The best places to visit

Updated: 03/03/20 | March 3rd, 2020 New York City my be the city that never sleeps, but it’s definitely hard to find a (cheap) place to sleep here. Accommodation in NYC is not cheap — and it’s often hard to find deals. That’s (in part) by design. There used to be a lot of hostels in NYC, but the hotel lobby got the city to use an old law meant to block tenements and limit the number of people that could stay in a single room. This effectively shut down most of the hostels in town, except for a few that were grandfathered in. Now you’re only going to find a few hostels left. Demand outstrips supply. Even though there aren’t hundreds of hostels to choose from, there are enough to make a “best hostels in NYC” post, so you’ll know which are worth staying at (there are a few that are really terrible and to be avoided). Over the years, I’ve stayed in dozens upon dozens of places. There are a lot of things to consider when selecting a hostel....

Updated : 11/22/2018 | Original Posting: 7/2/2008 As a kid, my family went on the obligatory road trips around the United States, but we never went far from the East Coast. We’d drive down to Florida to see my grandparents, into Pennsylvania, or up around New England. The only time I’d been west of the Mississippi was on a layover in Los Angeles when I was twenty-three. Driving across America, therefore, would be my first real trip around my nation. I didn’t know what to expect. I was going to areas I only had preconceived notions about—the redneck South, the boring Midwest, the beautiful West, and the barren Southwest. Yet driving around shattered many of these ideas. During my 2006 American road trip, I learned a lot over my two months around the United States. I wanted to drive across the country before I learned I went to travel the world. I figured that if I didn’t know much about my own country, I could never really learn about the rest of the world. A good travel...

Updated : 8/9/20 | August 9th, 2020 After I wrote an article about why, despite what you see in the news, Europe is safe to visit, Someone asked (with a degree of snark) if I would write a similar article about the U.S. too? Well, it’s a valid question. As an American writing for a mostly American audience, I tend to write mostly about what’s beyond our shores. But I have thought about this question before – especially since 45% of the people who read this website are outside the United States. So let’s turn the tables on my post and ask: “Is the United States safe to visit?” When most people ask me this question, I feel they are really asking me two things: (1) Does gun violence happen so often I should worry about being shot? and (2) Will everyone hate me because I’m a foreigner (or, especially, a non-white foreigner)? These are valid concerns. After all, just like how we in the United States have a perception that the rest of the world is unsafe and unwelcoming, so too the ...