The places most people only read about turn out to be exactly what they promised — and also something else entirely.
Notre-Dame in Paris, the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, the Roman Forum in Rome: yes, we have stood in all of them, and they are as extraordinary as advertised. But the texture of travel — what actually stays with you, what shifts how you see — lives in the moments between the monuments. The jambon-beurre eaten on a warm baguette beneath slate mansard rooftops and wrought-iron balconies on a Paris side street. The artists painting in Place du Tertre on the hill of Montmartre, carrying on a tradition woven so deeply into the city’s identity that it has survived every reinvention of the neighborhood around it.
France keeps revealing itself the further you move from Paris. The châteaux of the Loire Valley — each one a different argument about power and beauty and the relationship between a building and its landscape. The Gallo-Roman ruins of Lyon and Vienne, where two thousand years of civic life compressed into a river town make the concept of architectural continuity suddenly legible. The half-timbered villages and canal-laced streets of Strasbourg and Colmar in Alsace, where the Franco-German border runs through the cuisine and the architecture simultaneously, producing something that belongs fully to neither country and entirely to both.
In Spain we have tasted the difference between traditional paella in Valencia and the versions served elsewhere — a difference that turns out to be significant, rooted in what grows in the Albufera lagoon south of the city. We have wandered Girona’s narrow stone passageways in the Jewish quarter of Barri Vell, followed the medieval walls with the Pyrenees rising behind the city, traveled the Mediterranean coastline by train, and driven the winding roads of the Costa Brava. Each path leads deeper into a layered heritage that the country wears visibly, in its streets and its food and its collective memory.
In Italy we have sipped Barolo in Turin and Montepulciano in Florence, crossed the north by rail to find true pasta bolognese in Bologna — which is to say, a dish that bears almost no resemblance to its international interpretations — met a Venetian craftsman shaping leather by hand in a workshop that could have existed in any century, and climbed into the Alps above Innsbruck before returning to the Inn River for knödel and tafelspitz on a cold afternoon.
And then there are the smaller discoveries that accumulate into something larger. That Belgian frites are always served with mayonnaise, not ketchup, and that this is not a preference but a considered position. That haring in Amsterdam — fresh herring eaten from a small stand, held by the tail — is as clean and precise as good sushi, and that the Dutch have been perfecting it for five hundred years. That Delft’s blue-and-white ceramics began as a Dutch response to Chinese porcelain, which is to say that what looks like pure local tradition turns out to be a record of global exchange.
This is why I travel. Not to see the world as it appears in photographs — though the photographs are often accurate — but to understand how it actually works: how geography becomes flavor, how history becomes space, how a border running through a village produces a cuisine that neither side of the border claims fully. Travel, for me, is not escape. It is expansion — the widening of the frame through which I understand place, culture, and connection. It informs how I design, how I observe, how I write. Every trip changes what I see when I come home.
Understanding, I have found, creates appreciation. And appreciation, over time, creates something closer to belonging — even in places that are not yours, even in languages you are still learning, even at a table where you order by pointing and hope for the best.
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