Inpursuitof

If you really want to see a country, here’s the plan. Pick a bigish city or two, then play a little Location Roulette for the rest of your trip. Find some little-visited cityette and spend a few days there. I don’t reckon you ever need more than 3 days in a place to really get a feel for it, to know what it’s about and how it likes its coffee. Cities are kinda like art galleries, you can wander through for the best part of a day looking at everything and finding its meaning, or you can get on a determined walk and browse it in a couple of hours. I’ve never been one for looking too long at the paintings.

Best of all, if you can, stay with people in their houses. Friends, families, random people met off the internet or found on the street; stay with them, it’s infinitely better than staying in a hotel. Hotels might give you free shampoo, but homes give you so much more. There are kids to entertain and pets to cuddle, there are fridges full of half-eaten delights you won’t see in a mini-bar and, hopefully, hilarious pictures of people in their youth. You don’t often get to go grocery shopping at a supermarket in a hotel, or find out what kind of houses people live in. Hotels aren’t full of living additions to your landscape, travel companions both temporary and intransient.

So this is the summation of my limited travelling experience: choose the house with the mismatched sheets over the hotel with the identikit rooms. It will show you something worth not having egyptian cotton towels.

1) Erin, Kadin and Cameron

2) a tin of boilable treacle sponge pudding

3) a kid in a store when I tried to blag my way through liking ‘soccer’