There is a certain feeling when traveling that is impossible to prepare for. You can buy tickets, read guidebooks, reach out to friends of friends, but upon arriving, you will nonetheless get the sense that things are different here.
Foreign language on the street is an obvious marker. Clothing is another. In Dubai, in the middle of the most modern mall, a man will walk by in a flowing, white kandura with a ghutra and iqal atop his head, looking like he has just stepped out of a Thesiger story. In Bishkek, the distinct, guttural vowels common to Turkic languages mingle with Russian consonant clusters.
The differences extend beyond just how people speak and what they wear. Who is in charge - the car or the pedestrian? Are the streets mixed-gender, mainly male, or filled with children? Is it a cafe culture, where folks pass the day looking out on the street with a coffee in hand, or a beer, or nothing at all? How loud is it? Do people speak softly, or do they gesticulate and shout to overcome the cacophonous maelstrom around them? Is authority feared, respected, or scoffed at?
This dissonance from normal life is expected, of course. The strange feeling you can't prepare for isn't that things are different from home. Rather, it is that the strangeness slowly disappears. You may not speak the language, but you quickly notice how people greet each other. Paying for a drink at a roadside stall, you will have your first short conversation in a little-spoken language where no English is attempted: "hello? yes, carbonated water, please. thank you, brother." The numbers will come quickly as you learn to pay, as will the greetings.
The same is true beyond language. The view will shift from, how unusual to see these long, white robes, to wondering why the iqal rope around the headdress appeared anyway (nb: it doubled as a camel harness), to noticing young men with the latest Yeezy drop beneath their traditional clothing. The particular smells and sights take on meaning. Smoke in late afternoon means shish kebabs are being prepared. Those babushkas in the far corner of the park have the best wild strawberries. The tamale lady in the yellow dress sells out first with good reason.
All that is different is no longer unfamiliar. The first few days of a trip are not just learning about a new place, but learning how to learn about a new place. These are the fifty words I really wish I knew - "the bill, please", "later", "turn left". That is what the market stall you really want to visit looks like. Guidebooks don't teach this, nor do package tours. This is not a fault, as their purpose is inspiration and comfort. It takes experience, not inspiration, and some discomfort to know how to see what makes each place interesting. This ought to be a gradual process, but I find it to instead be an instant realization. One scent twice repeated, one conversation with the right cadence, can cause the thought, yes, I’m getting this place.
The need for experience also means that the direction of an adventure matters. Architecture, cuisine, design, language, customs, and norms all followed geography as they developed. You will notice that a particular baozi dumpling in Beijing transforms along the Mongol steppe into the Uyghur manti, the boiled-rather-than-steamed Afghan aushak, the Uzbek chuchvara topped with sour cream due to Russian influence, and the Polish pierogies stuffed with strawberries in late spring. The designs of the Taj Mahal reflect the Moghul patterns seen earlier in Central Asia and Persia. The doors of Zanzibar appear Middle Eastern due to the island's history as an Omani colony. The Portuguese sailors of the 15th and 16th century are memorialized everywhere from the Ghanaian beach town Elmina (from the slavetrading fort Castelo da Mina) to Canada's Labrador Coast (after Joao Fernandes Lavrador, the explorer). Sichuan spices and Italian sauces are both based on ingredients that only existed in the New World.
Because of these links, the more places you visit, the quicker you understand new ones. Just as Old Masters art makes little sense if you don't know the relevant Biblical stories, and Chinese chengyu idioms draw on a shared understanding of otherwise-unstated stories, the background knowledge you get from traveling in one region speeds your understanding of the next. In a way, travel requires exercising your ability to turn the unknown into the understood, an active process just like learning a new language or mathematical proof or sonnet.
It is unfortunate that there are no classes on how to perform this exercise. I have some ideas developed by experience, of course. The most important is to read at least one history, one local piece of fiction, and one contemporary story in each region. It is impossible for me to separate the fictional Sudanese village life of Tayeb Salih's "Season of Migration to the North" from the actual village life we observed on a Friday evening in Karima. I now conflate the rugged plains of interior South America with the rebellious geography of Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes. I've imagined myself as a wealthy baron fifty years earlier in Sri Lanka while reading Michael Ondaatje's Running with the Family, as a brave explorer on the Karakorum like Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart in News From Tartary, and as a rich Istanbullu while sitting in a park with Orhan Pamuk.
There are some pedants and Eeyores who argue that these impressions are only on the surface. "You don't really understand the culture after" one week, or one month, or one year. And of course this is true, relative to someone who grew up where their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents grew up. But what can be learned in a week, with your eyes and ears and nose and mind open, is quite a bit indeed. You can certainly understand what values are most important, or what is considered beautiful. You can understand whether hospitality, ambition, stability or piety is the highest goal.
As we begin this long adventure, our own highest goal is to clear the empty spaces from our personal globe. We want to hear words like "Guinea Bissau" and have a particular music, phrase, taste, and speed come to mind. Are the breezes on that country's archipelago damp or dry? Are the people burdened by corruption or optimistic about the future? What do we expect this place to look like a decade on? The answers to these questions can only resolve themselves once we move beyond noticing what is unusual, to being comfortable with what has become part of our life. Tastes and noises, arguments and tensions, attitudes and acts of kindness move from something that happens abroad to something that is a part of our own memories: this is the definition of a great adventure.