American anthropologist Ralph Linton wrote the following essay, which appeared in the American Mercury in 1937. Published half a decade before "globalization" became a buzz-word, it humorously illustrates how everyday routine in modern America is the sum of years of global human ingenuity. "One Hundred Percent American" There can be no question about the average...

"Disdaining tourists is the last permitted snobbery, a coded way of distancing oneself from the uncultured classes. And it drives me beyond bonkers to incoherence -- so I shall try to settle down. Examined calmly, there is no conflict between tourism and traveling. Just as one may eat one day at McDonald's and the next...

"Learn to watch faces and expressions. Language is not all it's cracked up to be. Often you go wrong when you are struggling with dimly remembered foreign words and neglect the person or context. You'll need a bit of Russian, a bit of French, and a bit of Spanish, at least, to do the world....

"Any budding academic can tell you that deliberately placing oneself in a position of not-knowing, and to then go about finding out what you don't know, can be a fulfilling pursuit, and the disorientation itself, the early stages of figuring out what you didn't know that you wanted to know, was as exciting as the...

"Travel, its very motion, ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimist, or else they would never go anywhere." --Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend (2000)

Can you recall, dear comrade, when we tramped God's land together, And we sang the old, old Earth-song, for our youth was very sweet; When we drank and fought and lusted, as we mocked at tie and tether, Along the road to Anywhere, the wide world at our feet. Along the road to Anywhere, when...

"At a much deeper, more metaphysical level, foreign news should offer us a means by which to humanize the Other -- that is, the outsider from over the mountains or beyond the seas who instinctively repels, bores or frightens us and with whom we can't, without help, imagine having anything in common. Foreign news should...

"We were leaving not just a place but a consciousness -- one in which the "I" was different for the Asmat than for me. It was group, tribe, family, tied together in ways difficult to grasp. For me, as an American, "I" is the biggest, most important unit. For us, freedom is everything. The right...

"When I started traveling professionally, I was surprised and delighted to find that I could still make emotional connections to places. I discovered this for the first time in Portugal, where -- after having schlepped around Spain -- I met a young Dutch woman who introduced me to a her friend, a colorful poet, who...

"There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it." --Ariel Levy, " Thanksgiving in Mongolia ," The New Yorker , November 18, 2013

"Once globalization and development have homogenized and sanitized the world - quite often for the best - it will no longer be possible for even the most self-indulgent and romantic among us to maintain the illusion that what we are doing is anything other than not-particularly-glorified tourism. If all the classic elements of backpacker stories...

After the teacher asked if anyone had a sacred place and the students fidgeted and shrank in their chairs, the most serious of them all said it was his car, being in it alone, his tape deck playing things he'd chosen, and others knew the truth had been spoken and began speaking about their rooms,...

"Many travelers seek out this high. We seek out what is different from what we behold in our daily lives, whether it is language, fashion, standards of behavior, architecture, climate, or animal species, because beholding what is different has the quality of being unreal. If our brains resist the realness of something, but this thing...

Melbourne , Australia has become my second home. Known for its café culture, four seasons in a day and city of all things sport, this special place has a lot to offer. In the city, there’s the hubbub of business, culture, life, eateries, endless laneways and riverfront activities. Just a short tram ride away gets...

"The literature of mystical or spiritual experience continually reminds us that the origin of the word 'spirit' is closer to that of a high-spirited child, or a spirited horse, than it is to any kind of anaemic piety. First and foremost, 'spiritual' means bursting with exuberant life. There is also that strong sense of belonging:...

"All I know is that I want to live somewhere I'll have to relearn everything: how to cross the street, how to order coffee, how to deal with people whose modes of thinking are utterly, intriguingly foreign to my own. I want to be uncomfortable, to be an outsider not just in my own mind...

"There is a sniffy school of thought that promotes the idea that the age of travel is over, and that in 1946 when Evelyn Waugh published the juiciest selections from his travel books under the title When the Going Was Good , it was to be assumed that the going wasn't good anymore. The book...

"What you see on large news channels is not the only truth, or even the only news. In fact, often it is the bad news. If you want to hear the good news, then travel. People are basically good and worth knowing, whatever the race or culture they hail from." --Mike Spencer Bown, What I've...

"This emphasis upon travel as a test, as a loss that brings a gain of stature and certainty of self, suggests that the changes of character effected by travel are not so much the introduction of something new into the personality of the traveler as a revelation of something ineradicably present -- perhaps courage, perdurance,...

"Talking about the authentic is often what we do when we the overfed and privileged are discussing the fetish we cultivate for lives that look unchosen, for lives that are inherited, and thus seem to us unbeset by the anxiety of choosing one thing over something else. We juxtapose the inheritances that structure a traditional...