Travel Addicts/Advice Thread

Sundry Chitchat
3859

I’ve filed two claims with travel insurance. Once when I got stranded on an island in Thailand due to an out of season typhoon and missed an expensive flight to Nepal + a few nights of hotels. I was taken off the island by a Thai military ship. Obviously I didn’t get a receipt or anything and they wouldn’t pay out because I didn’t have proof, and me taking photos and documenting the whole thing wasn’t good enough.

And then when I got my camera stolen I couldn’t get paid out bc I bought it off Craigslist and didn’t have enough proof of how much I paid for it.

Now I just buy travel medical insurance plus the protections on my CC.

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3860

I’ve read about some frightening stories recently from acquaintances where now I am looking into whether Medjet is worth purchasing for trips.

3861

Damn what happened to these people where they needed to be evacuated by air?

3862

One fell off a camel in the Middle East. Had emergency neck surgery in-country. Health went severely down hill after the surgery and the family - on the advice of a doctor at the in-country hospital! - scrambled for a medical evacuation that was incredibly stressful and not a pleasant experience. He sadly passed away after a couple-week stay in the ICU in the US.

That one I personally knew through a grade school friend. Another I think I may have recently read on a FB travel group. I don’t remember the details but someone needed emergency shoulder surgery and he it done in some random local hospital abroad and was in tremendous pain post-surgery. A lot of the responses spoke about Medjet.

3863

Yikes, the camel one sounds especially freakish. I’ve never met anyone who has a medjet plan, it does seem on the very risk averse side, but I guess you never know.

3864

My luggage didn’t make it on the new flights. Apparently it’s still in NY which is weird because the Delta guy who rearranged my now one stop elsewhere new flights insisted profusely that it wouldn’t be a problem redirecting my luggage

3865

Maybe he meant it wasn’t a problem for him.

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3866
3867

That article is pretentious dreck.

Who says travel has to be life-changing to be enjoyable? Sometimes you just want to go someplace different and see what happens. If you change, that’s great. If you don’t then that’s fine too. What matters is that you enjoyed your time and weren’t an asshole.

The issue with travel for some is that they go to places because they feel an external need to do so rather than being motivated from within. Their neighbor goes to Italy and there’s a bunch of FOMO and some jealousy that they didn’t go yet. So, they go and feel that outside pressure to do things that their friends think are cool so they can tell people about doing it rather than going to a place because they want to go there for themselves. Or they see photos from IG from some travel vlogger and want to get the same photos only with them in it for that sweet dopamine hit from all the likes and comments about how amazing they look.

Clearly, the dumbass writer felt the need to go to Abu Dhabi (fucking why?) to see a falcon hospital (again, fucking why?). Because she made a stupid decision travelling likely based on external pressure from colleagues and friends rather than being motivated by her own wishes, it is therefore bad for others to travel. I got the same feeling reading this as I do reading a movie review by Armond White.

I’m going to Armenia and Georgia in about a week or so. When I tell people that, their response is, “Really? Why?”. It’s not jealousy or envy or anything like that. When my answer is something like, “I don’t know. Looks like it could be fun.”, they’re left unfulfilled but not without the truth. I have a general idea on what to expect but nothing specific. I probably won’t see anything life-changing in either country. But I’m sure that I’ll have a good time.

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3868

There’s lots of articles out there that take the rough form of “I did X terribly so X sucks”.

I guess there’s probably something to be learned from reading that article, like don’t expect travel to be some magic elixir that will make you a happy person or make your marital problems go away. Don’t do it because you think it makes you stand out in a crowd.

Oh, also I do think there’s a lot to be said for learning to enjoy the place you live on a day to day basis instead of grinding out a miserable ABC life at home pining for a chance to hop on a plane to go somewhere far away.

3869

As mos says, you could plug any # of things in for the word “travel” and do the same article.

People buy Louis Vuitton bags just to post them on IG or make sure they’re seen as they go outside. People spend their lives miserable looking forward to the next Louis Vuitton bag, etc. i.e. Louis Vuitton bags are terrible.

That being said, there may be some truth to the article for much of the population (as well as the author). As Bob said, the reaction to visiting Armenia/Georgia is usually “but why?”. Same thing when I told people I’m visiting Poland. The fact that you can’t see the value in visiting these countries signifies that maybe you shouldn’t travel.

I’m sure many of us have funny stories about travel companions along the way.

-Went to the Louvre with a group and one of the guys in the group would just speed walk past almost everything and then find a seat at the end of that section and wait on the rest of us.
-In a similar vein, here in Poland we were in a museum and there was a group of (smelly obv) adolescents visiting. One of the boys had his smart phone out and was recording every single item. He wasn’t even really looking at them himself. Also, the recording was done so quickly that the video itself would not even have been watchable later on.
-Visited Italy with my brother and on the first day we arrived a bit late and only had 2 hours of daylight, so we were gonna do a walk through some of the top highlights of the city. My brother was far more interested in which little shops had the best magnets so that he could buy a bunch for people back home. My wife and I were like wtf, we’re standing in front of Trevi Fountain and he’s over there in front of a magnet stand.

And then there are several more stories that revolve around the same themes:
-The person who wants to hit all the main sites, but just snaps a quick pic/story and then leaves right away.
-The person that complains that everything isn’t the same as it is in America (hotel didn’t have AC, drinks don’t have ice, Venice is way too touristy (it honestly wasn’t even that full when we went))

I wish this were an exaggeration, but I swear it’s not. In Puerto Vallarta, every single time we were out walking and passed a group of 3+ middle aged white women and we could catch a fragment of what they were saying it was always “I don’t like…”, “It’s not like this back home…”, etc. It happened about a dozen times.

Anyway, different people travel for different things, and I’m starting to sound like the pretentious travel writer. If you do travel a different way and find value in it, great! As others alluded to, really it just boils down to making sure you’re doing it for the right reasons, but honestly there are myriad things in life that are done just to escape the drudgery of life or to stand out, that maybe we’re not doing “correctly” or whatever.

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3870

That article is unreadable. Terrible.

3871

Also using examples from centuries or millennia ago to justify his POV. Travel’s changed so much just in the past decade or 2 that it’s a completely different experience.

3872

If you want to make a case against travel, try doing it with two young kids. The case basically makes itself.

Honestly, it’s not that bad. It’s just that younger kids add a massive stressor to any trip as the number of things that could go wrong skyrockets. It’s still fun, but definitely not quite as relaxing as pre-kid travel. I think when they’re a couple of years older, things will improve substantially.

3873

The author is an autist.

3874

Tokyo was amazing. The USA feels like a third world country compared to Asia.

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3875

More like a professional troll. The Armond White of The New Yorker.

3876

It feels bad to ad hominen this, but the author seems like a bit of a weirdo (no kink shaming).

I’m sure she’s a competent academic, but not necessarily someone that I’m looking for life advice from. That may make me an asshole, I don’t know.

Perhaps more fairly, her Wikipedia page describes her area of research as “aspiration” (“a theory about the process of changes in an individual’s values”). She spends her entire professional life navel gazing about Deep Thoughts regarding personal motivations and interpreting everything from the perspective of what personal values motivate decisions and actions. I would argue that examining vacations through a lens of deep philosphical examination is self defeating. Nothing destroys fun as much as stopping to consider if your TRULY having fun, you know, from the perspective of the teachings of Socrates.

3877

Staying in Poznan, Poland for a week so decided to do a Berlin day trip since the train isn’t too long, but man, Berlin seems like a difficult city for a 7 hour trip.

In Paris or Rome you could do a 3-4 walk and knock out a ton of sick sights and feel like you accomplished something, but Berlin is a tough nut to crack. It feels like there’s a ton to be discovered, but you really have to put in the time to find it. We’re headed back to Poznan and it kinda feels like we didn’t actually “do” anything in Berlin even tho we walked a ton, biked a lot, spent 2 hrs at the Terror Museum, etc.

Btw, Poznan seems pretty underrated as a Polish city. I’m surprised it doesn’t get mentioned among the top 2-3 cities in Poland.

Also wtf is the deal with most places being cash only in Berlin? Pretty odd for this day and age and I wasn’t gonna withdraw Euros for a half day trip.

3878

A friend just came back from a work trip to Duesseldorf and he was surprised at how many places only took cash. And this was also in a whole area built for international trade shows.

Is this a thing in most of Germany? Maybe @GermanGuy can shed some light.