You should travel so that you can feel dumb. . .

good travel requires it

The steely grey skies and bunker-like apartment building from the window of our Berlin hotel

People sometimes think that traveling is for having fun, or for gathering cultural details and tidbits that you can file away in your brain or your body (in the case of food) and take it all with you back home. And it is.

But I think one of the best things about travel is that it makes you feel dumb. It challenges your notions of what you believe to be true, or what you believe the world to be, which it is probably not.

One of the things I lament about our digital age is that it trades a lot of the discomforts of traveling for convenience, and convenience is just that– it makes things easier, but not necessarily better, in the same way that cars do. Cars are definitely faster and more comfortable, but they are absolutely not as interesting or fun as riding a bus or riding a bike or walking.

If you’ve never had to figure out a foreign phone, bus, train, or restaurant reservation without the aid of a smartphone, then you haven’t really traveled. Not really. When stripped from the need to walk into a foreign convenience store, not speaking the language, to ask for directions, you’re missing out on a lot of the discomfort of traveling, which is a lot of the whole point of traveling. When you feel dumb, or when forced into discomfort, this is where all of your good stories come from— out of mishap. If everything about your travel experience goes comfortably and smoothly, then you have no good stories to tell back home, and that’s a shame.

Traveling alone is especially good for feeling dumb, because feeling dumb with a companion does not offer the full panoply of feeling dumb. When you have someone by your side to consult with, to make a mistake with, to fumble over foreign coins with– another thing digital life robs us of– then you can just pretend you are a couple of giggling friends goofing off instead of an adult woman rendered momentarily incapable of buying a cup of coffee.

Feeling dumb, having the things you ordinarily take for granted like understanding the proper fare for a bus or not being able to have one’s caffeine fix immediately sated is good for a person, I think. I think it puts our humanity more fully on display. Being in control all of the time is dangerous, because it’s false. Just because we have a routine ingrained, just because we know which knob is cold and which is hot, or what lever flushes, doesn’t mean that anything is under our control. It just means that we are the masters of the four-by-four space of our own bathroom and that’s pretty much meaningless, isn’t it.

Right now we’re in Berlin for the launch of Sean’s cookbook in Germany, and even though I’ve been in Europe too many times to easily count, it still kind of feels like the first time in small ways. I’m rendered dumb by not being able to easily have the words “good evening,” or “thank you” tumble off of my tongue. It’s difficult to be really yourself when speaking a second language, even when you kind of understand it, much less when you don’t know it at all. You stand there dumb, looking dumb, and probably people even do think that you’re dumb when you can’t answer the most basic of questions or read a simple menu or know which restroom you’re entering.

Right now in Berlin, it’s cold and it’s damp. Dark, too. That kind of weather that makes you want to huddle into a ball and never come up. But you can’t do that when you’re traveling, because it would be a whole shame to miss out on your limited time. And that’s why you should travel. To remind yourself that things are never ideal, or comfortable or easy. And you push on anyway.

Keep and eye out upcoming for my Berlin eating recommendations, for paid subscribers only!