Photo by Lola Akinmade

I wasn’t sure I heard her right the first time.

“I said leave my store! I have many windows you can look in from!” she yelled, probably mistaking me for an impoverished immigrant she didn’t want in her shop.

Visibly stunned, I vowed never to return to culturally diverse Luxembourg. As I marched off, the words “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!” stopped me.

Another middle-aged woman was chasing me uphill with a bag of groceries. She finally reached me, panting to collect her breath. This perfect stranger had also been a customer in the store.

“Je suis désolée! I’m so sorry!” She apologized on behalf of the shopkeeper.

I could have stereotyped the shopkeeper as a rude Frenchwoman, but I chose not to do so – based on the actions of another French woman. Instead, the rude woman remained only a rude woman.

Practicing Tolerance

Just keep an open mind,” is a phrase that’s easier said than done. Even the most intrepid of travelers morph into creatures of habit, reverting back to their comfort zone when faced with challenges.

Keeping an open mind does not mandate that you ditch your core values and spiritual beliefs. On the contrary, it implores you to acknowledge that others have their own beliefs as well.

An open mind allows us to ask questions of other cultures and of ourselves, evaluating the possibilities that there might be answers different from ones we’ve always held.

Clifton Fadiman, a writer and critic, eloquently explains that “…when you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

Though years of immersion can draw you closer into the true belly of a culture, on many levels, you’ll always remain a foreigner.

Facing Rejection

Locals may reject your notions of what you think is important. While many Western cultures view time as money, a large portion of the world views time as something to be savored.

When dealing with “island” time or other cultural norms, constantly remember that you are the stranger. Locals are not required to adapt their lifestyles to accept you. If they do, you should consider their flexibility a privilege.

On the opposite end, being accepted too quickly might mean that locals are treating you differently as a foreigner, giving you false insight into their true culture.

The key to keeping an open mind is to evaluate if they’re giving you preferential treatment because of your physical attributes or what you represent, rather than you as an individual. Use keen observation to view how locals interact with each other to get a truer sense of their daily lives.

Assessing each situation independently

The key to organically experiencing a different culture is to assess each situation independently. One tends to fall back on widely known stereotypes and overvalue one’s culture when suddenly faced with unpleasant encounters.

Photo by Lola Akinmade

Maybe that Luxembourg shopkeeper was having a bad day or just had deep-seated prejudices. I’ll never know, but I’ll always remember the stranger who apologized. I’ve since been back to the Benelux area multiple times.

Stereotypes are born when we take the actions of an individual and apply them to an entire culture, race, or generation. It is important to understand that a culture, though vastly different from yours, is innately logical to locals.

For example: Swedes freeze sliced bread to preserve the freshness. For centuries, the Aztecs and Chinese have dealt with stress and anxiety through simple meditation and breathing techniques to more “controversial” methods like acupuncture.

Some cultures view sleep as that unnecessary period deterring us from getting work done, while others welcome sleep with open arms.

Observing how others handle similar issues can both teach and enrich us.

Dealing with more controversial practices

For altitude sickness in higher altitude locations such as Cuzco, Peru, you could spend time popping pills to combat altitude sickness – or you could do as the locals do: chew coca leaves or drink coca tea.

The indigenous cultures of the Andes and Altiplano have lived in the region for decades and know how to suppress symptoms naturally and very quickly. Taking coca leaves outside of South America is prohibited because, in very large quantities, coca is the underlying raw material used to manufacture cocaine.

Eating poppy-seed bagels does not equate to using opium, neither does eating grapes equate to drinking alcoholic wine. We usually evaluate alternate solutions when solving problems.

Solutions from within different cultures should not be automatically deemed nonviable because we don’t completely understand them.

There isn’t a clear line to cross when absorbing other cultures into your lifestyle. You draw the line where you want to cross based on your own personal convictions and beliefs.

Challenging yourself to try new things

You don’t have to bungee-jump off a bridge over Waikato River in New Zealand to prove open-mindedness if you know you’ll go into cardiac arrest.

Nor should you eat fried tarantulas in Cambodia if the sight alone invokes violent retching.

However, travel demands you step outside your comfort bubble. Challenging yourself to sample facets of a culture is the underlying purpose of travel. Whether it’s trying local cuisines or undertaking a new activity, the only way you can truly enrich your life through travel is to participate.

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home,” said the popular American Author, James Michener.

As you open up your mind, you will notice your heart expanding in parallel. You’ll find yourself more forgiving and your own prejudices slowly chipping away over time.

Have you had an experience on the road where you could have exercised open-mindedness? Leave a comment below!

Editor’s Introduction – Tim Patterson: I’m typing on the deck of a hostel in a little Uruguayan surf town called Punta del Diablo.

I hope you’ll find similar inspiration in these quotes. Without further ado…

The 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

What quotes did we miss? Which one was your favorite? Please leave a comment below!

Sometimes, a lengthy trip just isn’t possible. For various reasons (such as family commitments, financial priorities and other responsibilities), you may end up working the 9 to 5 gig. This means you are given a few fleeting vacation days off a year, often amounting to just two weeks. That’s 14 days out of 365 you can dedicate to venturing into the unknown.

Deciding how to use those days can be quite the challenge for those who equally love their careers and also love to travel. Having dealt with that situation numerous times myself, I’ve managed to figure out the best ways to stretch your vacation days into a full-blown adventure:

1. First decide how to spend those 14 days

Do you want to take two (2) longer stints or four (4) short city breaks? Do you want to travel halfway across the world, or just hop over the Atlantic?

Choosing how you want to allocate those days is based on your individual travel style and travel goals for the year. A reasonable travel goal could be this: You want to volunteer in Nicaragua, experience San Fermin (Running of the Bulls) in Pamplona, and take a city break to Krakow, Poland before the end of the year.

Remember: You may also want to save a few days for when you are summoned by family for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

2. Yes, do travel around holidays

Planning your trips around holidays means you can save vacation days.

For example, if you want to travel to Spain and spend 9-10 days, leaving on a Friday evening and returning the following weekend, with Monday being a holiday in-between means that you will travel for 10 days but only take four (4) work vacation days. This leaves you with a balance of eight (8) vacation days.

By traveling around holidays twice or thrice a year, it allows you to make the most out of your allocated days.

3. Have flexible travel plans

You can argue that airfare prices might be higher around holidays. By picking holidays that fall around or flank the international travel off-season (for example, Memorial Day weekend in May or Labor Day weekend in September), you will find reasonable prices.

This means watching for low fares and being able to travel on a whim. Airlines such as United and Delta always send out weekly or bi-weekly emails with lots of international airfare sales.

4. For short city breaks, use budget airlines to cut costs.

Four or five day city breaks mean leaving mid-week (for example, on a Wednesday evening) and returning on a Sunday (or Monday if it is a holiday). This means you take only 2 vacation days off (Thursday and Friday), but use up your weekend as well.

For example, if you want to travel to Dublin or Edinburgh for a short break, flying to a larger hub like London will be much cheaper than directly to your destination. From London, you can hop on one of the many budget airlines like Easy Jet and Ryan Air which run roundtrip fares as low as 20 pounds ($40).

These budget airlines also fly to many cities in Europe such as Sofia, Bulgaria and Poznan, Poland so your city break options are limitless. (But don’t forget: offset your carbon).

5. Traveling to farther destinations like Asia or South America on only 12 days

A short break to Buenos Aires or Tokyo seems very unrealistic; however, don’t strike them off your list just yet. Try focusing on one activity, event, or festival when traveling to farther destinations.

If your goal is to go hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, you can take a 10 day longer stint (weekends included of course!), and visit Peru for this specific purpose. You can also visit Cuzco or nearby cities as a daytrip.

6. Use time differences to your advantage

If you travel eastwards to Europe from the US, you will move ahead a couple hours. If you travel westwards to Central and South America, you will fall behind a few hours. So returning from Europe on a holiday Monday means you arrive on the same day. This does not count towards your vacation days. When traveling to South America, you will arrive on the same day you depart, which means you will not lose any additional days.

7. Volunteer internationally

You can still get to off-beaten locations and paths by volunteering for 7-12 days (including weekends) with international organizations that operate in less touristy locations. You can work at an orphanage in a remote part of Central America or work with school children in Cambodia.

GlobeAware offers short-term (one week) volunteer opportunities that focus on cultural awareness and sustainability. This will focus your trip by allowing you to interact with the locals, and give you a real insight into their way of life and customs.

Note: be sure to read BNT’s volunteer tourism archives as well.

8. Explore your own backyard

Whether it is visiting Chinatown in San Francisco, or learning more about Native American culture in the Southwest, you can still immerse yourself in culture without leaving the country.

Note: Tim Patterson wrote an excellent article on the topic of local travel.

Overall, nothing beats extended travel and total immersion. As an avid traveler myself, I operate under that school of thought. Until you get to that point personally, you can still work with what you have.

Lola Akinmade is a GIS consultant who moonlights as a photojournalist. She has contributed to many online travel resources such as Matador Travel, Common Language Project, Black Travels as well as magazines. She can be reached via her personal site.