I have been told by countless people over the course of my life that I should start a blog. I am keenly aware that this is not a compliment. It is code for “Please stop talking to me and go find some other outlet for your annoying thoughts.” Still, I have always wanted to have a blog where I talk about things that interest me, but I never thought I had anything so valuable to say that necessitated a full blog. This changed when I started traveling extensively while working remotely, generally doing long stays that allow me to dive deep into the places I visit.

 

This is a travel blog, but I think of it less as a travel blog than as a compendium of things that I like, find interesting, and wish to point out and recommend, organized by place, language, or nationality. As for me, I largely define myself by my interests, so you can learn a lot about me by reading the blog. It is highly personal despite being largely impersonal, and there’s nothing else you need to know about me. Still, I think some context for the blog will be useful.  

 

I always hated traveling growing up, and my parents never tire of saying, “Isn’t it crazy that the person who used to hate traveling now spends his life traveling the world?” This question fails to recognize that a) I hated my childhood in its entirety and travel was merely one aspect of that, and b) I still don’t really like traveling all that much. Though I’m happier having traveled somewhere than not having traveled there, I find short trips very unsatisfying and frustrating for my completionist personality type. I want the time to really get to know places, understand their context, and develop an emotional connection with them. I try to immerse myself in each place I visit and I treat it like it’s the most important place in the world. Writing this blog helps me do that.

 

I don’t want to define my travel and life preferences too explicitly, partly because they are ever evolving and partly because I’m seemingly incapable of talking about myself without sounding like a pretentious asshole, but there are a few constants that I feel comfortable expressing, primarily as disclaimers:

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1. A good chunk of my travel time is spent walking semi-randomly around old neighborhoods. Though people frequently express jealousy over my lifestyle, when people are forced to travel with me, my way, they seem to strongly dislike it. When I’m forced to travel with other people, their way, I’m mostly just confused over why anybody would spend their limited time and money on their silly vacations, and I feel the same way when people tell me about their trips. I don’t understand the mainstream conception of travel. 
 

2. I don’t engage in most conventional leisure tourism activities, and I don’t travel just to get nice views or to be in a beautiful environment, though it’s a big plus when that does happen.
 

3. I travel to learn, and to have fun, but I don’t have that much fun unless I’m learning and I don’t learn very well unless I’m having fun. Something like that. More than any of that, though, I really travel to find, or rather feel, the abstract, intangible, and possibly imaginary emotional texture of a place. This isn’t something I can explain, nor is it something I had a concept of until recently. That pursuit, though, is the most enjoyable and educational experience of them all, and I suppose it is my way of connecting with the world. 

3a) A good amount of my pleasure in life comes from expanding and filling in my own mental map of the world (mostly figurative but partly literal in the case of travel) and I largely dislike activities unrelated to the grand mapping project of life. This informs how I make most decisions, the most important perhaps being which restaurants to go to and what to order.
 

4. Every place is its own distinctive world: some combination of intellectual, literary, culinary, musical, sonic, linguistic, spiritual, philosophical, visual, architectural, geographic, botanic, olfactory, and cinematic worlds, and etc, brought together by different cultural and historical currents, and that’s all only a small part of the story of any given place. That such worlds of worlds actually exist, and the planet is full of them, seems underappreciated. Few people have the time or background knowledge to give anything more than a very superficial exploration of any of these while traveling, and I won’t claim to either. Despite my ambitions, I’m quite mediocre. Nonetheless, attempting to get lost in these worlds, however briefly and incompletely, is incredibly stimulating and meaningful for me. I like cities more than most people because they contain more worlds to get lost in, but on a short trip less can be more.

4a) I’m against self-analysis, but it seems likely that I travel so much because I find whatever worlds I’m inhabiting when not traveling to be insufferable, and I find inhabiting any world for too long to be intolerable.  Also, I can see some continuity when looking at my life through the lens of worlds. Before traveling I was only ever interested in various arts. As a child my only interest in life was video games (now I hate them and think they’re terrible, a sad but unfortunately addictive imitation of better worlds). As a young adult my only interests, other than women who weren’t interested in me, were movies and music. Individual works of these arts (or anti-art, as I was into as a kid) are worlds of their own, making up the larger worlds of bodies of work, genres and mediums. I think the way I approach travel is pretty similar to the way I approached cinema and music when I was younger, and I see places as the greatest of all works of art. Pursuing places is infinitely more satisfying than exclusively pursuing specific arts because I consequently find much of the world to be interesting and valuable, as opposed to my life’s meaning being found only in a small sliver of artistic creations. I’m a much happier person after starting to travel, and I like people much more now too, as I recognize that people are parts of places, which at the very least makes them somewhat interesting and amusing.

 

5. I’m actually a very fun and happy person! [Though my wife’s response to this statement was “fun is subjective.”]

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I hope this provides some understanding for my recommendations. Even though my interests, tastes, preferences, and priorities are likely very different from most readers, I know there’s something in my guides for everyone and that anybody with decent taste will get a lot out of this blog. I also know that enthusiasm, like all emotions, is contagious. Moreover, I suspect there are others out there who may share aspects of my psychological profile but haven’t yet been able to channel that into an appreciation of the world, and I hope to encourage them.

 

I genuinely love the places that I visit and I want to promote them in all of their glory (though I’m not sure I do a good job of that). I get sad when people tell me about their travels and they sound lame and don’t capture what makes places unique and special. I hope I can provide accessible guides that showcase the specificity of each place. If nothing else, as a life goal I wish to champion specificity over the tyranny of the generic. 

 

Lastly, traveling has been a journey of discovering new interests (including travel itself) and taking existing interests in totally new directions they wouldn’t otherwise have gone. I hope you enjoy this blog and use it to discover and further develop interests of your own. After all, that is the point of travel… right? 

 

I do have much more to say, but this has gone on long enough, and as one of my favorite film industry expressions goes, films are never finished, they are only abandoned.

 

- Sam