It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.
Interpretation
Engaging with locals during travel deepens understanding and connection.
In this quote, Brandon Stanton emphasizes the richness of travel that comes from personal interaction with local people. By conversing with individuals off the beaten path, travelers can gain a deeper insight into the culture, values, and stories that shape a place beyond the typical tourist experience.
In practice
In a speech about cultural exchange, I might say, 'As Brandon Stanton suggests, immersive travel is about connecting with real people and their stories.'
When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.
Wherever I go, I just try to show normal life. If the work helps to dispel stereotypes, it's because I seek not to portray the extremities of a place, but the vast majority of people who are quite normal and are having normal life experiences.
I think that even though some of the things on 'Humans of New York' are kind of very personal and very revealing, I think the discomfort with sharing that tends to be overwritten by the appreciation of being able to distill the experience of your life into a story and share it with other people.
I always say that my favorite people to interview are the people who are at the beginning and the ends of their lives because they have two alternate perspectives of the world, and neither of them are less profound.
Somebody's willingness to let me photograph them, and willingness to tell me a story, has nothing to do with the words I say. It all has to do with the energy I'm giving off, which hopefully is very genuine, very interested energy. It's just two people having a conversation in the street. I think that's where genuine content comes from.
I love travelling full stop - so while I've had some harrowing instances, I never look at them negatively. Memories are made when you're travelling - not when you're chained to your desk.
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
Vagabonding is an attitude β a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.
The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.
This is what you do on your very first day in Paris. You get yourself, not a drizzle, but some honest-to-goodness rain, and you find yourself someone really nice and drive her through the Bois de Boulogne in a taxi. The rain's very important. That's when Paris smells its sweetest. It's the damp chestnut trees.
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