Category Archives: Travel

Teaching Abroad: A Great Way To Travel

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It’s a fact that travel dreams begin to intensify when summer is around the corner. For me and most other inveterate travelers I know, every fiber is starting to vibrate with an anxious need to hatch a plan pack a bag, and head off to far-flung places. The passport sings to us, asking to be paroled out of the drawer it’s been kept in for months. The question is, where and how? Money is tight, and gas prices are pushing plane fares upward. There are still great deals to be found, of course, but this summer it’s especially important to find ways to supplement income during the travels.

Teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) can be a great way to meet people and get steady pay. Tutoring locals interested in gaining a better grasp of the most commonly used language in the world can lead to great friendships, not just a few more Euros or Yuan. Often the job comes with low pay but great opportunities to experience a culture, travel widely, and meet some fascinating people.

Your chances of obtaining a decent ESL summer teaching gig are good in Asia. China is hungry for teachers to instruct adults. Their exploding economy means many professionals are looking to acquire a stronger command of English in order to be more competitive in the global marketplace. Japan, Thailand, and Korea have a vibrant market also despite less powerful economies.

The garden spots of Europe, however, are a tougher gig to land. Thriving Prague is a hot ticket. Gorgeous, cheap, and fun, the historic city is inundated with American, British and Australian college students eager to spend the summer tutoring by day and living it up at night. Dozens of private schools cater to the ever-more-Western business set looking to bolster their English skills. More easy-to-land opportunities can be found in the less-glamorous Polish and Russian cities.

If you’re on the search for ESL opportunities abroad, or have done it and want to share your insights and advice, please leave a comment!

Journaling on the Road

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Let’s face it, finding time and discipline to write well on the road can be really, really tough. Traveling takes a lot of mental stamina. At the end of a long day, once you’ve found a dinner and settled into the hostel, the last thing you have the mental juice for is thoughtful writing about the day’s events. At that point, your brain doesn’t want to process or reflect. It wants to rest. It’s checked out for the night.

But I try to force myself to journal every night on my travels. I’ve got bags full of bits and pieces from my travels sitting in my closet, but the most important physical souvenirs are the small, leather-bound journals that gather dust on a bookshelf. The journals—weathered and worn—contain the thoughts and impressions of places and experiences recorded in the moment. Some entries are shallow and quickly scribbled; some are well-thought out and insightful.

Most travelers will tell you the same thing; their journals are frayed little time capsules of emotions and experiences they wouldn’t part with for the world. Sometimes they’re written on a rickety milk run train in the countryside, sometimes they’re written while perched on a rock high in the Alps while cowbells jangle in the distance. Sometimes the entries are well-crafted insights inspired while sitting in a soaring cathedral during evensong; other times they’re scribbled late at night while the eyelids are forcing themselves closed and the synapses are shot.

It takes discipline to keep up a journal on the road, but it’s well worth it. We’ll return to the smudged pages at some point in the future and be reminded of a vivid memory, surprising impression, or fleeting thought. And we’ll be glad we had the discipline to stop and record it, even when the train ride was bumpy and the eye lids were heavy.

Pick up that pen, open the book and record a memory to cherish.

The What-ness, part 2: Choose what to lose

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When you’re trying to write about your experience of a place, whether for yourself or an audience, it’s tempting to adopt the narrative form we were taught in school. After all, it was drilled into us for years, over and over again. Therefore it’s no surprise that when you open many a travel journal or travelogue you’ll often see rote accounts of trips. Many of them read like a bureaucrat’s report to the head office. It’s death by a thousand details.

The point is, rote accounts won’t achieve what you want to achieve: capturing the fundamental “what-ness” of a place. As in, the “what-ness” of a place or feeling; the core essence of it. Readers from last week will recognize the term from my old philosophy professor (actually, I don’t think it’s a term).

If you want to transcend this and capture the “what-ness” of a place or experience, ditch the narrative and narrow your focus. In other words, choose what to lose. This is really a matter of self-restraint and decisiveness.

For example, lose the superfluous stuff like the plane’s arrival, the ride from the airport, and the reviews of the food you ate. Lose the comments on prices. Lose the talk of “quaintness” and “idyllic”. We already know certain places are idyllic and quaint. Other places are dreary or foggy or crowded. These words give us nothing.

Focus instead on the conversation you had with a lifelong local. He likely imbued the place a more human dimension or gave you a clearer historical perspective. Pick out a few key moments that really crystallized the personality of the place. Record the thoughts and impressions with words that pop; use words that render the place or experience in clear tones.

It’s challenging; I face this problem in writing my new novel. It’s easy to cram in mundane and blandly written details or clichés as I describe the book’s foreign settings. Instead, I strive to pinpoint something that gives meaning and emotional heft, and then try to render it in a multidimensional way that reaches through the page and pulls the reader in.

So, if you’re struggling to capture something special for your journal or for an audience, forget what you’ve learned. Choose what to lose. Figure out what’s meaningful and breathe life into it using words that sing.

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Comb through your memories and pick a few the most vivid experiences that truly embody or illustrate the experience or place. Expand on those.

There are two reasons why people write about their travel. The first is to capture a sense of place in their own private journal, in order to document the experienced of a place, and return there any time they crack the book open in the future. The second is for others’ consumption. Regardless, the each writer faces the same task: How to give a richer portrait of the place anf the experience of being there, and avoid using tired clichés?

It’s so easy and so tempting to spout out flat, tired fluff about “quaint” villages, “charming” towns, and “idyllic” beaches. You don’t want to sounds like a glossy brochures. Those are fine adjectives (and I use them from time to time) but they’re really overused, and thus lose their impact.

Plus, clichés paint only a two-dimensional portrait. Good travel writing is kind of like creating a personality profile of a place; to give the reader a more three-dimensional feel for the place. In other words, pulling in sensory data is really important to draw the reader into the location emotionally.

Credit card and phone fees — wasteful ways to blow a hole in your budget

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Savvy travelers probably know these things, but I know some who are still behind the curve and going abroad soon. So here’s an update: Though many report having no problems at all using their US mag-stripe cards and ordinary ATM cards abroad, make sure your credit or debit card has a smart chip. The global standard is “chip and PIN” technology, meaning you’ll need to enter a PIN after the terminal reads the card’s chip. Call your credit card company and ask for a new card with a smart chip for the “chip and signature” option. Most cards without the chip will still work sans-PIN at most automated kiosks though, since a signature is generally not needed for purchases under $50.

Another thing to keep in mind when pulling out the plastic abroad: When in doubt, go with the debit card. Though your bank likely charges a currency conversion fee in transactions abroad, credit card fees are usually almost twice as high as debit card transaction fees. Capital One does not charge foreign transaction fees at all, so it may be worth getting one just for your travel use. If you want other card options, the helpful site NerdWallet.com has a list of cards that don’t charge them either.

Roaming charges for calls can be another “under the radar”-type budget buster. Smartphone users can rack up big roaming fees unless they remember to switch on the device’s Airplane Mode and Wi-Fi when boarding the flight to a far-off place. Also remember to switch off the cellular mode.

Data usage costs more money overseas, but the International Data Plans from your provider are rarely the best option anyway; use Skype or Truphone instead (I’m a big fan of Skype) and, with a decent Wi-Fi signal, you can make international calls for dirt cheap. Estimate how much usage you’ll need. There is the ever-handy pay-as-you-go option or a monthly, flat-fee plan that allows unlimited calls in certain countries.

Alternatively, Facebook’s Vonage Mobile app enables globetrotters to make free international calls over Wi-Fi to Facebook friends who also download the app. If caller and recipient have iPhones, FaceTime is a great deal with one flat fee.

Now go have some fun!

The What-ness of Travel

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My college philosophy professor was fond of the term “what-ness.” As in, the “what-ness” of a place or feeling. Meaning, the core essence of it. Being a callow young man, at first I rolled my eyes and thought, “He’s nuts. That’s not even a word!”

But in time I became a fan of the concept, because it was really the perfect way to approach description. Now, as a professional writer, the concept is at the heart of my daily work. As I write my new novel—the plot of which involves a travel writer gallivanting through several countries—I’m well aware of the importance of capturing the soul of the locations. I stop myself from reaching for the same old clichés and hackneyed phrases and focus on the “what-ness”.

Just as my old professor taught me to.

The challenge is straight forward, but not easy. Our mandate is to render the location in vivid detail using all the sensory data we can muster.

The what-ness is comprised of the facets that add up to the whole impression. The good news is there’s no secret formula to reach the what-ness. The tools needed to render these places in almost-flesh-and-blood are in already us. They’re all around us, and they’re free.

Just focus on the sensory data.

For example, does the location of the given scene have a particular smell, perhaps giving clues to the dominant agricultural or commercial activity of the neighborhood? Or a noise that’s indicative of the place’s character? What are the visuals of the place—are the buildings fairly humdrum or are they freshly coated in an array of pastels? How are the people dressed? Do you dodge well-dressed professionals striding along, absorbed in their own cares? Or do you pass under lines of drying laundry hung from lines suspended from apartment balconies while grandmothers lean out open windows chatting with their neighbors?

These are just a few examples to give a sense of what I mean.

In future posts I’ll be expanding on ways to imbue these places with the magic necessary to touch the reader’s senses and emotions. By doing so, you are not just presenting the reader with a laundry list of facts; you are leading them to their own satisfying discovery of the “what-ness”.

The challenge is straight forward, but not easy.

I know, it’s tempting to try to bottle the soul of an entire city and give it to your audience to feast on. The instinct is noble but the end result usually does a profound disservice to the city itself. Such attempts will more than likely lead to a watering down of the place you’re trying to describe. And no place deserves a shallow generalization.

More importantly, such an attempt often does profound disservice to the reader. The reader has come to your words trusting your experience. They come for a taste of a place they’ve never been before—or at least a sample of a neighborhood they didn’t have the chance to get to know on their last visit.