How can someone plan a trip to make sure they fully enjoy the country? People tend to focus their preparations on logistics and on preparing lists of destinations. A more rewarding set of priorities for your research time might be learning a little bit about the culture and the place, taking time before you go there to star.
Travel is a vacation and people want to have fun, but I think many people would get more out of their travels if they spent a little more time doing some research and preparation. People tend to focus their preparations on logistics and on preparing lists of destinations. I think a more rewarding set of priorities for your research time might be learning a little bit about the culture and the place, taking time before you go there to start reading everyday and psyching yourself up to the fun of being there.
A few weeks before you leave or a few months, start reading the online edition of the English language newspaper from the country you are going to be visiting so you will know what kind of issues are on their minds and what are they talking about. How do they see Americans and what kinds of questions are they going to be asking you when you get off the plane?
I think that the value of sightseeing is over rated in general. When I talk to people after their trips about what was most rewarding, before the trip people will say, " I want to see the places. I want to get to the Taj Mahal, I want to go to the great pyramid of Egypt. I want to see the Great Wall of China, I want to see the Eiffel Tower." And they do that and it's all wonderful, but when they come back and I ask what was most rewarding about the trip it's almost never, "I saw site X, Y, or Z." It's, "I met this amazing family on the bus and we had a conversation for an hour in a café and I gained such insight and it really made me see something so differently and we had such fun." It's those human encounters and getting something out of them that make you come back from the trip saying the trip saying, "It was wonderful, it was amazing, it changed my life."
Conversations, personal encounters, times when you really felt you attained some greater level of understanding of some other person, and understanding the cultural value and belief system of a place - those are the things you can't plan, but you can be prepared for. .
I never discourage people from taking impulsive last minute trips. One thing I have seen working in the travel industry is people who tend to seize the opportunity to get on a plane tomorrow to some other country if its presents itself. If you've never traveled overseas before, if you don't have a passport, it can be very intimidating that first time. But once you get used to it, border crossing is border crossing, there is nothing fundamentally or complicated about it.. There's always going to be a way to get around in English or gesture and there is an international sort of language of tourism. You walk into hotel with a pack on your back, they show you a bed, they hold up fingers to indicate an amount of money, you pay that much money and sleep there for the night. It's not like its some fantastically difficult thing. International travel is much easier than most people think and in many ways it can be much more affordable. It can be easier than traveling around in the US which is relatively expensive and which requires a certain amount of planning and effort and travel skill. You really don't want to show up in New York having no idea where you are going to say and just wander into the first hotel. It can get pretty expensive.
So, I think people can be much more impetuous about traveling abroad, but at the same time I think people would benefit from planning further ahead. If you are going to be at one place for a month it's worth learning a little bit of the language if you are going to be able to have a minimal conversation with people at all. You may find that if you start doing some research about the place early on that it shapes your sense of where you want to go. If you start reading up about the place only at the last minute you may discover that really you would rather be flying into a different city, but it is too late to do anything about that. This is a characteristic mistake of people who buy a guide book only at the airport on their way to the plane rather than reading one at the library well in advance. It can never hurt to have some sort of background understanding of the way things work in a country before you visit.
