The way I travel

Almost everyone I meet loves to travel¹. There's a sense of adventure in embarking into the grand unknown. The feeling of putting another pin on a map that looks so small when it's hanging on your school wall, yet reveals itself as unimaginably large once you get in the air.

While we may share a love of travel, there comes a wide diversity of ways that people travel. There are the checklist aficionados that want to come back with photos in front of all the monuments. There are the shoppers, eager for an arbitrage opportunity in duty free. There are the worriers, concerned that everyone is looking to nab their passport. I imagine there are as many traveler personas as there are travelers out on the road.

After living out of a suitcase for over a year, I've kept a lot of the habits that I learned back then. This comes with strong opinions about the vibes to seek and the vibes to categorically avoid.

Seek out neighborhoods: My scouting of a new city starts with finding my favorite neighborhoods. I try to get a hotel in or around these areas to make access more convenient, or minimally give me a good destination when I'm walking around town. Once I feel comfortable in a place, it becomes a natural hopping point to adjacent neighborhoods that might have similar vibes.

I try to start with the artist or artisan communities. There's usually at least one per major city. They have interesting architecture, a good coffee scene, and sometimes a good amount of greenery. Even if you don't love hipsters they tend to cultivate a great scene. I've also had luck in finding a geographic landmark: water, a park, or a pier that don't show up on tourist lists.

Avoid shopping havens: I try to find a list of the most popular shopping areas and avoid them by default. They're usually scams (higher tourist prices) or surrounded by scams (bad food). I instead prefer to focus on one object that I love. For my girlfriend that's pottery - for me it's coffee.

Her process starts on Instagram. She looks for local artisans with small followings. She then looks to see if they have a public storefront - from there she filters based on Google photos. This led to several pottery finds in Copenhagen, Argentina, and Japan. It also occasionally connected us with the local artists that in turn led to a night out on the town.

My tastes orient more around coffee. I guide my coffee shop hunt mostly by aesthetics. As embarrassing as it is to admit, there's a high correlation between places that serve avocado toast and places that make really good coffee. It might mean I can't buy a house but I end up finding some chic places.[^4]

Go early to can't-miss famous areas: If I get a strong recommendation for a local monument², I try to go as early as I can when it opens. Seeing the sunrise is nice by itself and even better when you are somewhere uniquely beautiful. But generally speaking I would just as well avoid the famous areas entirely. There's usually too much tourist infrastructure around you to really focus on the experience. Finding a niche, non-crowded area where people are enjoying their daily routine has always been more rewarding for me.

The hard thing in this advice is knowing who to trust. What separates a can't-miss area from a must-miss area? When we were in Kyoto, we ended up getting breakfast one morning in a 5 star hotel.³ The general manager came over and we got chatting about his moving from Austria. He mentioned the Sanjūsangen-dō as one of his favorite spots. It ended up being one of our favorites too. I think the key is asking locals a relatively targeted question that removes the ambiguity. There's no way they can know what places will resonate with you. But they probably know the places that check some boxes for them.

In my case: I want to know their favorite minimally-crowded spot that acts as a good personification of their city.

Adopt the customs: There's no mistaking me for a local in most of the places that I visit. But there are some clear cultural giveaways that show you just got off the plane, versus conceivably could be living there for a few months. That's anything from the side of the street people walk, to the slang in initial greetings, to how people queue for bus stops. I try to observe these early and adopt them as my own.

Find some tastemakers: When eating out my ideal balance is delicious food, simple ingredients, and recommendations by the local scene of foodies. If someone seems cool (waiter, store owner, etc) ask them what's cool to do around the area. I'm always surprised at the authenticity of their answers. They've often recommended places that speak no English⁴ and I never would have found on my own.

I've also found menus are a pretty good heuristic about the clientele that places are trying to attract. If there are signs outside that advertise in bold English lettering, how many locals are really trying to eat there? Some countries also have their own domestic Yelp with more accurate reviews. Tabelog and LaFourchette are the two that I've used before. Most other countries have just converged to Google Maps. You can also scan through for reviews that are originally in the language of origin (which probably means more local people actually eat there too).

Offer to use the language: As someone who's less than gifted at learning new languages, I'm certainly not aiming to speak like a native when I travel. The extent of my knowledge is typically hello, please, thank you, and excuse me.

Realistically that doesn't get you very far. So I try to always come equipped with some technique to translate into the local language: either a friend, Google Translate, or increasingly ChatGPT Voice Mode. Even for the people that do speak English to some degree, they've always appreciated me making an effort to meet them on their terms and make it an easier process to communicate. That way - even if they pick English they're doing so with full freedom to still speak their language if they want to switch back.

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My goal (in general) with traveling is to see life through a local's eyes. Or at least the eyes of someone who's moved there temporarily for work. If I don't do something in San Francisco I try to avoid those habits when I'm traveling as well. If this characterization of travel resonates with you, there's a good chance you'll enjoy the recommendations I make on this blog.

We've loved cities that most people hate by answering the question why do the people that live here love living here. That's rarely the tourist attractions. They're more likely to be parks, coffee shops, restaurants, adventures out of the city center, public transit, or vibrant people. If you find the answer to this question I believe you'll likely learn to love your destination too.

Footnotes

1. So much so that I remember it being a meme on the dating apps. Loving fish, The Office, and traveling tend to go together. ↩

2. Meiji shrine in Japan is actually solid, for example. ↩

3. This violated my usual policy of no meals in a chain. But the glowing reviews and unassuming exterior overcame my objections. ↩

4. Which, as you can likely pick up by now, I love. ↩