Strangers Abroad

It isn't about the destination, it’s about the journey is one of the most overused, cliche, eye-roll sayings around travel. But it reminds us to not take for granted what gets us from point A to point B. The buses, the planes, the cars, the trains, the conductors and all of the wonderful and weird people you met along the way.    But it is when we are on the move when we see the things we didn’t expect. The goat trees in morocco, the base of the Italian Alps, or meet you new travel buddy for the next week. There is some kind of magic that happens when we remove ourselves from comforts and willingly throw ourselves out into the abyss.   Featured Guests: Everything Everywhere, Women on the Road, Sidewalk Safari, Why Wait to See the World

Travel has a way of redefining our romantic needs and helps us expand more than our horizons.  What can travel tell us about this silent connection. An eye glance or whiff of someone's pheromones can magnetize us to someone we might not normally be attracted to. We will talk to travelers who adjust their romantic needs, desire, chemistry, and commitment. Put some headphones in, this episode is not safe for work.    Featured Guests: Jamie Brickhouse, Authentic Asheville, Brad Lawrence 

The whiff of challah bread or bite into roasted corn can transport you back to journeys you had long ago. Nothing like food can stir a deep hunger within us to trekk thousands of miles to find the perfect spring roll.  It not only motivates our travels but helps us understand where we are and who we are with. Invisible lines portion Moroccan tagine dishes, slurping noodles loudly is a high complement in Japan, while Mexicans are unable to eat anything without salsa on it. When we sit down at someone else's kitchen, we aren’t just enjoying their food we are enjoying their perspective on how to nourish our bodies.  Food is an essential ingredient to having a rich experience abroad. It expands more than our waistlines. It expands how we understand each other and the cosmic soup we are all simmering in.  Featured Guests: Dan Pashman ( The Sporkful), Jonathan Berg ( Master Chef) Daryl and Mindy Hirsch ( Two Food Trippers), Chris Lueke ( Pubcast World Wide), Ubish Yaren ( Cultura Nacional) 

Now comes the time that most travelers anticipate the most: the wandering. The musing through streets for hours, the hidden staircases, the gardens behind bookstores, and random conversations with locals. All of the things we find outside of the guide book make our trip. We enjoyed these surprises more because we had no expectation to find them. And arriving with expectations can only lead you to disappointment.   Featured Guests: Amateur Traveler, Travels of Adam, Far From Home, Jessie Owens

Travel is the truest test of a relationship. It bonds unlikely people together and tests old relationships. It puts it to the test and finds the weak spots in a relationship like a raccoon sitting on a chicken coop, trying to find the weak spots.  But it also bonds you in ways that you couldn’t have imagined. In this podcast episode, we are traveling with others. We will talk to travelers who have had their minds expanded, their relationships shift, and hearts grown because they traveled with others. Featured Guests: 2TravelDads, Strangers Abroad Listeners, Ambitious Trekker, Stranger Abroad Host's Travel Wife 

Out of all the states that we will travel to, traveling alone usually brings up the most trepidation in people. To many, that idea seems as foreign as the places they want to travel to. Why would you do anything alone? Why not just wait for someone? But that underlying fear might be because solitude is often misinterpreted as loneliness. Both mental states are present but we only have to entertain one. When we travel alone, we have conversations with ourselves that we can’t have when others are around.    It offers a clear connection between our inner monologue and the solitude teaches us how to talk back. We could drown in a pool of our own loneliness or feel emboldened by the solitude.   Featured Guests: Andrew McGill  Julia Bainbridge  J. Harvey- My Normal Gay Life  Adventurous Kate

One of the largest plights of traveling is not knowing exactly where you are. It doesn’t matter how many websites you have on a travel board on Pinterest or how long you have stared at Google Maps, once you land it is easy to take a wrong turn.  Your internal GPS glitches out because you have no idea where you are.  Nothing is familiar. Everything is novel. Which makes it easier to get turned around.  And while we are exploring, we are bound to loose a few things along the way. A backpack, hostel keys, or favorite pair of earrings. Pieces of us go missing and found in other people's way.  But it isn’t just a physical location or losing an object that gives us a sense of misdirection, sometimes we feel lost in life. Our compasses can be demagnetized, and we use travel as an escape to figure out where we need to be going.    Today on the episode, we are lost. Travelers will tell us stories about being disoriented in every sense of the word. We will lose important objects, get turned around, be lost in translati

Our identities shift when we go abroad. When we leave the familiar surroundings of home, we start to see ourselves from a new light and angle of the sun. What will going abroad show us about ourselves that we couldn't see and help us take control of our own identities? Guest Travelers: Michelle Carlo, Tayo Rockson, Vanessa Valeria, Alexandra Tracy, Eric Trules

This mini episode is the prologue to the second season of Strangers Abroad.    We all experience moments of anxiety during or around the planning of our trip .    The planning.    The packing.    The waiting.    And then the day arrives when our flight is about to take off. Carry us to far off corners of the world. Maybe new adventures or repeating affairs.    But that anxiety doesn’t leave.    Getting to the airport.  Going through check-in,  security,  finding the gate, smooshing yourself onto the plane  and finding your seat.    But then there is the fear of leaving all that you once knew.  Saying goodbye to loved ones. Putting your normal life on pause.  Every familiar sound, smell, and comfort will be thousands of miles away, and you don't know what you are getting yourself into.    This episode explores the stages of anxiety we experience before we take off and how to buckle up for what is coming next.

This is a sample clip of Strangers Abroad by Adrien Behn

Three years ago, I was sitting on an uninspired carpet on my living room floor in Portland,OR and was planning my trip for Latin America. I was living in a sterol apartment with a partner who didn’t understand me, a job that was exhausting my passions, and a parasitic feelings of having no direction, which would leave me crying on that irksome carpet. I had always used travel to run away from my problems and knew I needed to leave. So I as was sitting on my plasticy couch and I started off at the uninterested walls of my apartment, I thought about how could I document what was about to happen, and I had been listening to podcasts non-stop at my baking job and thought “maybe I could start one?” Listen to our season finally to see if we have learned what we set out to find.

I met Doron at the beginning of his journey and in my last days of traveling. Although we were at the opposite ends of travel, we still shared one striking commonality: home. Where he had been walking around just hours earlier, was a place I hadn’t stood on in months and while he was ready to jump out into the big wide world, I was ready to cozy up in a familiar bed. Our conversation happens when we are back in New York and we discuss the relationship between home and the world and how leaving home can helps you discover who you are when it isn’t coddling you. In this episode, we reflect on the benefits of long term backpacking, why he feels connected when he is alone in nature, and why home tastes sweeter when you have been gone for a while.

Blanca, from Spain, and I met at the top of a mountain overlooking Machu Picchu. I know how that sounds. As we walked around the town of Machu Picchu, I was immediately captivated with her storytelling of the ancient man mad feat and with stories from her adventures around the world. At the time, her and her partner, Heiko, from Germany were traveling for a year, dividing their time between Latin America and Asia. She tells us all the areas that surprised her, aspects she has learned about herself and relationship with her partner, and how the world still has lessons to teach her.

On the morning of my father's 58th birthday, I woke up at 4 in the morning on a full bed next to an Austrian boy I had met 16 hours ago in the middle of the Andes. Thomas hopping into the bus within the first few moments of beginning my trek to Machu Picchu. Thomas hoped into the bus and I were the first on a bus from Cusco to Hydroelectric. He was young and present, one of the most mindful people I had met. We kept each other company while enduring a 6 hour whiplash of a ride throughout the Andes. That ride was one of the most diverse of rides I had ever taken as I witnessed how the temperature can so quickly contradict itself, constantly switching between elevation and landscape. At some points, you are surrounded by snow, and then 30 minutes later you could be in a lush forest crossing over a waterfall. Once we got off the bus, we walked for two hours along the train tracks that would bring us to Aguascalientes or the entrance to Machu Picchu. He was someone I quickly felt comfortable walking in silence wi

Matt and I met under extreme circumstances on evening when we were trapped inside of the chocolate shop due to aggressive protests in the streets of Arequipa, Peru. We were stuck in the cafe for a few hours, and being the only Americans, it was an opportunity for Matt and I to reflect upon our culture and country. We continued the conversation once it was safe to leave the cafe, and Matt and I found a restaurant still open and our conversation floated between our country, traveling to less developed countries, and why he was in Peru in the first place. He was doing a motorcycle trip around the “Gringo trail”, which is a path in Peru in the shape of a triangle from Arequipa, Cusco, and Lima, which hits all the big tourist attractions of the country but allows him to ride along the often unseen corners of the country. Matt uses motorcycling not as a way to see all of the landscape quickly but to explore the topography of himself. He casually mentioned that he works in Hollywood and has worked on several blockbu

Cindy was my Spanish tutor whom I met through Thomas ( from the previous episode) who worked with him through HOOP- the non-for-profit that provides lower-income students with opportunities for higher learning. Cindy’s primary job was to teach English to children living in lower socioeconomic areas and provide them with the tools to learn English and other languages.  I needed a teacher who wouldn’t judge me for the eclectic Spanish I had learned over my months of traveling throughout different Spanish speaking countries and inconsistent studying. As my Spanish improved, Cindy’s story became clearer and I she taught me more than just her language- the history and problems of her country, the gender inequality, and the day to day musings of living in Peru, which is what we discuss here in this episode. Forgive the screeching of cars and the shouts of Spanish in the background- you are getting the live action soundtrack to Arequipa Peru. Here is her story.

Thomas, from England, and I met at my first “hangover ceviche” which was always the Sunday morning after a late night of dancing and drinking around Arequipa. He mentioned to the table that a wonderful coworker was teaching him Spanish, and it was refreshing to hear another English speaker find it important to learn the countries language, while so many refuse to put in the effort. Shouting over clinking plates, in between bites of octopus in chimichurri and lime soaked fish, I asked what he was doing in Arequipa and he mentioned that he was working for a non-for profit called HOOP that focused on afterschool programs for underprivileged children in the outskirts of the city. I loved his straight-forward sensibility about social justice, as if it should be a logical default for everyone to practice. Together, we discuss why he chose to leave his corporate job to work for an NGO Abroad, how living in Peru had changed him, and how he had translated his privilege in the world and chooses to use it for the benefi

Rodrigo was a local Peruvian teen who worked at Chaq Chau. While working together, we would do our own twist on language exchange: he helped me with my spanish slang and I helped him create clever DJ names in english. He was always wonderful to talk to about Peruvian culture, identity, and history. But as much as he loves his home country, working in a community of travelers has fed a growing desire to go out and travel around the world. In this episode, we discuss what it is like to grow up in Peru, how working in an expat community has influenced his identity, perception of his own culture, and future goals to explore the world. We get the chance to talk to someone who is still untouched from the changes of travel, but I admire Rodrigo's ambitions to see what lies beyond his homeland and hope his desire to learn never leaves him.

If you have ever had any hesitations about traveling- I highly suggest you listen to this episode. Michelle is the archetypal advocate for long distance travel and is brimming with enthusiasm over the challenges, uncomfortableness, and struggles one experiences while traveling abroad, which to many may seem bizarre. Michelle is an individual who lives wholeheartedly and embraces the growth that comes with the challenge- discussing alternative opinions, getting sick, eating new foods, or dancing to a new rhythm- Michelle is her truest self when traveling and is in alignment with this podcasts philosophy- you don’t know who you are or what the world has to offer until you go out and find it for yourself.

Despising the complacency that is socialized into Italian youth, Rachel from Milan willingly thrusts herself out of her comfort zone which pushes her to rethink who she wants to be in the world. I vividly remember one time while eating alfajores, having one of the best conversations about how we have used our mothers as an example of what not to do (I love my mother, I come from a line of weird and wild women) and we talked about how our mothers were never challenged to push outside of normalized gender roles the way that we, millennial women are now encouraged. How our mothers were limited in the opportunities and expected to just follow the fold, even though they are both so much more than that. I remember feeling a sense of connection with her when she said, “If I don’t leave, I don’t become a better person and I would be restless.”