Beyond your peripheral vision.

There is a wild, wondrous world out there waiting to be explored, but don’t be surprised once you get there that it’s all just more buildings and food. You can spend thousands of dollars to fly halfway around the world, only to realize that it’s all the same everywhere you go. Then you take a couple pictures with the Instamatic and head home and wonder what the point of it all was. You could easily save money by downloading a copy of Google Earth. That is why I highly insist upon talking to the locals. It’s really the only identifiable difference between ugly American tourism and international cosmopolitanism. There are beautiful vistas that everyone should be required by law to see, but I get bored with vistas pretty quickly. I need something to engage myself, and talking with the locals is the best way to really imbibe a location. They can point you toward the out-of-the-way restaurant where they don’t charge you three times the price for reheated Spaghetti-Os, or they can color the locale with their own brand of crazy. I can barely remember most of what was in the Louvre, but I can describe in intimate detail the odd stench of that weird, shirtless Italian hobo outside of Florence. Ah, memories.