Food for Thought

 

Would you rather explore this Ajijic, Mexico, market or consult your smart phone?

Jonathan Look says, "Comfort is sacrifice – Ultimately, everything comes down to balance. It is impossible to enjoy the full beauty of a hike from your easy chair. You can try but you can’t get the true street food experience from your dining room table. Cruise ships require shorelines. All-inclusive resorts isolate you from the locals. A homogenized 5 Star hotel in one place is at least 80% the same as a homogenized 5 Star hotel in any other place. If you really want to see and learn about a place you probably need to give up some comfort instead of sacrificing your experience."

Look, a man trying to experience the world by living in ten different places for a year at a time, lists his thoughts about seeing the world involving sacrifice in his post entitled, "Top Five Observations from My Two Years of Minimalist Travel."  To read the rest of his observations, click here.

Frank Bruni also talked this week, in The New York Times, about how frequently travelers cocoon themselves in the comfortable familiarity of "home," even when they're thousands of miles away in an exotic locale.  With our technology, he suggests, we can insulate ourselves from everything around us.  He says:


     "I’m talking about our hard drives, our wired ways, 'the cloud' and all of that. I’m talking about our unprecedented ability to tote around and dwell in a snugly tailored reality of our own creation, a monochromatic gallery of our own curation.
     "This coddling involves more than earphones, touch pads, palm-sized screens and gigabytes of memory. It’s a function of how so many of us use this technology and how we let it use us. We tune out by tucking ourselves into virtual enclaves in which our ingrained tastes are mirrored and our established opinions reflected back at us."

To read Bruni's complete article, "Traveling Without Seeing," click here.