So you’ve decided to travel … you poor, stupid idiot.
Traveling can be a wonderful way to explore exotic locations, flood your senses with unfamiliar sights and smells, and re-calibrate your sense of place in the world.
Unfortunately, these experiences are often tainted with the foul stench of humanity. Sadly, people exist from the Pacific to the Atlantic, pole to pole, even in gross places where people should never live like war zones and Las Vegas. And those are just the people who already live there—the other wanderlust-driven little shits you’ll come to know as fellow travelers will rightly reaffirm your most deeply held belief that humanity’s evolution peeked tens of millions of years ago when the mammalian rodents we stem from outlasted the dinosaurs by huddling in fear in their subterranean holes. Things only went downhill from there … see again Las Vegas.
The following is not so much a guide as hopefully a deterrent; a list of side effects that decompensate otherwise serene travel experiences into the same bullshit you have to deal with back at home, only with an added mélange of hostel kids and their accompanying body odors.
Travel Guides Lie
Every picture you’ve ever seen of every famous monument is, in reality, a titanic-sized crock of shit.
Viewing Mona Lisa at the Louvre? Full of idiots clambering over each other to take pictures. Standing in awe of one of the wonders of the world? Hope you’ve sharpened your Photoshop skills to paint out all the other picture-takers at the Taj Mahal—plus the memory will be forever tied as the day you saw the Taj Mahal and a kid pooping in the street next to the Taj Mahal.
Here’s what a guide book will show you.
INSERT PICTURE
And here’s what you actually get to see.
INSERT PICTURE
Your Version of Traveling is Just a Vacation
There are few instances that make you want to slam a door on your hand more than the infuriatingly smug and oblivious European 20-year-old out in the wild.
You’ve spent months planning this trip, years saving for it, and all so you can scrub together two measly weeks to dart around another country. As you encounter other travelers—most of whom will be from Europe and most of whom will be in their teens to early-20s—you will come to fear the moment they ask how long you’re traveling?
When you respond that you’re an adult living in the soul-crushing machinery of capitalism which only bestows on you enough vacation to keep you satiated but not so much that you realize you could escape and never go to work again—or something to that effect—be prepared to hear these words in a patronizingly high-pitched English accent:
“Oh, so just a little holiday then?”
And you will be forced to declare war against the entire European continent.
Everything Back Home Sucks
You are american and you have been told that your country is the greatest country in the history of countries. Of course, you’ve know this to be a bold-faced xenophobic lie, but then you see what other places got cookin’ and you’ll shudder at the idea of going home.
If America is the greatest country on Earth, then why doesn’t America have urinal video games like the bathrooms in Japan?
And if this country is so great, why do our trains take longer and cost more than other countries’ plane flights?
In addition to the new people you will come to loathe on your travels, you will find yourself even more loathsome of all the people back home.
…
Safe travels, a-holes.