People travel for many reasons: culture immersion, research, charity, or just for fun. For the season finale, I wish to share travel trips tailored to each of these types of travelers, so that you too can travel and experience the world. Thanks for tuning in. Safe travels!
Hello everyone and welcome to the tenth episode of Baggage Allowance. This is going to be the final episode of the season. I am not sure if and when I will release another season, but unlike season one, it will probably not have a regular release schedule. If you enjoyed my podcast, please subscribe to me on Apple Podcast, Android, or Spotify so you are notified of new releases. If you are listening to episodes directly from my website, please join my email list; I added a subscription link to the main menu at the top of the site. I will only email you when a new episode is being released, and I am not using any email marketing platforms, so your information won’t be shared with any third party.
Now regarding the episode itself, I want to talk about traveling. This whole podcast was created because I wanted a way to share with others, particularly my friends, family, and fellow Americans, what I learned from years of traveling and living abroad. I also wanted to show that traveling can be so much more than just a vacation or an opportunity to get good Instagram photos. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things, but traveling is a privilege not afforded to most, so please make the most of such experiences. This episode will explore how to do that. So let’s begin.
First, begin by traveling close to home. Safety is a state of mind, which only gets developed through experience, and it is better to start building that experience at home rather than abroad. Especially if you are visiting a country that has a higher crime rate than what you are accustom to, deliberately go on a “vacation” to a place near home that has a higher and comparable crime rate. Whatever you plan to do while traveling abroad, do the same on your staycation. Use public transit, hitchhike, stay at an AirBnB, couchsurf: if you plan on doing any of these things while abroad, start by doing it at home first. In Episode 7, I had an intermission where I discussed travel safety in even more detail, so listen back on it if you haven’t already. Also go through the motions of finding places to visit, taking photos, and finding places to eat. Regarding that last point, challenge yourself to not just eat at local chains or places you are familiar with, but try to explore. If you plan on traveling with someone, travel with them locally first and learn how to negotiate and make decisions among yourselves before you are abroad.
I recommend all this not just as a means to train practical skills, but also because I want to encourage people to travel more locally. While I focused this podcast mainly on places I traveled to abroad, I have also traveled and lived all over the United States. And I think this is important. Not just in the United States, but not matter where I go, I find it remarkable how segregated societies are, and I don’t just mean by race, or religion, or any of that. That exists for sure, but there are levels of segregation far more subtle than that. A personal example was when I first came across deaf theater, a theater performance where all the actors are using sign language. It makes perfect sense when I think about it, but I didn’t know this subculture even existed until I met a deaf person, and we started talking about it. As an experiment, take a map of your hometown or local county and place a dot at every home, business, or attraction you ever visited your whole life. There are probably entire neighborhoods you never sat foot on. It’s not like there is nothing there to do. Thousands of people live, so there has to be something to do. You just never sought it out. There are places 10 miles, or even 100 yards away from where you are now that might as well be on another planet and you would never know, because you never bothered to visit the neighboring town or knock on your neighbor’s door. And if you are not comfortable doing that, then you probably won’t gain much from traveling abroad either.
So master the art of traveling locally, that is my first recommendation. Second, understand why you want to travel. The cliché reason people state for wanting to travel is they like learning about other cultures. In my observation though, people just want to travel because it is fun. They travel for the sake of traveling. And that is okay, much like how people like art for art’s sake. If that is your only reason to travel, there is no shame in accepting that. Especially if you are traveling abroad for the first time, this a necessary phase you need to pass through. Whether you go to a concert, visit museums, art galleries, amusement parts, or perhaps just marvel at the architecture or hike through the landscape, what you choose to do is down to personal preference, so I have nothing more to say. However, if you truly mean it when you say you want to understand a foreign culture, then I recommend the following strategies.
First, make a very strong effort to meet locals. I recommend using couchsurfing and AirBnB. Even if you are uncomfortable staying over at someone’s house, these websites have forums through which you could just meet a local. Your mileage may vary depending on the country and city, but give it a try. Another way to meet locals is to attend a conference or meeting of people in your profession. Yes, I know you are on vacation and work is the last thing you want to think about, but it is a lot easier to meet locals if you share something in common with them. This strategy only works if you speak the local language, or English is the language of your profession though.
Next, study the history of the country beforehand. Use this to identify important historical landmarks and be sure to include them in your trip. Once you arrive in the country, be sure to visit the history museum. Even though you read up on the country’s history beforehand, there is still much to be gained from visiting the museum. For one, it may reveal details you previous overlooked or didn’t grasp the significance. More importantly, you are giving the local country a chance to present themselves in the way they want to be seen. This can reveal important biases of the local population. I describe this in more detail in Episode 3.
Third, go where the locals go. While researching the country’s history, also study important holidays and festivals, and plan your trip to coincide with them. Preferably, pick a holiday or festival that falls outside of the main tourist season. Something else I recommend is to find out where locals leave online reviews. For example, Yelp contains restaurant reviews for foreign countries, but chances are most of the reviews were left by other tourists. Find out what app or forum locals use, and use that to decide where to eat. Finally, when abroad, do some chores. For example, if you or couchsurfing or at an AirBnB, ask your host if there is some shopping you could do for them, or if there is some other way you can help out. Not only does this give the host a good impression, but it gives you something to do that would almost certainly take you far away from tourist spots. For example, I have volunteered myself to clean a shrine, fix my host’s plumbing, buy a new saucepan, and replace the battery on a broken cellphone. These chores gave me a chance to learn about the kind of detergent, kitchen utensils, pipes, and cellphones locals used. And in these four cases, I learned some very useful information along the way. I now use hydrogen peroxide and three layer composite pipes at my house, and I use a cast iron tortilla maker and a Japanese cellphone. Furthermore, I had a chance to visit a shrine, a hardware store, a kitchen supply shop, and an electronics store. All places I would never have gone near had I just been a tourist.
Fourth, get outside the large cities, especially the capital. Capitals and large cities tend to be very different compared to the rest of the country. If something can be found in the capital and it is part of the nation’s culture, chances are there is a smaller, cheaper, less crowded version of the same in a smaller city nearby. On that note, I also recommended visiting all the cultural regions of a country, or if you don’t have time, focusing on only one cultural region. How do you find identify the different cultural regions? Look at a climate map. Climate influences culture. If you notice a country has a handful of distinct climate regions, make it a point to visit them all, because chances are those regions all have different cultures. Another way to find distinct cultural regions is to look at how the country’s borders changed over the last 500 years. Did the country (or somewhat similar predecessor) even exist at the time? Did areas break off or get annexed over the course of the last 500 years. The regions that have changed hands probably have a different culture compared to the rest of the country.
Finally, don’t always eat out. Cook food as well. And by that, I don’t just mean buy some pasta and tomato sauce. Go to the grocery store, and before buying anything yourself, see what others are buying. If you are courageous, straight up ask the shopkeeper what she plans to make for dinner, or what she had for breakfast. If you think you can handle preparing something similar, ask for her help buying the ingredients. If you are staying at an AirBnB or couchsurfing, offering to help in the kitchen is another way to go about it (and better, because you have someone to guide you).
All these tips are attempts to get you to act like a local, instead of a tourist, and in the process, hopefully allow a glimpse into the local culture. However, there is a difference between acting like a local and thinking like a local. As I explored more in Episode 5, there is more to a country’s culture than just what people eat, wear, or do. Culture is an ego, an identity, and that is a lot harder to grasp or understand in just a 2 or 3 week vacation. The best way to understand a nation’s cultural identity is to actually immigrate there. Not only does this give you years to interact with the various institutions of society, but it also puts you in a position where you are forced to integrate, or in other words, take on the identity of the local population. So while a tourist might have a wrong impression about how a culture works, and never know the better, immigrants don’t have that luxury. If they have the wrong impression about their host’s culture, they won’t be able to integrate, and that cuts them off from the rest of society. They are punished for being wrong, so they tend to have the most accurate and nuanced understanding of the culture. So if you have no interest or desire to live abroad for a year or three, your best shot in understanding cultural identity is to meet immigrants or expats. On social media sites like Facebook and Meetup, though they vary depending on the country, there are often groups built by expat communities. Join these before you arrive and see if you can join one of their meetings. Alternatively, if the country you are visiting is non-English speaking, there also tends to be language cafe groups. Join these as well. You are likely to find both recent and slightly longer resident expats attending these cafes learning the language to try and integrate. It gives you the chance to practice the local language a little as well, which can be helpful for the rest of your trip. That said though, because integration is so hard, immigrants can often be cynical, or vent their frustrations at you when you start asking about how living in xyz place is. Take with a grain of salt, but don’t discount it entirely. In the worst case, you still have a starting point to make more observations.
Now, all these tips are useful if you are interested in learning about a country’s culture in general, and these are the tips I generally follow when I travel to a new place. However, sometimes, I am traveling to learn about something specific. For example, when I was 18 years old, I moved to Finland for one year study abroad. When I left for Finland, I left with a mission. For a couple of years before that, I kept reading reports and surveys on the news about how Finland was ranked the best on a number of areas. They as a nation were some of the happiest people in the world. Their government was perceived as one of the least corrupt. Their education system ranked number one in the world. And so on. Which got me thinking, what is this country doing right, that so many other countries are not. When I left for Finland, I left with a mission to find out, and possibly bring those ideas back home with me.
And so I planned accordingly. For study abroad, I applied for a program in business, administration, and public policy, despite this having nothing to do with my major back home. I sent emails to a bunch of officials in government, and was actually invited to meet with a minister of parliament, twice. Then I contacted local schools to see if I could possible observe their teaching style. Unfortunately, because they get so many requests from actual teachers and education professionals from abroad, 18-year old me did not qualify for a tour, but I don’t regret asking. And that is my recommendation to you. If you are traveling abroad with a specific purpose in mind, don’t be afraid to request meetings with people relevant to your research. The worst that can happen is people don’t reply or say no, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the sheer number of so called busy and important people who were willing to meet me. Cast a large enough net, and you will catch at least a few.
Once you have a meeting, do your research and come prepared with interesting questions. Show that you have done your research. Doing this encourages the people you are speaking with to give detailed responses, and if you make a very good impression, special invitations or backdoor access that can help you in your research. In the case of Finland, I got a private tour of the parliament building and chance to briefly observe a committee discussing revisions on a draft of some regulation. They were speaking Finnish, so I have no idea what it was about, but it was interesting never the less. I also had a chance, in other trips to other places, to visit a leading solar research lab and on another occasion, a nano-chemical safety lab. It never hurts to ask, so by all means do so.
So far, I have provided tips for those who are traveling to understand a local culture, and for those who are traveling on a mission to learn or study something specific. The final group of travelers I want to address are those who travel for the sake of volunteerism. For example, I have a friend who has a 12 year old daughter. She had a very sheltered upbringing, so I half jokingly told her to put her daughter on a plane to London when she turns 13, in the same way I traveled abroad for the first time when I was 13 to the UK. She responded, “I would rather she travel to some other country as part of a volunteer group rather just send her on an expensive vacation.”
I understand where she is coming from, so I said nothing, but I have some very mixed opinions about volunteer tourism, and if you want to include volunteering as part of your travel, I think there are a few things you need to bear in mind. First of all, you need to ask yourself why you want to volunteer. If your primary reason for volunteering stems either from a sense of guilt or because you think volunteering would bring you some good karma, heed my advice and don’t volunteer. Many organizations who promote volunteer opportunities overseas are not doing so because they need the help. By definition, labor costs in poor regions are cheap, so why go through the effort of getting people from overseas to do work that locals are fully capable of doing themselves? They are doing it as a way of raising money. So skip the middle step, and just donate money to a reputable charity that does good work in the area. Alternatively, just buy lots of souvenirs from family owned shops. As a tourist, spending money is probably the best thing you can do, as it provides people with the means to purchase the things they are lacking, and it is done in a way that helps people maintain their pride and develop their craft. Now, having said that, there is one exception I make to the this rule. If you want to donate money to a particular charity, and you want to understand how or verify that your money is being spent, then by all means, embark on the trip. Just remember that you are playing an observer role.
Another reason why you may want to embark on volunteer tourism is for the educational experience. This is sort of what my friend was alluding to. She wanted her daughter to understand the privileges she had growing up, how others aren’t as fortunate, and how we should respect and help them if we can. These are admirable motives, but often this slips people into the realm of “poverty porn.” Poor people are not there to serve as an object lesson for rich people. And I would argue that if you truly want to understand the lives of poor people, volunteering isn’t the way to do it. There is an inherit power imbalance between the volunteer and the people being helped, and this creates a distance. For the volunteer, the people become a project, and while volunteers may catch glimpses into peoples lives, it is often from the perspective of: “This is so sad. How can people live like this? Something must be done.” That is not the same as understanding someone else. If a community is lacking something, it means the people in that community have decided to focus their efforts and energy into something else. Understanding what those priorities are and why they are the way they are, that’s what it means to truly understand someone, and it only comes after living among them. Merely observing what a community lacks from the outside and feeling guilty about it does not equate to understanding.
Once, I worked with a non-profit to bring solar energy to a rural, developing area. As far as I was concerned, how or what the community uses the electricity for was their business. They already pooled together money to buy the panels, but in classic example of putting the cart before the horse, had no idea how to install or use it. Which is where we came in. However, the organization I worked with disagreed and felt that unless the electricity was being used for necessities, we should not get involved. I could understand, if there were other more pressing priorities, but my supervisor was trying to divert resources to a bicycle trail development project, claiming that increasing tourism would benefit the community in the long run. While the community played along with his ideas, I could tell they were skeptical, and they were justified in being so. Our organization was not designed to do such projects. Furthermore, the fact that the community already invested money into solar panels was a sign to me that they already decided for themselves that this was their next priority, and I respected that. However, I came across way too many examples of people like my supervisor in several volunteer organizations. While perhaps with good intentions, they often come with a sort of arrogance, that the people they are helping lack vision and guidance which is why they are where they are, that they know what is best for the community. And unfortunately, communities that are being helped have to sort of go along with it, because otherwise they fear they won’t get the money or help that is being offered. As a result, one of the dirty little secrets about many development and aid projects, even those conducted by large reputable NGOs, is that fail. Some of it is inevitable, but a lot of it is also due to malinvestment, but because the money was spent on “work”, it is still treated as money well spent in charity statistics. This is why I recommend earlier that you travel with charities you donate to, if possible.
The alternative to this paternalistic attitude is to understand how the people you are helping live. You need to live among them as an equal to truly understand their needs and challenges. Only after that stage is it possible to truly help the community. Reputable volunteer organizations understand this. They hire locals from within the community to lead projects. Those who want to volunteer from abroad work under them, and only after a couple of years would they be ready to run projects more on their own. What I am trying to communicate by saying all this is that true volunteerism does not happen over a summer vacation. It is a career and like any career, it takes time to become truly trained. If you are interested in making this into a career, then by all means participate in these projects to see if this is the career choice for you. Then the education is worthwhile. Otherwise, if like my colleague, she wanted her daughter to understand the lifestyles of people elsewhere in the world, I would recommend just going as a tourist. Use the strategies I explained in the beginning of the episode to be among locals and understand their way of life.
Broadly speaking, I think I covered the three main reasons why people travel (assuming they have one): culture, research, and volunteering, and I think I have given sufficient advice for each kind of scenario. Before I end this final episode, I want to thank all those of you who listened to this podcast from the beginning and gave me feedback along the way. When I started, I envisioned this podcast as a way to share with others lessons I learned after years of traveling. While writing and recording episodes for the last few weeks though, I realized the limitations of this approach. For example, when speaking about tatami mats in episode 6, if you the listener never lived in a 600 sq feet well designed Japanese home, you would never be able to appreciate how spacious 600 sq feet could be made into. The divisions, egos, and identities I spoke of throughout this podcast can only be appreciated if you witnessed them firsthand. So, go. Travel the world so you can see all that I described these episodes. I hope these tips I provided in this season finale prove useful in your adventure. Safe travels. Until next time.
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