Traveling for Dummies: Preparing for Your Trip the Nerd Way (Doing Your Cultural Research)

A few weeks ago, I went to a presentation given by Ed Fuller, author of You Can’t Lead with Your Feet on the Desk. (It was a work thing.) He has spent a couple of decades building business relationships all over the world. During his presentation, he said something that I’ve always taken for granted (paraphrased): “When you travel to a foreign country, study its history. In it, you’ll find the passion of the people.” This made me wonder: how often to travelers study the culture of the place they’re visiting?

Upon some further research (asking people I know; highly scientific, indeed), I discovered that apparently I’m in the nerd minority. I almost always do cultural research before heading abroad. Even when I only had three weeks to plan for the Danube Adventure, I still managed to squeeze a viewing of Amadeus and download some Strauss to my iPod. Bex and I took turns on train rides reading about the history and customs of the people on our itinerary.

Bex and I are going to Russia. Oh, didn’t you hear? Yeah. X10 is coming too. We’ve been planning it casually since before the Danube Adventure (when I did some in-depth research on a real-life Russian!); and formally since about January. Trust me, there will be some nerd statistics in a future blog post. But the gift of time has allowed me to fully immerse myself in Russian cultural history.

So this is what y’all should do:

* Check out the Frommers recommendations: After the Rick books, the Frommers guides are my faves. They’re not heavy or huge (in general), and they have great cultural research recommendations! If you look on their website, in the “In Depth” section of your destination (try the country one before a city one; they’re more likely to have this), there’s a “Recommended Books and Films” section. Which leads to the next suggestion…

* Read books. Really, you should just read Crime and Punishment anyway; it’s friggin’ awesome. When reading some of a culture’s best-known literature, you’ll find the pulse of that culture. Or at the very least, you’ll be familiar with something that most members of that culture are familiar with. Can you imagine how much cooler it is to walk around certain neighborhoods in London with a healthy knowledge of Dickens under your belt? And to drive through the moors of Yorkshire after reading Jane Eyre? It’s amazing!

I dare someone to read Samuel Johnson’s dictionary as cultural research for England.

* See movies. Go to the filming locations on IMDB section if you’re stumped at first. Or if you don’t have time to read biographies or novels from that country, watch biopics or film adaptations. It’s the cheater’s way, but it’s better than nothing.

* Look at art. If you’re going to spend hours slogging through the world’s great art museums, knowing a little bit about the artist or other artists of the same time period will add a lot of richness to the experience.

* Look at buildings and study major architects. For the same reasons as the art thing. Also, this way, you will be more astounded by buildings you see walking down the street, and not just the major monuments.

* Wikipedia famous people: Who is the most famous actor in the world? There’s a very good argument for Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood star with over 150 movies under his belt. To quote this article:

… Does he find it strange that in India millions of people would do penance for him yet 90% of the world doesn’t know who he is? “No,” he shrugs. He looks to an aide: “In India, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wouldn’t be recognised in most places.”

If you’re going to India, you better darn well know who Amitabh Bachchan is. And Shah Rukh Khan, ‘cause he’s the freakin’ MAN.

* There’s a line of audio lectures by The Teaching Company that are super awesome for preparing for a trip. These audiobooks are readily available at libraries, so you don’t necessarily need to fork out the money to buy them (they are rather expensive). There’s a huge history section, as well as language and politics sections. They are as broad as “A Brief History of the World” and as specific as “The American Revolution” and “Churchill.”

In preparation for the Russia trip, I checked out “Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life.” Because I have neither the time nor inclination to read Gulag Archipelago (I’ll take my darkness in the form of Dostoevsky and biographies on Stalin, thank you very much), I listened to the entry on it, summed up in a tidy half-hour.

Imagine these two scenarios:

Scenario #1: There we are, me and Bex and X10, standing tired and cranky in a gigantic ballroom with gilded columns and tiled floors. We look bored. X10 says, “Why are we here again?” “It’s the Winter Palace,” I say, “and it’s, like, big and stuff.”

Scenario #2: There we are, in the same room, still a bit tired ‘cause we’re jet-lagged and have already walked a mile inside this building. Bex is saying how this is the room in Russian Ark where the Shah’s ambassador is presenting himself to the tsar, and I’m talking about how this room was originally built by Empress Elizabeth and then burned down later, and X10 is firing up the iPod Touch so we can play “Once Upon a December” and waltz around the room like in Anastasia.

Which sounds more fun?