Last week we, well I anyway, bemoaned the rampant globalization that has spread chain stores and brand names and destroyed most of what is special in the world. This week, as promised, we are here to reassure you : All that’s special has not been lost. You can still find it, those unique sides of a place that imbue it with its own special character.

Over the years, as globalization has squeezed out the mom-and-pop stores, the rough-hewn and the sides of a culture which can lead to that uncomfortable shock, travelers have adapted. They have identified what are now fairly good tactics of finding the genuine people, the mundane life, and the guts of a place and its folks. In fact , there is a whole movement, “slow travel,” targeted on doing precisely that.
Sites on slow travel

Slow travel is “in” nowadays, so look carefully at the source of the info (“About Us”) and the small print of what they’re calling “slow” (A 14 day motorbike tour through three states? Nah.) Here are a few of the well-established sites that may induce you to get up and go slow :

Slowtrav.com : Focus is on finding holiday rentals ; the company has spun off many themed sites for notice boards and photos, a favored forum (slowtalk.com) and some destination-specific sites, as an example: slowtrav.com/Switzerland.
Slowtraveltours.com: A bunch of independent, small travel companies offering group tours they lead themselves. Most tours are based in one place.
Slowmovement.com: Australia-based site and slant, but has pleasing features on slow travel, slow cities, slow food etc .
Theworldinstituteofslowness.com: Established in 1999, the institute is a self-described “think tank for the slow revolution.”
Slow books: The World Pequot Press distributes some of the new manuals on slow travel, including “Eat Slow Britain”, “Go Slow France”, and “Slow Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly.” Information is on their internet site: globepequot.com.

Local marketplaces, neighborhood water holes, outside gathering spots, community events and local accommodations are among methods to escape the brand-blitzed landscapes that globalization has made. Incorporating such experiences and encounters on your trip likely will present new challenges and get you out of your comfort zone at least initially. But they may also result in your most enduring travel memories. Not to mention a bigger appreciation of how endlessly fascinating life is on this planet.

Here are ways to go about finding special experiences, wherever you are:

Go Off-season

When the visiting hordes have subsided, there’s nobody home but the neighbors. Some places close up, but what remains open for business will be quite enough. I am a massive fan of the Jersey Shore in winter ; some cities are rather more year-round than others, as an example : Cape May, Spring Lake, Red Bank. The sand won’t be bath temp, but it may twinkle with frost in the morning ; you’ll still find great restaurants, pretty inns, better rates and time to talk to the neighbors and visit undiscovered parks, galleries, shops. Another off-season favorite is Yellowstone National Park. The 30-below readings may scare off the masses, but that just means you’ll get the complete attention and awareness of the park rangers and winter lodge staff as well as a graphic, even visceral, idea of the competition for survival in the wild ; nature everywhere is at its brutal, pretty best.

Take Public Transportation

Yes, it can be mysterious even in your hometown, you may not have a handle on it. But abroad, trains, buses, shuttles are all part of life. I have rubbed elbows well, elbow-to-feathers with a colorful spread of passengers (including cattle) on an Ecuadorean train in the Andes and shared a curry meal with a local family on a long train trip through India.

Stay Local

Residence rentals are crazy-popular, in part because they’re less expensive and gave you more space / amenities than a hotel room. But boarders quickly realized they provided another entry to the local strategy for living. Leave your key in the lock coincidentally, you may meet and start to know your neighbour (say you have lost your moggy, you may make fast friends with a whole neighborhood, la “Amelie”). You’ll be among locals rather than other travelers (though given the approval for rentals, you might find your neighbour is a local hopeful as well).

Other types of local stays include leasing a room in a place airbnb.com, a quite new company, offers both whole-place rentals and a room in somebody’s home, with the host (hopefully) becoming a type of insider guide-cum-mentor for a local experience. Home stays are also a choice. My first visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early ’90s included a stay with a Russian family and without them, I’d possibly have done something unbelievably goofy and wound up in some KGB-esque netherworld.

Agriturismo is another growing lodging option. Farmers and others whose lives are attached to farming have started opening their houses and offering accommodations to travelers mainly because they require the bucks, but most won’t treat you like an ATM. You can simply stay over and eat what will no doubt be a killer wonderful meal or 2, but you can also find out about or perhaps pitch in with their work. In rustic Umbria, we visited a family that had been tending a large sweep of olive trees for 4 generations. I ate the most remarkable spread of tapenades of my life, gained a new appreciation of the entire olive oil making process, and also gained a few pounds in the process. Finally I lost the weight, but I carry the memory of the setting sun heating up the peach walls of the villa to this day.

One travel writer has spent his whole career traveling and meeting folks this way. I’m not that gregarious, but I have managed to yammer my way to invites without purposely doing so . Solo travelers have a better shot at this option, I suppose, though safety is also more of an issue if you are alone (a camera with a really massive telephoto lens is always my first defensive zone). After a Bedouin taxi driver in Egypt started talking about his standard bread-baking stove, I posed questions until he took me to his home a little place with a mud floor, chickens running through the rooms, a cheery, friendly babe and a sweet other half offering me some of their bread. Later on my Egypt trip, when I was surrounded by youngsters appealing for cash, a person came out and shooed the youngsters away, invited me in, and he and his spouse sat down with me in their living room and talked about the impact of tourism on culture. “You give them cash, they think of you as dollar bill with legs,” recounted the person, a schoolteacher. I can never forget the couple, standing with their baby in the wife’s arms, as I left their house, resolved not to make a contribution to the ruination of any more cultures.

People-to-people Programs

My first was in the Bahamas, during a cruise. It might have been a vague three-hour stop in the port of Nassau. Instead , I hooked up with an area woman who’d volunteered for the town’s P-to-P program, which was new at the time (fifteen to 20 years back). I joined her as she stopped at an elementary school to pick up her girl, to a neighbor’s for coffee, to her mom’s local dress shop talking and finding out about her life all on the way. Such programs have caught on everywhere. Check with the destination’s tourism office to work out if there is one.

Attend a Local Performance

Sure, you wish to see the Kirov Ballet if they’re performing at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. But think outside of the high-ticket-price shows. I was staying with a local family in that stunning Russian city and they advised a concert by a local orchestra from one of the city’s number of fine music and humanities colleges. It was in a theater with wooden chairs and great acoustics, and the performance was amazing particularly as the young musicians were so poised, keen, brilliantly gifted. Later, children coming out to welcome their acquaintances and family, smack kisses and proud words OK, I could not interpret, but I knew were as memorable as the music. And a heads up that while we’ve got our differences, some human behaviour is universal.

Volunteer

There are plenty of volunteer opportunities to work with local people teaching English to adults or youngsters, working the land with local farmers, building houses, or reconstructing them after a tragedy as I did in the trail of Katrina in New Orleans. Often, I volunteer for programs that focus on helping animals. But they usually bring me new understanding of the area folk, as well . In Namibia, the two-week PAWS big cat restoration project was absolutely connected to the local popularion ; without learning their philosophy and traditions, anything we probably did would be opposed, ineffectual or completely futile. So when we went to save a leopard that had been trapped on a farmer’s property, we managed to speak with him a person who during the past may have just shot the animal because it was a threat to his cows and sheep. Our connection, on his land, speaking for a couple of hours, provided an epiphany for me, and I came away with an understanding that would not have been possible were I to remain in my ivory tower of environmental idealism.

Local Marketplaces

In cities and rural areas worldwide , the custom of the local market has somehow endured. In agricultural parts of many European countries, markets have naturally evolved an effectual schedule that can keep family refrigerators and cabinets stocked weekly. A good concierge or manual can give you the days and places to be to partake of the colorful, frequently loud and absolutely down-home scenes. The overview of Dubrovnik, Croatia, I was treated to from a walk along the old city walls was sublime, but at ground level, the Sat. market in the square, with its bright, lined-up produce and shuffling old men and hind-leg-walking dogs and outgoing sellers touting samples and calling “Try it!” in Croatian and English was what I recollect best.

Specialty markets, particularly those with artisans and artists, are also full of local flavour. They are particularly abundant around holidays. While you may encounter the odd slick, boring entrepreneurs, for the most part these local craftspeople are earnest and excited about their work, and like to speak to passersby. During the annual Shrimp & Petroleum Holiday on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, a serious attraction is the gigantic tented area with people selling their homemade and often regionally flavored creations. I can never forget the beautifully poised young mom behind the counter with her teenage child, all of their hand-crafted jewelry spread out before them ; a peculiar reversal of roles, with the studded-nose daughter surprisingly businesslike and the ethereal mom simply wanting to talk about her child, the economy and how I liked this bit of Louisiana.

Don’t forget the shops. Visitors don’t spend some time getting a shop cart and attempting to find lettuce and dishwashing liquids. But if you’re looking for everyday life, get thee to a corner store! In Paris, just understanding the way to extricate the cart from its neighbours is fun (needs an EU Buck coin deposited in a slot that enables you to turn a key unlocking a chain you get the coin back when the store gets the cart back). What’s on the shelves (nobody beats our cereal aisles), the way in which the locals buy (small amounts, and yes, the 4-euro bottle of wine flies off French shelves), the conversations, the packaging, the packed fast food, are all areas of local understanding. And naturally, being able to bring my dog into the Monoprix food store (he sat nicely in the cart) was something you’d do only in Paris!

Pedal or Bipedal Power

Wanna stop and smell the roses and kick off a conversation, read a makeshift poster, pet a dog and talk to its walker, drop in somewhere unplanned but that strikes your curiosity? Ride a bike (more and more cities have public cycle rental systems) or walk!

I’ve employed all of the techniques above at one previous point or another. Little do I know that they’ve been wrapped up and now define a new movement : slow travel.

Slow travel is an offshoot of the “slow food” movement that commenced in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome ; the idea was to instead preserve regional cuisine, local farming, communal meals and standard food preparation strategies. Today, the idea has spread into a movement, a means of living that emphasizes connection food, first, and in the case of travel, also to local peoples and cultures.

Instead of trying to squeeze as many sights or cities as possible into each trip, the slow traveler takes the time to explore each destination completely and to experience the local culture. As founder Pauline Kenny places it on her internet site SlowTrav.com, “Slow Travelers say that they do not have to see everything on one trip, that there’ll be other trips.” The key is slowing down and making the most of each moment of your holiday. You may stay in one place long enough to recognise your neighbours, shop in the local marketplaces and pick a favourite coffeehouse.

All of the above methods are a part of the movement, from finding a place to settle in for a week, to using local transit or biking, or your feet to find a way around and meet the locals, do the shopping, enjoy the common-or-garden and the night hobbies, cook the local techniques for example. And find points of interest from their perspective.

It’s not invariably straightforward : If you are shy (like me), it’ll take beating some fears to get out the door and get speaking. There might be language barriers to overcome, as well as currency conversions, size and weight conversions, getting lost, getting beat, and we are, after all Northern Americans being frustrated by all this slowness, writes tagza.com.

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