Spendthrift Shoestring

Tel Aviv: Graffiti, Politics, Eggplants

Snowball and Squealer?

Everyone loves to play under the table, right?

A statement against the Israeli government's practice of deporting the children of foreign workers in Israel illegally.

A verbal eggplant?

What You Didn't See Doesn't Matter

This is part two in an occasional series of Unsolicited Pieces of Advice for my fellow travel bloggers.

What you didn't see doesn't matter. Stop feeling like crap because you didn't see X and Y on your recent trip to Z city. Seriously. Stop it.

Any fellow travel writer who judges you for not seeing a particular museum or eating at a particular food stall is dumb. This is not to say that you shouldn't thank people for providing you with tips, of course—more on that, perhaps, in a future Unsolicited Piece of Advice—but stop worrying about what other travel writers and other people think. Just do your thing and write about it in a compelling manner. Or enjoy yourself and take notes and don't publish anything at all.

One of my favorite travel companions hates going to any destination that requires major effort to visit, only to find that she doesn't have enough cash on hand to partake in the iconic local activities. I get that, but even here I think that whatever happens is going to be interesting and worthwhile. $500 whalewatching excursions can piss off. 

Great writing is great writing. The best travel writing—even narrowly-defined "service" writing—often isn't really about activities. Remember this, and stop fretting over whether or not you've ticked off every last item on the must-do list.

Here it is, again. What you didn't see doesn't matter.

Unsolicited Advice for my Fellow Travel Bloggers

Do more things by yourself.

Stop spending all your time with expats and other travel bloggers while you're on the road. Seriously. You don't need to be suspended in a cloud of familiarity and collegiality while you're traveling. You're not a business traveler who needs to eliminate all excess stimulation in order to get your work done.

You need to actually experience defamiliarization in one or another way in order to come up with anything interesting, and you probably need to be alone to do this. That smart expat who has been living in La Paz or Nairobi or Dhaka forever does indeed have many delicious secrets to share, but he or she also has biases that you might not be able to identify. He or she is as fallible as they come, same as you. No individual source of information is beyond reproach. You should know this.

You should also probably fail from time to time. Failure on the road is more interesting to readers than seamlessly perfect experiences. And you can't fail or even have much of an experience of any kind for that matter if you don't try to do anything at all by yourself.

Travel Writers by Type, Take Two

Another pie chart. The final 1%, omitted for whatever reason from several pie chart drafts I've worked on over the last half-hour: Republicans. Face it, Republicans do not often choose to be travel writers.

Thanks to Math Warehouse for their customizable free pie charts.