Hello beautiful folks,
The most useful thing travel ever taught me had nothing to do with culture or food or history. It was that I am, in a surprising number of situations, completely useless.
I speak one language. I have deeply specific habits about coffee. I get stressed when I don't know where I am sleeping. All of this becomes very obvious very fast when you are in a city where nobody speaks your language and the maps app has confidently sent you to a parking lot.
People talk about travel as though it's primarily about broadening your horizons. And it does do that. But the mechanism is a bit more uncomfortable than the brochure suggests. What it mostly does is strip away your usual competence. You can't read the menus. You don't know the social norms. You are dependent on strangers in ways you haven't been since childhood. That's where the actual learning happens. Not in the highlights.
Travel doesn't teach you about other cultures as much as it teaches you about your own assumptions. About how much of what feels like just "how things are" is actually just "how things are where you are from."
That's worth being a little uncomfortable for.
