Across my two week trip I had a lot of random thoughts. But two were omnipresent.
1) As I define “travel”, to get the “most” out it, you really should do it alone.
2) It’s the details and context of the places you visit that matter.

Through both personal experience and witness, I saw that when in a group you’re far more likely to fall into old habits. You’re more likely to go ask for directions or help in your native language. You’re more likely to engage in your traveling partners’ company than in observing and immersing yourself in what’s going on around you. The list goes on and on.

I got to spend my time roughly evenly between tagging along with random groups of people that I met along the way, and total solo time exploring. And I very clearly saw that as much as I enjoyed the comfort that comes in numbers, and having fun people to talk to– the experience was totally different. I got the most out of my travel experience, when I observed the random details of the city I was in, when I stumbled (quite badly) in figuring out how to ask for different things in a foreign language, and in general was aware of my ‘foreignness’. This was the feeling that I most treasured from my travels, it was a feeling that is light years away from my everyday life. Traveling in a group is very comfortable (and fun), but again, most of us pretty comfortable in our everyday lives. Of course, many people travel for the primary purpose of escape and enjoyment. And traveling with a best friend, girl/boyfriend, spouse or whatever, totally provides a really fun, enjoyable experience. But that’s different than the nitty-gritty of traveling.

The other thing I noticed was the absurdity of photos. The Eiffel tower. The Brandenburg gate. The Coliseum. La Segrada Familia. One would think that these poor monuments were meaningless or not beautiful enough without a tourist’s smiling face in the foreground. It struck me as kind of bizarre how without fail, people scurried to get photos of themselves in front of these beautiful, historic sites. Often they’d rush, wait in line, and then spend most of their time taking photos. I myself was very guilty of this early on in my trip. And then I stopped and wondered what I was going to get out of all these photos I was taking. There are tons of photos of these things online, so it wasn’t about that. It’s that we’ve been trained to take pictures. We’ve also been trained to think in terms of “I can say I was there” or ” i can say I saw this”. But I really questioned why that really mattered, and why I really cared about having a photo in front of the Coliseum. I ended up that I shouldn’t care and then spent a lot more time trying to suck in the details of the various places I went, and more specifically, I tried to learn details about why these places actually matter.

Two random thoughts, but before I left I hadn’t given a seconds thought to either.