends in the place, you can also ask them their opinion, but because some people may have unrealistic or false impressions, it’s often best to ask multiple people if possible, to cross-reference with multiple perspectives. People naturally want to help others. Their advice is golden, because they know far more about the specifics of the place than you do as a traveler.

In my experience, many outsiders to a city have stereotyped and otherwise false views of how dangerous a city or neighborhood is. Maybe, they hear tons of horror stories on the news, not realizing that is far from the daily life of someone living in or visiting that space. That said, the best way to determine whether a place has issues with safety is to talk to people who live there. It is not perfect; residents can also have a biased conception of the place they live, but given that this is their reality, their opinions are far better than yours.

2) Notice how others conduct themselves

You should also listen to (or look at) how others conduct themselves in that space. One of the most important ways to stay safe from petty crime like theft is to not stand out. There is little you can do if you physically look different (say you are a different race than most people there), but even in such situations, walking and otherwise moving your body like you are a person who lives there, casually going about their day. Registering as someone who lives there significantly decreases the likelihood of being targeted. In addition to giving you practical actions you can take to avoid being targeted, residents’ advice often implicitly helps you blend in and seem like you belong there.

For example, while on the bus, subway, waiting at the bus stop, or walking down the street, etc., do most people around you (not counting any obvious tourists) have their phones out doing whatever? If so, you are probably safe doing the same. If not, however, then it’s probably best to keep your phone in your pocket as well.

Do people walk fast like they know where they are going (common in big cities)? Do people keep their heads down? Do people say hello to everyone they see walking down the street? I have seen urban neighborhoods with high crime adapt both extremes as a way to cope.

3) Learn to walk as if you know where you are going.

In most big cities, people walk fast and intently, so in many city environments, the best way to avoid being targeted is to look like you know where you are going. It doesn’t matter whether you actually know where you are going; simply walk as if you do. Walking fast, with intent in your step, and not like you are deciding which way to go at each intersection helps with this. In large cities like New York City, this is the default way most people move.

To walk with intent, the most important trick is to pretend like you know what you are doing and not to stop or gawk at the scenery for too long unless you absolutely need to (yes, you can still look at cool buildings and other scenery without stopping or gawking in an obvious manner). Even if you are just aimlessly wandering, set up checkpoints in your mind and walk to them. Decide you are going to walk to that corner or that store not too far away. Walk straight to it like that’s your goal, and then on your way over, pick a new one. Don’t stop and decide where to go; decide as you reach the destination, so you continue moving once you get there, even if it’s arbitrary. If you need to wait to see what is around the corner to decide, then continue moving while you are deciding what to do with the new information.

What if you realize you have been going the wrong way and need to turn around? That is the hardest thing to do when you want to look like you know where you are going, but it happens all the time when you are new to a place (even when I have lived in a city for a long time, I still get lost there). If you need to turn around, do it assertively, not like you are indecisive. That’s key. In many places, you are fine just stopping where you are, turning around, and just walking the other way. Just do it quickly and decisively with intent in your body. Once you are walking the other direction, keep walking at a brisk speed like that was the direction you were walking all along.

If you sense that you are in a significantly less safe place, you can cross the street and then start walking the opposite direction. Unless someone is specifically watching you during the couple seconds it takes to do that, then most people will not even notice that you turned around. In an extreme, worst-case scenario, the best bet would be to duck into some business, wait there for about 30 seconds to a minute (or longer if you are in real danger), and then walk out going the opposite direction. Then, anyone who saw you before will think of you as having gone into that business to buy something, and then when you come out, anyone who sees you now just sees you going about your business after visiting a store. Pretty normal.

If you need to take out your phone to determine where you are going, I find it best to keep walking while checking your phone. Be aware of your surroundings when walking with your phone out to make it look like you know where you are going but are just checking a text or something, and then put it away once you are done. This is rare, and I only need to do this when my GPS is making some kind of error, which I can check for in under a few seconds. Be aware of your surroundings and do it when someone is not near you, on the sidewalk well away from the road where someone can nab your phone as they drive by.

I wouldn’t do that for longer than a second or two, not only for fear of someone taking it, but also because it’s good to look in front of you when you walk. So, if you need more time to look at your phone’s map to reorient, it’s best to stop and go into a business where you can take your phone out for longer. Maybe a convenient store, cafe, or something like that. There, you can take the time you need to get your bearings. In an extreme scenario where you still feel threatened while in the story, I may go into a locked public restroom away from others entirely. If you walk with intent, most people will assume you were just going to that shop or cafe, not knowing you ducked into there to figure out where on earth you ended up and how to get to your destination.

4) Keep precious items near to your body and minimize how often you need to take them out.

If you can, keep precious items in one’s top pockets near one’s hips (not your butt pocket where someone can easily nap it without you noticing). If you are like me and often wear cargo shorts, in places where theft is a problem, you should not put your wallet, phone, or other valuables in the lower, cargo pockets because they are much more stealable. If you are carrying a backpack, keep it over your chest, and any purse or other bag over your shoulder or front waist, so you can keep an eye on it. Anything you are carrying behind you is easier for someone to stab open with a knife and make a run for it.

In areas where theft is a concern, I minimize the amount of valuable goods I bring. I generally always need my phone and wallet throughout the day, but I don’t generally bring my laptop, an extra camera, or other goods unless I feel like I absolutely need them for a specific activity. In some neighborhoods, these are fine, but others not. This would also apply to expensive jewelry or other wearables if I owned any, but they are not my style personally.

Further, I minimize how much I need to get out such items. For money, I often take out enough cash from my wallet to pay for things like lunch, snacks, or other daily items and keep it separately in my pocket. That way, I can pay for daily needs like public transit or food without getting out my wallet, especially in an open market or other public space. For any city that I need to swipe a special public transit card to ride the bus or subway, I also keep that card out, separate from my wallet for ease of use. Keep in your pockets other small items you may need while walking down the street, like a few tissues so that you can blow your nose without having to open your bag to find them.

5) Pro-tip: Listen to directions on your headphones.

Google Maps, for example, does walking directions. Put on headphones and turn its GPS on like you would driving directions. It will tell you when you need to turn, but to anyone else on the street, you look like you are listening to headphones. Listening to headphones actually helps you seem like someone who lives there simply going about your day. It will tell you when to turn as you walk, preventing you from having to constantly get out your phone to make sure you are going the correct direction or not miss a turn. Occasionally, you may need to double check the map if it is misfiring in some way, but that is rare, and in my experience, these checks are often brief; just checking to make sure I need to go left, right, or straight here.

Most often, I will turn on directions to where I am going when I am in a safe place before I leave, put in my headphones, and then go onto the street ready to go. You can also listen to music, a podcast, or whatever else while you walk, or be in complete silence. That’s up to you. Just make sure you are still able to hear enough to not get sneaked up on.

I hope this helps you stay safe in urban neighborhoods. Crime can be an issue in some cities around the world, but they are an overcomable one if you know what you are doing. Most cities are still worth visiting despite the low chance of crime. Most people who live there don’t experience any problems on most days, and these precautions help you make sure you are among the many there who have a wonderful day there.

The Pros and Cons of Staying in Hostels

When you are traveling the world, sometimes you have to stay in hostels. As someone who generally does not like sleeping in the same room as someone else, I find it happens a lot less than you think: in most places, there are single room hotels or Airbnbs available within my budget, but that’s not always the case. Here are the pros and cons of staying in hostels specifically for someone like me less accustomed to it and maybe a little skeptical of the whole idea:

Pros

1) Cost: Their obvious advantage is that they are cheap. I remember in New Zealand, the difference was between under USD$10 a night to $80-100 a night in many places, making it worth it. Most places have more of a middle ground, but almost everywhere the cheapest place to stay off the street itself is a hostel.

2) Meeting New People: You can meet fellow travelers. Hostels can provide a nice social setting for fellow travelers. If you read other blogs and forums from digital nomads or other travelers, meeting new people who are also traveling is the most commonly cited reason people list for staying at hostels other than the cost.

At the same time, if you mostly meet people at hostels, you are generally meeting tourists or other travelers, not locals. This can lead to a bubble. This seemed most pronounced in Nonwestern countries where I noticed many hostels would be an oasis for Westerners to mostly hang out with themselves rather than get to know the people in the culture where they were visiting. Some hostels offered “cultural experiences,” but these were artificial introductions rather than just making friends with the people in that place. I found that where you hang out is where you will meet people, so the better way to meet someone was to get an Airbnb by yourself in the part of town where tourists were less likely to gravitate. That way, those around you are mostly those from the culture you are in, so you are more likely to take the cross-cultural hurdle of talking with them rather than staying in your Western bubble.

3) Falling Asleep: I found it easier to sleep than I thought. I worried that I would not be able to fall or stay asleep given potential noise or activity by others, but this was not as big of an issue as I first expected. In some places it was an initial problem, but I was generally able to fall asleep okay, whether the light in the room was on or whether there were others in the room doing stuff as I fell asleep. Two places were an exception because of the degree of activity late at night (which I will discuss in more detail Con #4).

Cons

1) No Private Space: After many days, I wanted a quiet place to unwind in the evening. In some hostels, there was a place where I could hide out when needed, but in many, that was not possible. The constant movement of others could eat at me slowly overtime. One night was generally okay, for example, but not having the ability to be by myself overtime influenced my ability to vegetate, decompress, and otherwise be myself. I was rarely forced into an interaction I did not want but not having space dedicated to me made it more difficult to unwind. It also made more private activities that I do not want someone potentially looking over my shoulder while doing, such as checking personal finances, making personal calls, etc. more difficult.

2) Worry about Theft: Theft is a worry. A few people in the hostels I stayed report having their stuff stolen. Only a few hostels had personal lockers where you could lock your stuff, but it could not usually fit all valuables. This could range from food to precious electronic equipment, and range from theft of stuff temporarily left around to break into locked lockers. In most cases, I had a rental car, so I generally left my stuff locked in my car. That worked, but when traveling, one does not always have a rental car.

This is a probability game. Even if it’s a low probability that my stuff would get stolen, if I stayed at hostels everyday I traveled, each day it is more likely to happen. Even if there is a 1% chance of it happening on a given day, after spending 100 days in hostels, the chances of it happening to you at least once is pretty high. It only takes one moment to loose something valuable to mess with your life. Because of this reason in particular, I do not plan to stay at hostels unless I absolutely have to and preferably if I have a rental car for storage.

3) Noise: Some hostels are rather loud. This depended on the environment, but in my experience, they ranged from rather quiet and chill on the one extreme to common rooms full of talkative people (difficult if this is the only place where you can do work) to one where guests routinely partied until around 1:00 am. This could be a major problem, although even in the latter, I personally was still able to fall asleep at the end of the day.

4) Far Away Bathrooms: Surprising con, but most often you have to walk a far distance to go to the bathroom. This stinks for me since I personally wake up a few times in the middle of the night to visit the toilet.

5) Difficulty Running Electronics at Night: As a data scientist, I often run stuff on my computer overnight, and this is not possible in a hostel, unless you kept those devices in bed with you as you sleep and hoped you didn’t turnover in the night and squash it by accident or something like. This was surprisingly agonizing for me, who is accustomed to frequently running programs that can take several hours to complete.

Overall, I would say that hostels were not as awful as I expected. They are doable (best to choose one with a security guarantee such as locked boxes for your stuff), but I still only do them sparingly. I handled staying in hostels for the better part of a month and a half, but let’s just say it was not ideal and only do. If needed, I could sleep in one for a few nights here and there, but I would only do so if I had no better option.

How to Overcome the Nomad Nihilism

Traveling can encourage a certain type of nihilism. Often every few weeks (or sometimes every few days), you are in a new place. This can produce a constant sense of churn, kind of like a time loop movie, where you constantly reexperience new things and a new setting of people going about their lives. You don’t usually stay in a place long enough to experience the long-term consequences of your actions or to develop roots. Thus, like some of Phil’s benders in “Groundhog Day,” you could, in theory, live as hedonistically as you would like (as long as you do not break any laws) if you really wanted to. Pure hedonism was never really my thing, but I could understand its pull on many travelers.

Each new place starts to fit into the standard pattern of all other locations. You end up looking at people going about their lives, removed from the signals of meaning that ground most humans in their daily lives. You technically don’t need to wake up at a certain time (unless you choose to impose that on yourself), go to work at a certain time, or otherwise follow the rhythms that produce the structure for most people’s lives.

Likewise, you are not connected in the web of relationships that many encounter in their daily life. Instead, you witness an endless stream of new people you meet along the way. If you do not click with a certain person or even those in an entire community, you can simply move on to another place. This produces the advantages of flexibility. You are not stuck with the same people over and over again like how many people are forced to tolerate their neighbors for years on end. This allows you to be yourself. At the same time, though, you are presented with endless choices and often do not have to experience the social consequences of social sanctions for your actions.

All of this can give the feel of endless cycles, leading to a type of nihilism. I can understand Phil’s “whatever” attitude in Groundhog Day much better after experiencing tons of new places in rapid succession. After a while of being in new places again and again, it can feel about the same after a while. What do you want to do today? Whatever you want. Some days that is a grand adventure, but others it’s sitting on the couch and doing nothing. It’s all been done before, and any grand adventure is probably similar to ones you have already done many times.

I call nomad nihilism. It’s the dark side of flexibility. After a while, you can start to feel meh about the specifics of where you are (the new people you meet, the new sites you see, and so on) since to you, it’s all been done before.

Unlike in Groundhog Day, you are in new places, which can produce new dynamics. This only goes so far and eventually these small novelties start to compress into a singular lull. Within this, though, lies the start of the solution.

You still take some things with you, however: your memories, photographs and any other physical or written artifacts, and most importantly, any relationships you made along the way. These grounded me against the meaningless lull of novelty. Notice these are mostly the positives of the places you have been to: the people you clicked with and maybe form a lasting friendship with, not those who never clicked with; the beautiful photographs of the places you found interesting, not the ugly places or tourist traps you wouldn’t go back to again, etc. Except for memories, which are always with us no matter how harmful, you have the choice, meaning you can focus exclusively on the positives.

This produces a significantly different dynamic than regular, settled life. On the one hand, you have significantly greater control to craft the experience that works best for you. You can decide where in the world to go, what to visit in each place, and when to interact with others in a locale with less “intrusions” into your time by others than in settled life. At the same time, this means your decisions do more to craft the experience you have. That day, you can choose to be hypersocial and speak with tons of people you can, or you can choose to be a hermit talking to no one (or anywhere in between).

Over time, your choices influence your overall experience over the long-run. If you choose to focus on yourself or your work in the short term, that is often fine, but if you do that all the time, you run the risk of never finding time for those around you and creating an overall less immersive, less vibrant experience for yourself. The freedom to craft your own experience comes with more responsibility as you are often what stands in the way of living your joy.

Constantly changing environments can also help you see the arbitrary constructions of human existence. Constantly witnessing new environments with new variations of the human experiences can make you notice the parameters that form normal human affairs, whether that be a conversation or seeing how a specific community celebrates a particular holiday. This removes some of the “magic” of normal life that someone may experience if they only lived within one community. The external world losing some of its muster can make retreating into your own world more appealing.

It seemingly hyperindividualizes you. Our society glorifies being completely able to choose when and how you interact with others, and traveling the world is an ultimate manifestation of that. You both learn much more about humanity from seeing the diversity of experiences around the world, and you have the freedom to construct the experiences that you want. It enables you to see the strings that hold communities together, but such a removed perspective can also feel distancing, reducing community to the assemblage of specific factors. To work through its cons, you must figure out how to take time to engage with the communities in which you are in.

You ultimately need a balance between solitude and external. You need to explore, learn new things, and meet new people. These relationships, in particular, help center us, both who we are and how we regulate our emotions. You also need to relax and rest. Finally, creativity is crucial too: I agree with the Youtuber Sisphysus55 that art or creativity is the ultimate solution to burnout. Producing whether for others, just ourselves, serious, or whimsical helps reorient ourselves as well. I found these three to be the pillars of overcoming nihilism: relationships, rest, and creativity.

What Journeying throughout South America Taught Me about Find Meaning in Everyday Life

These are some of the lessons about life I learned during my trip in South America in 2024:

1) The Importance of Balance: I think I tried to do too much during the trip, hurting my mental health. Each day I gave myself too many items on my to-do list. This made me less in the moment, detracting from my ability to meet people and be open where I was. It also made me more stressed and irritable.

2) Always another adventure: No matter what happens, life goes on. There’s always another day, another struggle. When you travel, you don’t stay in a place long enough to really experience the benefits of community or the long-term consequences of your actions. You can keep certain positive things – like your memories, photos and most importantly, any good relationships you made along the way – but many negatives you can continue to leave behind. That person you accidentally offended because of a cross-cultural difference, you will never have to see again, for example.

This can create a type of Groundhog Day-like nihilistic feeling, if you allow it to. You are freed from certain types of consequences and can focus on those personal experiences, memories, and relationships that you do take with you. Navigating this can be very different from regular, settled life, and it took me many months to get used to that. You must create your own meaning as you go.

3) Finding Meaning: I think this trip made me think more about how I should find meaning and fulfillment in life. I learned how vacuous the typical “career life” can be, and how beautiful and fascinating other parts of the world are. At the same time, seeing more and more places took some of the novelty of adventure. It forced me to be more at peace with myself. I had to pause during the key moments and realize that I will be forever who I am and that I need to figure out how to find satisfaction in that.

Contentedness does not mean I do not have passions or strive to do new things: knowing myself, I would not feel fulfilled with stasis. Contentedness, for me at least, means that I feel fulfilled as I follow my passions: that’s how I find satisfaction each day of my life.

4) Every day of traveling won’t feel magical: Endless amazement only exists in one’s mind. Some days feel drab, tiring, or just plain annoying, and you need these days to make the wondrous ones feel magical. Happiness and satisfaction are really in your mindset. I can do an activity one day and love it, and do an activity another day and find it mediocre or even taxing, and the main difference is my attitude. Maybe the trick to finding satisfaction in life is to align one’s passions with what one is doing so that the winds feel at your sails as you do it.

5) The importance of communication: Traveling with my girlfriend, I learned that communicating your expectations is crucial. I think I overall did a bad job at this, and we had two different expectations for how we were traveling. In addition to getting on the same page at the beginning, communicating expectations is a constant, iterative process at almost every stage of travel. We constantly navigated between what I wanted and what she wanted while traveling. This was a constant dance that we had to work on together.

All this said, the most important lesson I learned is that traveling the world is amazing, and I would recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure.

Unlocking the World: Balancing Exploration and Reflection While Traveling

One lesson I have learned while traveling is that in order to learn from the world around you, you must first be open to listen, and to be open to listen, you must be comfortable with yourself.

You no matter where you are in the world, you are always yourself. People often think that when they travel, they will magically become a completely different person with a completely different set of interests, but that is never the case. You are who you are, no matter what continent you are on, and when traveling, you will have to face the same inner demons and flaws you already struggle with.

At the same time, the ability to learn from the world around you opens up new possibilities; the trick is to use them wisely. By learning about the world and engaging with others, you both encounter new rhythms that can get you out of your cycles, try on different identities that may offer innovative ways to resolve some of your inner issues, and can learn from other lifestyles and ways of thinking.

But how to best leverage these gains is easier said than done. I find the trick is to balance extrovertedly exploring and learning about wherever I am and introvertedly reflecting and processing.

The more I explore and learn, the more I get my own internal juices going. Learning and creatively are multiplicative: innovation connections produce even more innovative connections, cascading out overtime, and new thinking from the culture I am currently in will naturally spill over into innovative thinking in my personal life.

An S-Curve: Ramping up suddenly and then slowing

But such innovation grows exponentially and can thus become overwhelming. I need alone time to rest and process all of it. Like the s-curve models of the spread of diseases in populations (common on the news during the Covid pandemic), my learning at first shoots up rapidly but then slows down significantly as my brain becomes too filled with new ideas to handle new ones. That’s when I need to rest and process what I have learned so far. If I don’t, I will become tired and often cranky. After taking the time to process it all, I can go back out and learn some more.

That is how I navigate between both personal growth and learning while traveling the world. How you do it may be different based on your different personality, but I hope this provides good food for thought. When doing something as long-term intense as traveling the world, intentionally strategizing how you meet your mental needs and work on yourself while experiencing a literal world of things is important.

Everywhere You Go Is Normal: How You Can Use This to Change How You Travel

When you visit a new place in the world that you have never been to before, that place can often seem really exotic or really scary. Having never been there, we can feel an ambiguity when we think about it. Our mind sometimes casts that ambiguity into one of two extremes: the most amazing place on earth or a horrible, scary place where we will constantly have to be worried about safety concerns. Which one you pick often has to do with whether we have built positive or negative associations based on the types of stories we have heard about that place.

Psychologically, this is normal, but these initial conceptions unsurprisingly turn out to be completely wrong. You may initially see what you think you will see, but if you stay long enough or keep an open mind, you will slowly discover all the ways in which you were wrong.

For me, one of the most important lessons I learn when traveling to a new place is that this place, in all of its wonderful unusualness, is normal for the people who live there. When I visit a new part of the world, instead of thinking about how strange it is – whether strange in the exoticness or strange in the weird or scary sense – I try to think about how those who live there can consider it normal. For every place is normal for someone.

By thinking about how weird it is, I mentally separate myself from the place, but by conceiving of how this too is normal for some, I force myself to confront one of the most perplexing things about humanity and the world: how we can create so many different types of normal. Thus, I come to terms with how in its distinctiveness, it still has something major in common with the place that I call home: that it is a home for the people there.