You’re Doing Travel Wrong

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Thwarted by the weather!

Ah, travel! The exhilarating experience of upending your entire life to join insufferable crowds, destroy foreign monuments, and consume bizarre foods, all at a premium cost. Sure, you make lifelong memories of standing in long ticket lines, but you always return from your vacation in need of a…vacation.

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Sale! Normally 2,000 Won – but now only 3,900!

The fact is that you’re doing travel all wrong. You could be standing in much longer lines, wearing your own smelly clothes, and paying more money. As an expert traveler (self-certified) let me educate you. (See disclaimer at end)

The first thing you’re doing wrong is staying in a hotel. Maid service, individually wrapped soaps, and a minibar minifridge? No, that won’t do. You need to be staying in Airbnb. Sure they’re destroying the local housing market and forcing out locals, but those people were going to yell at you anyway for stopping on the sidewalk to take a photo of a vintage (“distressed”) door. With an airbnb, you have no idea whether there will be any soap, you might be in a graffiti covered building, and you could get yourself and your host evicted! Ah, memories!

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Giving Thanks for Travel

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Train stations are so much cooler than airports!

Wow, I can’t help but be thankful for this amazing year. Foremost, I’m thankful it happened at all. It could have remained a dream forever. Instead, it became an actual goal and then reality.

And it could have been awful. I could have failed to learn any language. I could have gotten sick. I could have been robbed. Stranded in Italy and forced to huddle in the shade of a marble cathedral surviving only on focaccia sandwiches and Brunello di Montalcino wine.

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“Can you spare some prosciutto?”

So after 10 months of traveling, here’s what I’m most thankful for. Friends, art, and of course, languages.

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Oktoberfest!

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Need I say more…?

I went to Oktoberfest! The real one in Munich!

I cannot describe how amazing it was to actually get a table on the first day! The energy was crazy. Waiters are carrying 12 liters of beer down the aisles. There’s a brass band in the middle of the tent, and people are all standing on the benches in lederhosen and dirndls.

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Biggest darn tent I’ve ever seen…

I was there with two friends who had never been either, so it was great to see their reactions. We found a table full of Swiss men in their twenties. With lederhosen, of course.

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Back to School

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I thought long and hard about going back to school…

Monday I’m going back to school. Have pity on my teachers. I’m going to be quite the troublemaker.

Here’s what I want from the school

  1. Structure
  2. Friends
  3. Conversation – not grammar

Structure

Guess who doesn’t work very hard without a schedule? Yeah, that would be me.

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