Skip the Landmarks — The One Travel Habit That Actually Changes How You See the World

None of this requires more money or more time than a landmark-heavy trip. It requires trading one guarantee — the photo everyone recognizes — for something less certain and, almost every time, more worth remembering. The growth people talk about from travel doesn’t come from distance covered. It comes from the 45 minutes you spent actually talking to someone whose life looks nothing like yours.

None of this requires more money or more time than a landmark-heavy trip. It requires trading one guarantee — the photo everyone recognizes — for something less certain and, almost every time, more worth remembering. The growth people talk about from travel doesn’t come from distance covered. It comes from the 45 minutes you spent actually talking to someone whose life looks nothing like yours.

• Visit the local market before the top-rated attraction — go early, before 9am, when vendors have time to talk
• Learn 20 words in the local language and actually use them, mistakes included
• Book one hands-on class through a local host rather than a big tour company — search “[city] cooking class family run” instead of the first result
• Eat one meal where you’re the only tourist in the room; ask the server what they’d order
• Skip one landmark on purpose and give that afternoon to wandering a neighborhood with no destination

None of this requires more money or more time than a landmark-heavy trip. It requires trading one guarantee — the photo everyone recognizes — for something less certain and, almost every time, more worth remembering. The growth people talk about from travel doesn’t come from distance covered. It comes from the 45 minutes you spent actually talking to someone whose life looks nothing like yours.

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• Visit the local market before the top-rated attraction — go early, before 9am, when vendors have time to talk
• Learn 20 words in the local language and actually use them, mistakes included
• Book one hands-on class through a local host rather than a big tour company — search “[city] cooking class family run” instead of the first result
• Eat one meal where you’re the only tourist in the room; ask the server what they’d order
• Skip one landmark on purpose and give that afternoon to wandering a neighborhood with no destination

None of this requires more money or more time than a landmark-heavy trip. It requires trading one guarantee — the photo everyone recognizes — for something less certain and, almost every time, more worth remembering. The growth people talk about from travel doesn’t come from distance covered. It comes from the 45 minutes you spent actually talking to someone whose life looks nothing like yours.

I’ve stood in front of the Mona Lisa. I remember the crowd, the rope line, and almost nothing about the painting. I remember, in exact detail, a 45-minute conversation with a fishmonger in Lisbon’s Mercado da Ribeira who taught me how to tell a fresh sardine by its eyes. That’s the split that changed how I travel: landmarks are photographs you take, but ordinary places are experiences that take you.

The market test

Wherever I land now, the first stop is a local market, not a museum. In Oaxaca that meant Mercado 20 de Noviembre, where I watched a woman grind cacao, cinnamon, and almonds into drinking chocolate on a stone metate she’d used for probably 20 years. In Osaka it was Kuromon Ichiba at 7am, before the tourist crowds, watching vendors argue cheerfully over the price of uni. You learn more about a place’s actual rhythms in 45 minutes at a market than in a full day of checking off a landmark list — what people eat for breakfast, what’s expensive, what’s a point of local pride, what makes people laugh.

Learn 20 words, not a language

I’m not fluent in anything but English. But I write out 20 words before every trip — hello, thank you, delicious, how much, too spicy, where’s the bathroom, that’s beautiful — and I use them constantly, badly, with terrible pronunciation. The response is never annoyance. It’s almost always a smile and, often, a longer conversation than I expected, because trying signals something that a phrase-book perfect accent never would: you actually care whether this exchange goes well for both of you.

Take the class you’d never take at home

A three-hour tamale-making class in Oaxaca with a family who ran it out of their courtyard cost me about $35 and taught me more about Mexican regional food than any restaurant meal could — why Oaxacan mole takes 30-plus ingredients and two days, why the corn matters more than the filling. Cooking classes, pottery workshops, a single dance lesson — these put you in a room with locals doing something specific and technical together, which strips away the tourist-and-local divide faster than almost anything else. You’re both just bad at the same new thing.

A few ways to build this into any trip

• Visit the local market before the top-rated attraction — go early, before 9am, when vendors have time to talk
• Learn 20 words in the local language and actually use them, mistakes included
• Book one hands-on class through a local host rather than a big tour company — search “[city] cooking class family run” instead of the first result
• Eat one meal where you’re the only tourist in the room; ask the server what they’d order
• Skip one landmark on purpose and give that afternoon to wandering a neighborhood with no destination

None of this requires more money or more time than a landmark-heavy trip. It requires trading one guarantee — the photo everyone recognizes — for something less certain and, almost every time, more worth remembering. The growth people talk about from travel doesn’t come from distance covered. It comes from the 45 minutes you spent actually talking to someone whose life looks nothing like yours.