Exploring the World
I sometimes like to offer my readers a “behind the scenes” look at my web sites. It can be interesting, for example, to see which articles are the most popular (as measured by page views), and compare that to which articles you have enjoyed the most. Also, if you see that something is popular which you haven’t read yet, you might want to check it out to see what you’re missing! Continue reading “2019 Year in Review”
For various reasons, I didn’t add as many new blog posts in 2019 as I wanted to. I added a total of 15 new items, and I would have preferred to add something at least once every 2 weeks, if not more often. 
But, there were good reasons Continue reading “When Life Gets in the Way of Blogging – A Look Back at 2019”
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I think tourists, digital nomads, expatriates, and travel bloggers often forget this important point. When we travel, we are guests in somebody else’s homeland. I have seen some travel blogs that made me wince, due to how disrespectfully the authors write about places they have visited. Some talked about trying to worm their way into private spaces uninvited, some mocked local food or customs, some focused on difficulties they encountered, etc.
You might have noticed that here on this blog, I try to focus on the positive aspects of the places I have visited. I do, of course, notice negative things too, and yes, I too have had some bad experiences. I just choose not to write about them in my blog.
One issue is that most of the bad experiences I’ve had traveling are also things that could happen here in the U.S. such as sexual harassment, bad traffic, etc. It would be hypocritical to criticize someone else’s home when mine has the same issues.
As for mocking a local culture’s way of doing things, I think that mocking is immature behavior. It shows a lack of empathy, and usually its purpose is attention-seeking, as the person doing it is trying to make themselves look clever or witty by denigrating someone else.
Also, people from other countries could legitimately find things to criticize about the place where I live, and I’d feel kind of sad to see something rude written about my home town — even when I realize it’s true. So I when I write my blog entries, I try to treat the places I’ve visited according to how I’d like to see visitors treat my home when they write about it.
When I write about the people I’ve encountered, I always think, “What if that person reads what I’ve written? What emotion will they feel reading it, and is that the emotion the one I would want them to feel?”
There are many aspects of any culture that can make travelers uncomfortable: what kind of attire people wear in daily lives, what people eat and drink, how traffic operates, negotiating prices on purchases, unfamiliar language, and more. But… if we want to wear what we normally wear, eat what we normally eat, and so on, then why travel? Why not stay home where we can surround ourselves with our own ideas of comfort?
We tend to find what we’re looking for. If we look for beauty and joy, we’ll find it. On the other hand, if we look for something to mock or criticize, we’ll find that. It’s more fun to look for beauty and joy, so that’s where I put my energy.
Sometimes I go back and update old blog posts. This can happen if I get new information, new photos, or need to correct old information.
I just spent a month in Egypt. I took more photos and learned new stuff. So I’m adding my new material back into older blog entries.
Here are ones I’ve recently updated:
I have more updates planned. But I invite you to check these out for now, and I’ll post again when I have more ready to look at.
You might be wondering why I haven’t posted any new blog entries lately. It’s because I broke my wrist on November 16, 2018. Ice was involved.
I had to cancel the trip to Egypt I had planned for December 1-17. It’s disappointing, I’d planned to include some adventures in that trip that would have been new to me, such as visiting the Siwa Oasis.
It hasn’t been easy to type in my current condition, therefore I haven’t been creating new blog entries. Expect something new from me soon, once I have healed a little more.
Whenever I tell friends and family that I’m planning another trip to Egypt, one of the first questions they ask is, “Is it safe to go there?” I’d like to share my thoughts on that.
Many years ago, in the U.S., there was a series of attacks on European tourists in Florida. Around that time, my employer was organizing a business meeting in California. My European colleagues told me that they were afraid to come to the meeting because the U.S. was unsafe for European visitors. I was shocked by this comment. Florida was 3,000 miles (4,900 km) away from California where we were planning to hold our meeting. I couldn’t understand why Europeans would think events in Florida would have any relation at all to California.
But now, I see that these fears are very common. That’s exactly the same thought process people in North America use when they say they’re afraid to go to Egypt.
When bad things happen somewhere, news media will report on them. The more dramatic or painful the story, the more likely it will be reported in news media around the world. We see the stories about the exceptions, not the normal everyday situation. Headlines such as “Another Peaceful Day in Cairo” don’t draw readers, whereas news of a violent incident does.
The Gallup Global Law and Order poll in 2018 showed that the people it surveyed ranked Egypt as the 16th safest country in the world, compared to the USA, which was ranked at 35. The poll asked whether people felt safe walking at night, and whether they had been victims of crime.
I live in a somewhat small city in the U.S., a metropolitan area of only 171,000 people. In 1991, we had an incident in which a shooter killed 5 people before killing himself. In 2018, a man kidnapped and killed Mollie Tibbetts at Brooklyn, Iowa, a town whose population is under 2,000. Clearly, staying home is no guarantee of safety.
Whenever I go anywhere as a tourist, I tend to exercise more caution than I do at home. At home, I am very familiar with what level of safety precautions are typically needed. When I travel, I’m less familiar with the area, so it seems sensible to take extra care. This is true regardless of whether I’m going to Cairo, San Francisco, or any other place.
Even though I tend to stay alert to personal safety issues and avoid taking unnecessary risks when I travel, I do feel safe when I go to Egypt. If I stayed home, there’d still be some risk of car accidents, violence, tornadoes, an unexpected health problem, and other dangers. Safety is not guaranteed anywhere. Therefore, I choose to embrace travel to Egypt, a country I have come to love.
Because of spending a month in Senegal in October 2017, I came to feel a real appreciation for the country and its people. Once I start to feel that level of connection, I find myself wanting to go back, and I do feel that pull to return to Senegal for a visit.
What would I do if I went back for a visit? This is my wish list. I really don’t think it would be feasible to do all of these things in a single visit, but I would enjoy doing what I can!
Will I actually go? It’s hard to say. I’d like to have at least one travel companion that I can dine with, plan with, and share the experience with. I also would need to figure out how it fits into everything else going on in my life. For now, it’s on the back burner. But life can take interesting directions, and if the right opportunity were to present itself, I’d be happy to return.
When I originally decided to start this site, I visited some other travel blogs to see what they were like. I needed to create some kind of online journal as part of my job responsibility for the month I spent in Senegal with the IBM Corporate Service Corps. IBM lets participants decide what specific approach to take, so long as we create something. I chose to use this as a starting point for a more general travel blog that would talk about not only my month in Senegal, but also other places I visit.
I noticed that most of the blogs I looked at fell into one of these categories:
I gave some thought to where I wanted to fit in, and proceeded accordingly.
I started by posting photos of things I had seen with some narrative about the content of the photos. It was a good place to start, but it felt a bit superficial to me. I wanted to offer more of a back story that would show why I thought the topic of the photo was interesting enough to write about.
I experimented with adding my personal impressions and experiences to tell a story, but didn’t want to go too far down the path of centering myself in a story about somebody else’s homeland. Also, I want to be respectful in how I talk about the people I meet and their culture, so I think carefully before writing about my personal reactions to things. I try to imagine how one of the people I’m writing about would feel if they were to read it. Something that looks like a funny story to me might look insulting to people whose homeland I’m writing about.
At this point in time, I have not monetized my blog and I don’t have any plans to. I suppose it could happen in the future, it’s just not where my priorities lie today. I do know this – if I do monetize the blog, I will include only affiliate links for products I have personally tried and liked.
Now that I have been doing this for 8 months, I’m feeling comfortable that I have found my voice as a travel blogger.
I like taking photos and sharing them, so I’ll keep doing that. I like exploring only one topic per blog entry, featuring multiple photos related to that topic. For example, I created a post about the Agricultural Museum in Cairo specifically centered around the diorama showing a rural wedding celebration. There are many other exhibits in the museum, but I wanted to keep that post focused on the topic of the wedding. I may decide to post other photos of other exhibits from that museum in the future.
I have decided I want to try to include background about the subject of the photo that will go a little deeper than what a typical guidebook might tell you, especially with respect to history and culture. For example, when I posted my blog entry about the tannoura whirling shows in Cairo, I offered a bit of background about the history behind Sufi whirling and the form it takes in Egypt.
