Why is "traveling" such an admired or accomplished trait these days?

I was born in another country and was naturalized as a teenager. In my experience, Europeans and Americans who make a show of their well-traveled nature tend to have the most provincial mindsets. It seems to be a compensatory mechanism of sorts.

Travel is for gays (aka democrats).

After graduating from college I worked for a few years in my profession and then was transferred to one of my companies overseas branches. That was 30+ years ago. Spent most of my adult life working in Asia, Jakarta, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Karachi, and Bangkok. Changed jobs and companies along the way. It was quite a ride but I'm happy to be back in the US working here. Overall it was a good experience but like with everything it has it's ups and downs. It was a shock for the kids when they came back to the US to go to college. They are Americans, but had never lived in the US until they were 18 and going to college.

Because travelling you are learning a lot of new things and people, culture of other countries and some food they prepare if you are interested to know. When I was in some east countries from europe I learned a lot of interesting things the way they live and traditional food. When I visited Italy, I enjoyed a lot the trip to Naples and all the history about the city I got a this site, it was really interesting and I took the decision to go with my family there. A really nice place to rest with really nice architecture.

The site I found:

https://www.travelsafe-abroad.com/italy/naples/

cruce wrote:

First off, "traveling" within the usa is not traveling. The usa is absolutely uniform now....

I mostly agree with what you've said. But you can maybe tone down the cynicism.

If there is anything I've realized through traveling it's that people are nearly the same everywhere, and that is not a bad thing. Almost everyone works, likes spending time with family and friends, and enjoys good food. There are many small differences, like eating with your hands or using chopsticks, but those have little weight in my opinion. Of course languages are different, but they're probably saying the same things you do just in a different way. The point is that people from other countries aren't something to be afraid of anymore than you should fear your neighbors. People who don't travel may never have this realization. So this uniformity you speak of isn't such a bad thing.

Traveled a lot but not enough wrote:

Traveling is great. Of course there are a lot of ways doing it.

I preferred to grab a Lonely Planet and a backpack and go somewhere for a month or two. Always traveled with public transport and used the cheapest hotels possible.

Great way to extend your horizon.

Of course this is a rare concept in a huge country where most have not been to Canada or Mexico and don't even own a passport.

Kind of sad really.

There are people that haven't even been to another state.

Look up the "Great Tour" and get back to us about "these days"

More than half of Americans dont have a passport, which means we like it here.

Cause the warcry of of the Millenials is: Ill PaY fOr ExPeRiEnCeS, NoT ThInGs

Its really code for, "i've got too much debt to buy anything nice, and as soon as i get $800 ill fly to mexico and take pics for IG to make me look relevant"

I'll sit in my 3000sq foot home full of "things" and laugh.

because it means you have free time. I travel a lot around the world with the 30 days of holidays I have every year. Why would I stay at home? I can do that every other day in the year.

[quote]cruce wrote:

First off, "traveling" within the usa is not traveling. The usa is absolutely uniform now, the exact same from miami to portland. Regional variation has been erased. You eat the same hamburger or chili's entree for 3000 miles, listen to the same songs and the same voices on the radio, the same commercials, see the same billboards advertising the same trash products, even the architecture is the same: square. The usa is a cultural wasteland and if you think by flying from Akron to Charlotte and checking into the days inn is travel, the entire rest of the world pities you.

The USA is not "absolutely" uniform. And finding the unique and not uniform places in the USA is what makes traveling fun. Don't get me wrong, traveling abroad is great, but to totally dismiss traveling in the USA makes you sound snobby.

In Miami, there are literally thousands of places you can eat that will provide a new experience for someone who does not live there. Miami is a melting pot of cultures from central and south America, and there is a lot to be discovered there, beyond the food. And Portland, the seafood in Portland. I'm sure there's something for you in Portland if you don't like seafood, but lobsters off the dock are one of my top 5 local foods. I'm sure you can score those in a few other towns in Maine and Mass, but local seafood culture in the northeast states is something that is unique. It's a culture that's dying out, but it's for sure there.

Mass culture is here also, it's what you choose to appreciate. Sounds like you'd appreciate a trip to Kentucky, to purchase some bourbon to drown your sorrows in your basement.

US employers are also not required to provide paid vacation days (or any vacation days as a matter of fact). In other countries, employers are required by law to give their employees time off. Like healthcare, vacation time is a privilege and not a right in the US. And people appear to be afraid to take any time off because they could be replaced by someone else.

It depends on what kind of traveling it is.

Showing off that selfie you took in Paris is neither an accomplishment nor something to be admired. But showing off that selfie you took on Kilimanjaro is since it actually requires some effort to get there.

The same thing goes for domestic trips. Hopping on a plane from LA to Denver doesn't mean anything. But flying there by yourself in a single engine plane or riding there on a motorcycle in a day will turn that trip into an epic adventure you can be proud of.

People used to be proud that they traveled and got to know people of other nationalities. Just remember what a hero Lord Byron was in the eyes of the entire aristocracy when he wrote poems about his travels. Now people admire not travelers but the courage of the traveler. It's hard for me to overcome language barriers. If you don't know, not all people in Europe know English. You need to outgrow your shyness and communicate with Europeans. Of course, before leaving home, I download offline maps I buy sim cards for the internet. But I still have to ask questions to the local population. These advices I got from as travel guides like https://www.dbauskunft.com/de /,

vivalarepublica wrote:

Haji wrote:

And a sense of adventure.

You can display all of those characteristics without traveling internationally. If you can't figure out how, you're lacking in creativity.

The poster never said you "couldn't" display all those characteristics some other way than traveling internationally, simply that in his/her mind traveling internationally demonstrated a sense of adventure. You're jumping the gun here with your criticism; seems like you 'want' to find fault here rather than read the post comprehensively. Just my .02 of course.

A lot of these women "travelling" are getting money from secretly being an escort, sugar baby, stripper or onlyFans or similar page.

STEVE THE ADDICT^^^^^^""""-""""--'-"--^' wrote:

A lot of these women "travelling" are getting money from secretly being an escort, sugar baby, stripper or onlyFans or similar page.

Exotic trips and fabulous travel photos on IG. Turns out she was doing it while smuggling coke, and who knows what else.

What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea — “Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home” — and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two-veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ‘cos they “overdid it on the first day.” And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentals with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting “Flamenco for Foreigners.” And adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney’s Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local color and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing “Torremolinos, torremolinos” and complaining about the food — “It’s so greasy isn’t it?” — and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards, of places they don’t realize they haven’t even visited, to: “All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an ‘X’. Food very greasy but we’ve found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney’s Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’.” And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can’t even get a drink of Watney’s Red Barrel because you’re still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you’re thirsty and there’s nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it’ll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of “unforeseen difficulties”, i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris — and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody’s swallowing “enterovioform” and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn’t there to take you to the hotel that hasn’t yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there’s no water in the pool, there’s no water in the taps, there’s no water in the bog and there’s only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can’t sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door — and you’re plagued by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers’ wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe — and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn’t like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone’s comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free “cigarillos” and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on “Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich” and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody’s talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane…

Like Brian Laundrie?