When I worked at the National Air and Space Museum, we had a thing where you could pay $6 for a small velvet drawstring bag, and you could fill it yourself from a massive tray filled with hematite-looking magnets. It was really popular with kids because it was cheap, and something about the “fill it yourself” aspect…

I think what we really need is more articles about how to deal with jealousy and negative feelings, both within ourselves and in conversation with people who make us feel negatively. Like, I'm jealous of my friend's travels, what do I DO with that? I'm tired of hearing about my friend's kid all the time, what do I say…

I just don’t think anyone on the staff really has much experience that would inform them in writing that kind of article. Which leaves open the question about why they aren't soliciting more and better outside pieces on those topics, or why they'd start a project like this without the means to see it through, but…

Every single other country I've been to, I wonder how people with disabilities just do their basic getting-around. And the answer is it's hard as fuck, and a lot of people just don't have the energy, which is why I see, for example, people on mobility scooters in the DC Metro all the time, but in 9 months only ever…

This does remind me of someone on my FB feed who wrote something like “I wonder if kids would still go to Africa to volunteer if they couldn’t Instagram about it,” or something of the sort.

Great to know the bitterness doesn't fall solely on one side of the conversation between the traveled vs. the untraveled.

I’m not totally sure, but I think it means “I can talk about my school-building trip to India for 38.27% of every conversation I have for the rest of my life, but if you so much as breathe a word about the Caribbean island-hop cruise your family took for your mom's 60th birthday, I will be writing catty shit about you…

On the other-other hand, I definitely saw Westerners in Sudan, largely in the development field, who were clearly hanging on and doing that work, which really needs to be done by the best, not out of any interest in what they were doing but because they were able to afford such a comparatively-lavish lifestyle that…

I honestly think it’s because everyone knows that one 20-year-old who went to study abroad in London and came back after 4 weeks with an accent talking about her “flat.” And that’s annoying, but it’s just a symptom of someone young experiencing something big for the first time, and it’s relatively harmless, and very…

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I agree with you 100%, but it can definitely go both ways. In Sudan, my host family had an Ethiopian servant, and she was basically part of the family in the specific sense that everyone else in the house was contributing to its upkeep, she had access to all of the public household goods, was paid, and not humiliated…

The other side of this coin is that if you’ve been somewhere for literal months, like your friend in France, it’s going to come up a lot once you get back because, um, that was your frame of reference for a pretty long time. So imagine everyone’s sitting around talking about what they did last weekend, and last…

Also people travel for work, and that's a significantly different experience than being a tourist.

Most of the time, I can’t even tell if they actually enjoyed it. That’s because most people collect passport stamps the way some people collect stamp-stamps.

To be fair, polygraphs don’t mean shit under any circumstances. They’ve never proven effective in controlled studies like those done by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences. There’s an extremely good reason why lie detector tests are not admissable as evidence in court, and it’s because…

Would you like me to scan my passport stamp?

Unless I was prescient enough to know about a crash that happened recently back in 2006, it wasn’t that one. I already said I wasn’t sure it happened in Alton Towers, but Alton Towers is the only amusement park I know the name of in the UK, so it obviously was the one that sprang to mind.

Except that I was in the UK hearing about something that happened in the UK. AND the incident you’re linking to didn’t happen until the next year.

Six Flags Kings Dominion - still not in the UK. Again, though, this sort of thing apparently happens all the time everywhere.

It was not, unless Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom was in the UK. Nice to know this kind of thing happens all the time, though.