09 Dec How to Plan for a Meaningful Culture Blog

You’ve got a big vacation planned, or maybe you’ve decided that you want to live and work abroad. You’ve decided that you want to share your experiences online with the rest of the world, either through a blog or even just on your personal social media profiles. But, you don’t just want it to be a travelogue or a diary, you really want to share the culture of the place you’re going.

It can be hard to dive into the culture of a place once you get there, and after you leave, sometimes you don’t feel like you learned enough to really share cross-cultural understanding. You may get to the end of your time abroad and realize that you aren’t sure how to meaningfully talk about what your destination is really like. It becomes really easy to fall back on sharing pretty pictures and writing a travel guide instead of diving deeper.

But, if you start out your adventure with a little extra planning, it’ll make finding those cultural experiences that much easier, and sharing them more meaningful. Here are four things to include in your plans for your time abroad to make sharing culture a breeze.

Festivals and Holidays

The Dance of the Terrifying Deities is one of the main dances of the Thimphu Teschu in Bhutan. Teschus are major religious festivals that take place around the country that involved masked dances performed by monks who enter full meditation during the performance.

Check your calendar and the calendar of where you are going and see when local festivals and holidays are happening. These are the times when the local people are especially proud of their culture and show off and celebrate what is culturally significant, making it much more accessible to visitors. Even if you don’t speak the local language, have a difficult time engaging with strangers or are traveling with a group, festivals and holidays make for a sure fire way of experiencing the local culture.

The author and Kumar, her guide, at the highest point on the Annapurna Circuit. At the end of the trek, Kumar gave the author a “khata” at the end of the trek, a tradition in Tibetan Buddhism to mark ceremonial occasions.

Local Guides

Guidebooks can only give you so much information and are no replacement for the people who live in there. Many travelers are resistant to hiring guides and prefer to rely on guidebooks or travel bloggers. However, a guide can provide a window and entry into the local culture. They’ll likely be able to share some local folklore, teach you some of the local language and explain cultural customs to you. Whether it’s a one-hour city walking tour or a multi-week trek in the mountains, spending your money on a guide shows that local culture is valued, can help prevent the march of globalization and injects money directly into the local economy. You may even end up with a new friend.

Local Transport

Motorcycle taxis are common throughout Cameroon. These motos can carry a surprising amount of things on them, including an entire other motorcycle.

Renting a car, chartering a taxi or even flying around the country can often be a real bargain and make your trip more comfortable. However, such modes of transportation often isolate you from the people of the country you are visiting and prevent cross-cultural exchange. Even if it’s just once on a short trip, travel the way the locals do. You’ll get a real sense of what life is like for people who live there and may help answer some of your cultural curiosities. Push past your discomfort and you’ll end up with a great story to share.

Books

Novels, collections of folklore and memoirs from your destination, ideally by a local author, can be an invaluable way to open up new cultural experiences. Descriptions of family traditions, beloved national dishes and even attitudes and beliefs can come through in books that you may otherwise miss entirely. You’ll be able to gain a deeper understanding of the place, beyond what you are experiencing in your day to day life. Head to your local library, pick up a copy at your local bookstore or download an e-book, whichever is most convenient for your lifestyle, and I guarantee it will enhance your experiences.

Have you done any of these things during your time abroad? Tell us how they helped you gain a deeper understanding of the host culture in the comments!

This is a guest post by Christine Bedenis, a well-traveled twenty-something from the Midwest. She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Thailand), now living and working in Ghana. She was a winner of Peace Corps’s annual Blog It Home contest in 2014.