studentsineurope

Five Traveling Tips of Unparalleled Wisdom

Learn from my mistakes, because I’ve certainly made enough of them.  Here are five random pieces of advice, learned mostly the hard way.

1)      Take anyone’s advice with a grain of salt: Including mine.  Suggestions from other people on where to go and what to see are a valuable source of information with a huge caveat.  For one, each person has a unique idea of what is worthwhile and what should be avoided.  For another, unanticipated, circumstantial events that happen during a trip – such as getting robbed or meeting someone especially cool (hopefully not in the same instance) – can completely alter a person’s perception of a place.  These incidents are often random and have little to do with the specific locale in which they take place.  They’re factors of chance – which is, after all, the source of most adventures, good and bad.

Don't let Lonely Planet tell you where to go! They just don't want to get sued.

2)      What matters is who you’re with, not where you are: My most memorable trips have been with wonderful people to mediocre places, and my most disastrous have taken place in incredible settings with individuals with whom my relationship ranged from indifferent to hostile.  The financial and chronological limitations of travel usually force you to pick and choose destinations, so if you’re ever facing a dilemma between going to one place and to another, I firmly believe the quality of travel buddies trumps the quality of a place.

3)      The best things in life are free: Museum- and monument-hopping – to the exclusion of all other activity – is the worst way to experience a place.  It’s also expensive.  Maybe I’m alone in this opinion, but a lot of memorials and palaces and museums and the like are staid, static places with little relevance to the local culture.  The Palace of Versailles is, sure, beautiful and magnificent, but it’s so far removed from modern-day France that I question the value of going there (and between admission and a ticket out there, it’s not cheap.)  Moreover, I question how much it really tells you about the history it embodies and the culture that lives today.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m fascinated by history and think history-based tourism is completely valid.  But I think it’s more worthwhile to base your experience not so much on “sightseeing” per se but on drinking and eating (which can but doesn’t have to be expensive), lounging in parks, riding the city bus from one end of town to the other, talking to (bothering) locals, and the ever-popular “walking around looking at stuff.”  Just try to strike a balance between going from place to place in the guidebook and laying back and absorbing the local color.

4)      Avoid any restaurant with multilingual menus: You know what I’m talking about.  A laminated menu in four different languages and a middle-aged mustachioed man in a bad suit outside trying to persuade you to eat there.  Even without the guy with the moustache, these places should be avoided.  Almost invariably, they serve subpar food at an inflated price.  There are exceptions to this rule.  For example, if the English translation is so hopelessly bad (“I’ll have the ‘Globes of Meat to the Happy Fun Sauce’”) that you can’t even make sense of it, it might be a safe bet.  A corollary would be that if the number of tourists exceeds the number of locals in a given establishment, it should probably be avoided too.

5)      If someone tells you not to go somewhere, go there: Your acceptance of this rule will inevitably depend on your comfort level with venturing off the beaten path.  In my personal experience, every place I’ve been sternly told not to visit (whether from a guide book or from a person) has been not only perfectly safe but also eminently worthwhile.  Sometimes people will genuinely express legitimate caution about a certain neighborhood, city, etc., but many times this kind of advice comes from ill-informed, middle-class suspicious about working class communities.  Despite advice to the contrary, I once paid a visit to one of London’s rougher, “don’t go there” neighborhoods when I was 18, clueless, thoroughly suburbanized, and by myself, and nothing happened.  This was during the day.  I don’t know about nighttime, and if you’re going to venture into someplace with a reputation for danger, I’d caution against a visit after-dark.  But my little side trip was interesting, eye-opening, and just risky enough to be exciting without being reckless.