Travelling To Hometown Quotes

Someday, I would like to go home. The exact location of this place, I don't know, but someday I would like to go. There would be a pleasing feeling of familiarity and a sense of welcome in everything I saw. People would greet me warmly. They would remind me of the length of my absence and the thousands of miles I had travelled in those restless years, but mostly, they would tell me that I had been missed, and that things were better now I had returned. Autumn would come to this place of welcome, this place I would know to be home. Autumn would come and the air would grow cool, dry and magic, as it does that time of the year. At night, I would walk the streets but not feel lonely, for these are the streets of my home town. These are the streets that I had thought about while far away, and now I was back, and all was as it should be. The trees and the falling leaves would welcome me. I would look up at the moon, and remember seeing it in countries all over the world as I had restlessly journeyed for decades, never remembering it looking the same as when viewed from my hometown.

It is easier to bear the worries of wandering than to find peace in your hometown, where only the sage can live in a happy house surrounded by trite troubles and daily distractions.

I still feel at home in Baltimore in a way I will never feel anywhere else—part of the definition of home being a place you don’t belong anymore.

Europe’s reluctance to go to war frustrates some Americans. I believe their relative pacifism is because Europeans know the reality of war, while most Americans do not. …. It’s easier to feel detached when a war is something you watch on the nightly news, rather than something that killed your grandfather or destroyed your hometown.

I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.

I used to take walks only in good weather. No I do so in any weather. When I travel, my favorite way to acquaint myself with a city is to walk it. Why not do the same in my hometown?

... to wander far from the familiar "home" of his adolescent ways of belonging, doing, and being. He must, as poet Mary Oliver puts it, "stride deeper and deeper into the world." His culture will greatly influence the manner in which he wanders, as will his gender, physical constitution, psychological temperament, age, and bio-region. In one culture, his wandering might take him geographically far from his hometown or village. In another culture, geographic movement will have little importance for the true depth of his wandering. What is critical is not whether he engages in this practice or that, or undergoes this ritual or another, but that his wandering changes his relationship to the world, that he leaves the home of his adolescent identity, and that his border crossings usher him into the mysteries of nature and psyché.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a lef- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.

A Tom Sawyerish figure she imagined growing up on some widwestern farm, reading adventure books and butchering chickens, pulling the braids of milkmaids and leaving his hometown to travel the world; a more devout and sober Hemingway, in search of a deeper meaning, but never losing sight of where he came from.

She told me that some day she would go to my hometown and stay there for a while and be happy. And she will see me in every wall, every street, every glass, in every person, in every wave of the sea and smile.

Good afternoon,” Hadrian offered, but no one replied. No one smiled. Some whispered in the shelter of doorways. Mothers pulled children inside and men picked up pitchforks or axes. “This is where you grew up?” Arista whispered to Hadrian. “Somehow it seems more like how I would imagine Royce’s hometown to be.” This brought a look from Royce. “They don’t get too many travelers here,” Hadrian explained. “I can see why.

Makes me so happy every time you find out how small the world is, you know? Like, we were in that place at the same time and now here we are. At different points in our lives but still connected. Like quantum entanglement or some shit.” “I think about that every time I’m in an airport. It’s one reason I love traveling so much. As a kid, I was a loner, and I always figured that when I grew up, I’d leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and—I don’t know. I don’t feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they’re all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.

She told me "I want to go to your hometown. Someday I will go there and I will smile till the time I will stay there and be happy because its your home town. I am going to see you in every wall, every street, every glass, in every person, in every wave of the sea and smile.

Tradition? Kadash, did I ever tell you about my first sword trainer? Back when I was young, our branch of the Kholin family didn't have grand monasteries and beautiful practice grounds. My father found a teacher for me from two towns over. His name was Harth. Young fellow, not a true swordmaster -- but good enough. He was very focused on proper procedure, and wouldn't let me train until I'd learned how to put on a takama the right way. He wouldn't have stood for me fighting like this. You put on the skirt, then the overshirt, then you wrap your cloth belt around yourself three times and tie it. I always found that annoying. The belt was too tight, wrapped three times -- you had to pull it hard to get enough slack to tie the knot. The first time I went to duels at a neighboring town, I felt like an idiot. Everyone else had long drooping belt ends at the front of their takamas. I asked Harth why we did it differently. He said it was the right way, the true way. So, when my travels took me to Harth's hometown, I searched out his master, a man who had trained with the ardents in Kholinar. He insisted that this was the right way to tie a takama, as he'd learned from his master. I found my master's master's master in Kholinar after we captured it. The ancient, wizened ardent was eating curry and flatbread, completely uncaring of who ruled the city. I asked him. Why tie your belt three times, when everyone else thinks you should do it twice? The old man laughed and stood up. I was shocked to see that he was terribly short. 'If I only tie it twice,' he exclaimed, 'the ends hang down so low, I trip!' I love tradition, I've fought for tradition. I make my men follow the codes. I uphold Vorin virtues. But merely being tradition does not make something worthy, Kadash. We can't just assume that because something is old it is right.

The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body. Embalming received another boost four years later, when Abe Lincoln’s embalmed body traveled from Washington to his hometown in Illinois. The train ride amounted to a promotional tour for funerary embalming, for wherever the train stopped, people came to view him, and more than a few must have noted that he looked a whole lot better in his casket than Grandmama had looked in hers. Word spread and the practice grew, like a chicken heart, and soon the whole nation was sending their decedents in to be posed and preserved.

In the same library book that taught me about Theia and how the moon was made, I read that Earth travels two hundred million miles around the sun between fall and spring. Some people die without ever having left their hometown, and yet they could be ninety million miles from where they were born. We're all just ants, riding a bus on a highway too long to comprehend.

I’ve learned to sometimes ask, “Where did you grow up?” which gets people talking about their hometown. I travel a lot for work, so there’s a good chance I’ll know something about their place. Other easy introductory questions are things like “That’s a lovely name. How did your parents choose it?” That prompts conversations about cultural background and family history. Those conversations often go off in good directions.

As a kid, I was a loner', I explain, 'and I always figured that when I grew up, I'd leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and - I don't know. I don't feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes those people different, they're all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.

Everywhere she traveled in the south she saw what the evil men did, an evil that had simply not been present in her hometown. They passed field after field of black men and women in chains, toiling for white men in shaded hats who sat on horses and bore whips like the one Amelia had used on Stephen White. She could feel the hate that radiated from these men, the contempt, the smug superiority, and she never passed by one without wishing to knock him from the back of the horse and hope the animal kicked him to death.

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons'....

It's one reason I love traveling so much." I hesitate, searching for how to pour this long-steeping soupy thought into concrete words. "As a kid, I was a loner," I explain, "and I always figured that when I grew up, I'd leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and- I don't know. I don't feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they're all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.

Reviewing the records of two million recruits, Feyrer and his colleagues also checked the natural iodine levels in their hometowns. Nationwide, the researchers found, the introduction of iodine raised the average IQ by an estimated 3.5 points. And in the parts of the country where natural iodine levels were lowest, Feyrer and his colleagues estimated that scores leaped 15 points. It may be hard to believe that such a straightforward change in people’s diets could have such a tremendous effect on intelligence. But as public health workers continue to bring iodine to more of the world, the same jumps happen. In 1990, Robert DeLong, an expert on iodine at Duke University, traveled to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. The region has extremely low levels of iodine in the soil, and the people in the region have resisted attempts to introduce iodized salt. It didn’t help that the people of the region, the Uyghurs, distrusted the government in Beijing. Rumors spread that government-issued iodized salt had contraceptives in it, as a way to wipe out the community. DeLong and his Chinese medical colleagues approached local officials with a different idea: They would put iodine in the irrigation canals. Crops would absorb it in their water, and people in the Taklamakan region would eat it in their food. The officials agreed to the plan, and when DeLong later gave children from the region IQ tests, their average score jumped 16 points.

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder -- its DNA -- Xerox(tm) it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallelparked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.

TWO STYLES OF REASONING: PRINCIPLES-FIRST VERSUS APPLICATIONS-FIRST Principles-first reasoning (sometimes referred to as deductive reasoning) derives conclusions or facts from general principles or concepts. For example, we may start with a general principle like “All men are mortal.” Then we move to a more specific example: “Justin Bieber is a man.” This leads us to the conclusion, “Justin Bieber will, eventually, die.” Similarly, we may start with the general principle “Everything made of copper conducts electricity.” Then we show that the old statue of a leprechaun your grandmother left you is 100 percent copper. Based on these points, we can arrive at the conclusion, “Your grandmother’s statue will conduct electricity.” In both examples, we started with the general principle and moved from it to a practical conclusion. On the other hand, with applications-first reasoning (sometimes called inductive reasoning), general conclusions are reached based on a pattern of factual observations from the real world. For example, if you travel to my hometown in Minnesota one hundred times during January and February, and you observe every visit that the temperature is considerably below zero, you will conclude that Minnesota winters are cold (and that a winter visit to Minnesota calls for a warm coat as well as a scarf, wool hat, gloves, and ear warmers).

Listening to some songs makes us nostalgic. All the past memories flood our mind, and we begin to miss our hometown achingly.

Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

Leroy used to tell hitchhikers his whole life story — about his travels, his hometown, the baby. He would end with a question: “Well, what do you think?” It was just a rhetorical question. In time, he had the feeling that he’d been telling the same story over and over to the same hitchhikers. He quit talking to hitchhikers when he realized how his voice sounded—whining and self-pitying, like some teenage-tragedy song. Now Leroy has the sudden impulse to tell Norma Jean about himself, as if he had just met her. They have known each other so long they have forgotten a lot about each other. They could become reacquainted. But when the oven timer goes off and she runs to the kitchen, he forgets why he wants to do this.

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Though I have not lived in New York City for more than two decades, these storytellers – from the United States, Britain and Canada – have touched my heart with their openness, inspired me with their joie de vivre and deepened my appreciation for my hometown as a worldwide phenomenon. Welcome to our New York.

Some-times it’s very good to break the rules and do what you want and supposed not to do. It gives a new mould to life. New place, music, new weather and on a very right time, it feels awesome with your favorite songs, and by knowing that, some-one is caring about you in some-where else, in the campus, in the home, and in home-town also, gives a feeling that will fill your heart with the joy of happiness and the proud of having a good life which is full with surprises and sometimes adventures too.

The play was performed often in Fürth, then at a film festival in Munich, and in 2002 in Zurich. And then in Czernowitz. On the anniversary of the world premiere the cast travelled to Selma's hometown, where it was put on in a theater very similar to the one in Fürth. As Jutta Czurda reported in a letter to me, both performances were almost sold out and the audiences were very enthusiastic: "Almost 1,000 people saw Selma …After the play we all signed countless programs and answered questions. And so for us, you, too, returned symbolically to Czernowitz with your voice, and built a direct bridge to Selma for the audience." She is right. Although German is not spoken in Czernowitz today, Selma and I came home somehow.

She was down to three customers, all sitting at one table. There had never been more than a handful this evening, and Tory had known beforehand exactly who her Christmas Eve customers would be. They were all watching It's a Wonderful Life. It made her think of Joe. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart wanted to get on a train and leave the small town he had grown up in. He wanted to travel, to build things. But he never made it out. Instead, he stayed home, married, had a family—all the things Joe had been raised to do, all the things he wasn't doing now.

Contrary to what the media tell us, I can certify that there are very few rapists, ax murderers, and meth lab motels out there on the open roads. Of course, they exist—and even one is too many—but ask yourself: if something terrible had just happened in your hometown, why would your "local" news be feeding you stories about a tragedy fifteen states away? 
Crime is down overall, folks. Breathe.

In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home,

Even so, for such a long time, she’d never wanted a child. She lost the love of her life over it. And there was nothing wrong with her life that a child would fix. For fifteen years, Gustav had agreed with her. They traveled, ate in fancy restaurants, bought nice furniture, and enjoyed every minute of it. But about six months ago, he changed. He claimed it wasn’t because he had a mild heart attack, but a week later he woke her up in the middle of the night and told her that he needed to be a father. He wanted a family. “But we are a family,” she told him. “You don’t need kids to be a family.” He asked if she’d do it, for him, just one child, and because she said she’d think about it, he’d been wearing her down ever since. Now they were going to attempt it, in her hometown, of all places. At least she’d get to spend time with her mother; it had been a while. She hoped she’d also get to see Lois, Hazel, and Mildred. Maybe she’d get to see Al Norgaard.

And, my God, was it really not she he met later, far from the shores of their homeland, under an alien sky, in the torrid South, in the marvellous Eternal City, in the brilliance of a ball, to the thunder of music, in a palazzo (it absolutely must be a palazzo), drowned in a sea of lights, on this balcony, wreathed with myrtle and roses, where she, upon recognising him, so hastily took off her mask and whispered: "I am free", and trembling, threw herself into his arms, and with a cry of rapture, they embraced, and in an instant they forgot sorrow, separation, all their torments, the gloomy house, the old man, the dismal garden in their distant homeland, the bench on which, with one last passionate kiss, she had torn herself away from his arms, numb from torments of despair?

I think about that every time I’m in an airport,” I tell her. “It’s one reason I love traveling so much.” I hesitate, searching for how to pour this long-steeping soupy thought into concrete words. “As a kid, I was a loner,” I explain, “and I always figured that when I grew up, I’d leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and—I don’t know. I don’t feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they’re all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.

Afterward we recited the entire poem together. "The bed is lit by moonlight I think it is the light of an early winter morning Looking up, I enjoy the full moon in the night sky Bending over, I miss my hometown" We all know that poem is about a scholor who is traveling and missing his home, but on that night and forever after I believed it was about us. Snow Flower was my home and I was hers.

Because each of us carries around inside ourselves a mental picture of the kind of person we are. “I’m an efficient secretary,” we may say. Or, “I’m an outdoorsman who loves to hunt.” Or, “I’m a hometown boy not interested in travel far from home.” This self-concept is at the heart of our opinion of ourselves – how much we like ourselves, how much confidence we feel, etc. – and we live our lives in large measure to be in consonance with this self-concept, and to enhance it. Our self-concept is our most precious mental and emotional possession.

Life changes as we travel down the road. We don’t always know what’s going to happen—good or bad. What I’ve come to realize is, it’s not what happens to you, but how you react that defines your path. Sometimes what seems horrible at first is a change for the better,

I’m not saying I’ll turn down a good road trip, but it has been the trains, ferries, subways, and most frequently the buses that have most helped me travel the world. When I want to explore a place, to get a sense of its culture, people, and neighborhoods (even my own), I have found that there is no better way to travel than public transportation. Crowded or nearly empty, full of conversations or silence, scheduled or unscheduled, with live chickens or Styrofoam packets of eggs, on sleek coaches or beat-up minibuses, whether in my hometown or a new town in a foreign country: traveling on public transportation becomes a primary insight into a place and culture.

There is a theory that all chain hotels are participants in a conspiracy to convince the international traveler that there is only one hotel on the planet, and it’s just like the one in their own hometown. Personally, I don’t believe it: it seems much more plausible that rather than actually going somewhere I have, in fact, been abducted and doped to the gills by aliens, implanted with false and bewildering memories of humiliating security probes and tedious travel, and checked in to a peculiarly expensive padded cell to recover. It’s certainly an equally consistent explanation for the sense of disorientation and malaise I suffer from in these places; besides which, malevolent aliens are easier to swallow than the idea that other people actually want to live that way.

I still feel at home in Baltimore in a way I will never feel anywhere else – part of the definition of home being a place you don’t belong anymore.

Other Romans pledged their allegiance not to the longstanding ideal of Romanitas but to the individual cities in which they resided. “I am a citizen of Bordeaux,” one fiercely insisted—conveniently ignoring the Roman roads he traveled, the Roman money he used to buy his writing equipment, and the Roman courts that protected his property. Bordeaux’s local government provided none of those protections or amenities. It was the treasury of Rome that made them possible. But for a resident of Roman Gaul, waving the flag of hometown pride had likely become an effective strategy for keeping unwanted strangers out.

Food is perhaps the most accessible way to experience another culture. It does not require you to have a friend or colleague from another culture and you don’t even need to travel outside your hometown.