No one on this plane is here for the plane.

We have each spent a great deal of money specifically to be somewhere else. But to get there, we must first sit still for thirteen hours in a sealed tube with two hundred strangers.

On the way in, we passed a flight attendant with a tray of champagne, smiling, but making a private guess about which direction we would turn. I turn right. I always turn right. Half of Economy appears to have boarded directly from bed. A woman is wearing what looks like patterned pajamas. A man dressed like Adam Sandler is standing in the aisle trying to figure out which of his ten cords he needs to have with him in his seat.

By the time I reach 40C, my overhead bin space has been taken by someone three rows ahead who brought a bag the exact dimensions of a small refrigerator. There is nothing to be done about this. We are a miniature society now, and the injustices began before takeoff.

The first hour is administrative. We adjust our screens and scroll through the entertainment library with initial contentment, but we will change our minds at least twice before the drink cart arrives. There are three hundred options on this flight today, but I know that ultimately, what I will watch is whatever the person diagonally in front of me chooses.

Someone nearby has already pressed play, which is a bold decision given that their film is about to be interrupted by a safety video in which Kevin Hart screams at two people sitting in safari chairs in ‘Nairobi’ about how to fasten a seatbelt.

When the seatbelt sign goes off, the cabin reshuffles. This is when people reveal what kind of long-haul passenger they are.

There is the man in 38D who reclines his seat the moment it becomes legal to do so with such force that it almost hits the head of the woman sitting behind him. Her options for the flight are now limited. Her screen is twelve inches from her face. She can no longer reach into her seatback pocket or eat without holding a scalding aluminum dish. She will remember this for the duration of the flight and possibly longer.

The meal cart appears two hours in. You can hear it banging into passengers’ knees before you see it, and the sound causes the entire cabin to sit up slightly, like meerkats detecting motion on the savanna. A flight attendant leans in and asks the question that will define the next twenty minutes of your life.

“Chicken or pasta?”

This is not a real choice. The chicken is a portion of protein in a brownish sauce that could be curry, could be gravy, or could be both, seasoned with what feels like an entire day's worth of sodium. The pasta is the other option. Both come with a bread roll that requires enough force to open that you risk elbowing your seatmate. From behind the curtain up front, there is the faint clink of actual silverware.

After the meal, the cabin goes dark, and the window shades come down. This is supposed to be the sleeping portion of the flight, and the airline does everything it can to suggest that sleeping on a plane is a normal thing that normal people do. They dim the lights and lower the temperature to something that feels hostile. They hand out thin blankets that cover either your shoulders or your feet, but never both.

I watch people attempt sleep in ways that would concern a physician. One man is folded over his tray table like a student who has given up during an exam. A child three rows back is fully unconscious, limbs splayed, sleeping better than any of us have slept in years. This is the last time in his life he will find an economy seat comfortable, and he doesn’t know it.

There are four lavatories for roughly two hundred people, and a line forms after the meals. We stand in the galley area, swaying gently, avoiding eye contact, pretending we are not all here for the same reason. A man joins the line in socks. He has made a decision, and it is not one I would have made; it is not one any person should ever make. Each time the door opens, the person leaving holds it for the person waiting with a politeness that suggests they feel guilty about something, though what exactly is left for the next passenger to figure out.

Around hour nine, the cabin enters a strange limbo. The lights are still off, but no one is sleeping anymore. People are staring at their screens in the dark, or at the flight map, watching the small plane icon inch across a blue ocean at a speed that makes you wonder whether the plane is moving at all. Someone three rows ahead has turned on their overhead reading light, illuminating nine seats in every direction. They are reading a paperback. They do not care. Others are walking the length of the aisle with no destination, just movement for its own sake, pacing the cabin slowly, bumping every aisle seat on the way past.

Somewhere around hour eleven, the cabin lights come back on. The second meal arrives shortly after. It is smaller than the first and served in a cardboard box. A man eats his while standing in the aisle, stretching his calves. No one finds this unusual.

The plane begins its descent. One person along the windows does not move. They were asleep before the lights came on and they are asleep now, almost certainly on something pharmaceutical. A flight attendant taps their shoulder and waits while they figure out which continent they are on before asking them to lift their shade.

The wheels touch, and a phone rings somewhere behind me at a volume that suggests the caller has been trying for thirteen hours straight and finally got through. The passenger answers. “Yeah, we just landed,” they say, and then begin to describe the flight before pausing and saying “Chicken.”

We file off the plane and into a terminal that looks exactly like the one we left. For a moment, it is not clear that we have gone anywhere at all. Then the signs are in another language, and we remember why we did this. 💺

Did you notice something else on the flight? Share it in the comments.

(You can also join me at the hotel breakfast buffet or booking a cheap flight)

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The Stage is a viewing platform at the top of a tower on the Bund, and on a clear night in January the wind off the Huangpu will cut through whatever you are wearing. I stood there on my first night back, after six years away, on a building that didn’t exist back then, and looked east across the river at the Pudong skyline I had helped build a part of, back when I was working in the industry that built it, for clients that no longer exist. The light show that now runs across the Pudong facades at scheduled intervals was smaller when I lived here and not the synchronized production it had become. The Bund below me was bathed in its yellow light, the colonial buildings glowing the way they have for as long as I have known them, and behind them, to the west, the city stretched out dark and dense and illegible. I could not see the old neighborhoods from up there. What had happened to them would take a long walk to understand.

I moved to Shanghai in 2011. I came for a job I had not expected to be offered and stayed for five years, working with local governments and developers to turn neighborhoods into construction sites across the country. I kept coming back after I moved away, and then in early 2020, the borders closed and stayed closed for four years. In March of 2022, the Shanghai municipal government imposed a lockdown on the city’s twenty-five million residents that would last more than two months, confining entire districts to their apartments, and leaving a mark on the people who endured it that none of my friends, six years on, seemed eager to discuss. I booked a trip for 2025 and canceled it from a hospital bed. When I boarded a flight to Pudong in January of 2026, I knew that every map I carried in my head was out of date.

The next morning, I headed toward M50, the gallery complex on the north bank of Suzhou Creek, to visit one of my favorite artists. The streets were different before I got there. Electric cars had overtaken gasoline cars by a ratio I stopped trying to estimate, and the new EV plates — a gradient of green into white — had replaced the blue and white gasoline plates that used to be auctioned for amounts greater than a hundred thousand yuan by the time I left. At intersections where I would have heard idling engines and horn blasts, I could now hear birdsong. The mopeds that used to swarm through red lights lined up in designated lanes. The city was quieter than the one I had left, and more orderly, in every direction I looked, than I had thought Shanghai could become.

After M50, I walked along Suzhou Creek. The creek had been an open drain for most of the time I had known it, and the banks had been a maze of material wholesalers and workshops where I used to bike at night past men pushing handcarts and women sorting metal in the cones of streetlamps. I had loved it for the same reasons it was unpleasant. The city had spent the better part of a decade on a master plan1 to convert the banks into continuous public space, and what the creek is now is a promenade connecting small parks and new developments along clean water where more than forty species of fish have returned. I walked past joggers on rubber pathways, past benches facing the water, and did not see anyone collecting cardboard. What I did see, on poles at head height every hundred meters or so, were cameras.2

As I walked through Jing’an, I passed a series of signs mounted on the fences of residential compounds. They were official, and they addressed the pedestrian directly. One urged “considerate tourism.” Another promoted “courteous traffic behavior.” A third instructed residents on “proper waste sorting.” Each came with a cute cartoon illustration, and people were following the suggestions. At crosswalks, people would stand and wait for a light to change while no cars were coming. Nobody was spitting on the pavement. The whole city had become orderly in a way that I registered somewhere between admiration and unease — admiration because the results were real, unease because I could see the cameras on the poles above the signs, and I understood that the suggestions might not be entirely voluntary.

Most of my old haunts were gone, but that was expected. In the five years I had lived here, I had learned not to grow attached to any particular restaurant or bar, because a place could close without warning and reopen as something else within a week. What I had not expected was what had replaced them. When I lived in Shanghai, the foreign concession streets had catered heavily to foreigners and to a local clientele that looked to the West for its references — Yongkang Road, the bar street that exploded the year I arrived and was shut down the year I left, had been ninety percent foreigner-owned, and on summer nights the residents in the apartments above would dump buckets of water onto the crowd to get us to leave.

The places I was walking past now were different. They were Chinese-owned, Chinese-designed, and had a confidence to them that I had not seen before in this city. For as long as I had known Shanghai, the design standard for anything hip had come from somewhere. These places, however, were not running behind anyone. The signage, the interiors, the way they presented themselves felt like they had come from Shanghai and nowhere else, and they were as good as anything I had seen anywhere. Many of them were coffee shops. Shanghai now has more than nine thousand3, more than London or New York or Tokyo, and in 2025 a Shanghai barista won the World Brewers Cup. The city had built an entire coffee culture in the six years I was gone.

I walked south from Jing’an into the former French Concession. Fumin Road was also different — more small shops and eateries than I remembered, a street that had found its next life while I was gone. I stopped in a tea store and spoke to the owner, who had been on this block for twenty-five years. Over a cup of tea, he told me how the street had recently become one of the new destination streets in the city, the way Yongkang Road or Maoming Road had been in their time. He was still selling his teas, but he had expanded his range to include essential oils and other products that catered to the young hip local crowd now coming through. Outside, the London plane trees along the concession streets had been trimmed back for winter, and without their canopy I could see the architecture behind them — the upper stories of the old apartment blocks, the cornices and ironwork. The harsh pruning had bothered me when I first moved here, all those beautiful trees cut to stubs every winter, but over the years I had learned to love the way it worked — how six months of bare branches let you see the buildings, and six months of full canopy hid them again, and the city kept moving between what was visible and what was covered.

Near the corner of Julu Road and Fumin Road, I passed a mural painted across the sealed ground floor of an old building. It depicted a café with a striped awning, an open sign in the window, and a beer menu with prices in American dollars. It was charming. I took a photograph and kept walking.

A few blocks on, I noticed another one. A woman running on a beach with her dog, a cartoon shark in the surf. Then another. I started photographing all of them, because this was the kind of thing I used to send to friends when I lived here — look what they’re doing now — and because I wanted to know who was painting them. There were dozens. They were all different. Some were playful, some were nostalgic, but whoever had done them was seemingly very busy.

I spent most of the morning like this, walking and photographing, not following any route but instead cutting south through on the back streets I used to wander through aimlessly, past my first apartment, through Tianzifang, which was still there but hollowed out in the way that tourist precincts hollow out when the artists leave and the postcards stay. I was not yet paying attention to what was behind the murals. I was walking through a city that had been mine for five years and was not mine anymore, and what I felt was not grief exactly but something closer to the disorientation of seeing someone you once knew well who has become, in the years since, more than you remembered and more than you had become yourself. I did not know what any of it had cost, and I was not sure I was entitled to ask.

Past Xintiandi, still bustling. I walked down toward Dongtai Road, where the old antiques market had been — the lane of stalls where I used to take every guest who visited, the place where you could buy a little red book for ten and a ceramic Mao for fifty. I had known the market was gone before I came back — it had been under construction well before I left — but I wanted to see what had replaced it. The entire block had been rebuilt as the third phase of the Xintiandi development, a commercial project that bore no physical relationship to the neighborhood it had replaced. I stood at the corner and took the same photograph I had taken years ago of the market entrance, aiming the camera at a building I did not recognize.

It was after this that the walk changed.

East of Dongtai Road, I crossed into the area where old shikumen neighborhoods had begun. The Bird and Flower Market used to be here, on South Xizang Road — the place where old men bought songbirds and carried them home under a cloth. The market was gone. The ground-floor entrance on every neighboring building had been bricked shut. Above the sealed doors, brown fabric had been draped over the upper stories, covering the windows and the balconies and whatever remained of the rooms behind them. The murals appeared here, too, in ever-increasing numbers. On Shouning Road, I stopped to photograph a long mural and saw what I had been missing. Every mural I had been photographing since Julu Road, starting with the charming fake cafe hours and miles to the north, was not an announcement of anything about to open. It was a decoration applied to the surface of something that had already closed.

I kept walking. The zone did not end. Block after block, the pattern repeated, and as I moved east, it intensified. Past the sealed shikumen, I came into areas where the next phase was underway. Gray-brick buildings designed to mimic the architecture they had replaced, except without trees, or any of the things that had made the originals worth noticing.

Beyond that, closer to Yuyuan, the buildings stopped altogether. Construction walls lined the roads. The old neighborhood had been demolished entirely, and nothing had gone up in its place. The land was bare. Then, at the edge of this cleared zone, a development backed by the Fosun group — a self-described “modern folklore experience hub” — announced in signage that it would be emblematic of seven hundred years of Shanghai culture. Seven hundred years of culture on land that had been razed within the last five.

Then I came onto Fang Bang Road.

The entire street was white. Both sides, every building, every ground-floor shopfront sealed with roller shutters or cinderblock, every surface painted in the same flat cream, except that here there were no murals. The decoration had run out. What was left was the street itself and a few of us who looked like we had wandered onto a film set after the crew had gone home. On a pole at the corner, surveillance cameras pointed down the empty street.

I had spent a day falling back in love with a city, and I had arrived at this. I walked out of the sealed blocks not entirely sure where I was and came onto the Bund, twenty kilometers from where I had started, and the Pudong skyline was standing there in its late afternoon gold, the way it always has. I had crossed through the center of the city, and the center of the city had seemingly been completely emptied, sealed, and held, and I had no idea what to do with that. I had to meet friends for dinner in an hour.

I took the metro out to meet my oldest friends in the city, a couple I have known since I first moved here. They had moved further out, to a new development, a ground-floor apartment with outdoor space. I was ushered back to a private room, and we sat and ate and caught up on six years. When I asked about the 2022 lockdown, they said they had been thankful to have moved when they did — the ground floor and the room to breathe. They understood how bad it had been for others, they said, but I know they take the long view, and the long view meant not getting stuck on those weeks. What stuck was everything that came after. The lockdown had accelerated the city into full digital life. If you needed a pair of chopsticks, my friend said, they said you could probably have them within the hour. I asked whether the lockdown had changed other things too — the crosswalks, the order I had noticed everywhere. They thought it had, though they could not say exactly how. When I showed them the photographs of the cream-painted buildings in the old city, they did not know what they were looking at. We said goodbye with my promise that I would not let it be anything close to six years again, and I rode the metro back, searching for whatever I could find about what I had walked through earlier that day.

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The next morning, I walked through a different part of the city and found the other version of how the old housing ends. Near the Nanjing West Road metro station, a development had taken a set of shikumen buildings and rebuilt them entirely as a high-end commercial district. This was not the cream-paint limbo but the finished product. The buildings had been lived in until the end, then cleared, then replaced with architecture that looked almost identical to what it had replaced. It was handsome and complete and empty in a way that was different from the emptiness of the sealed lanes to the southeast.

I walked through it. And then, at the southern edge of the development, I turned a corner and found Jing’an Villa.

I had been there before, years ago, and I had taken photographs. The neighborhood was still there. It abutted the new development on one side but had not been consumed by it. People were living in it, and laundry was still hanging on metal poles projecting from the buildings. I stood there for longer than I had stood anywhere else that morning. I thought about the two gregarious Shanghainese grannies I had met here, and I found myself wondering whether ten years on, they were still with us.

This block had survived by what looked to me like an accident of the boundary line or perhaps the strong coordination of the community, and the condition of it suggested the latter. The stonework was clean, and the spaces were swept. Whoever lived here had decided, individually or together, that the place was worth maintaining at a standard that made demolition harder to justify, and they had kept that standard for what appeared to be a long time. And so it continued, in January of 2026, to be a neighborhood, which is a thing that requires no permission to be, and which cannot be reinstated by any amount of money or heritage branding.

The next day, I finally got on a bike. Riding had been one of my favorite things to do in Shanghai. From my first apartment, I used to ride ten miles or more along the Huangpu River in the evenings, breathing air that the pollution index said I should not be breathing, and I did it anyway because the ride was worth it. The northern stretch of the east bank had been my favorite — a waterfront promenade where old shipping cranes stood illuminated against the sky and gravel barges slid past close enough that you could see the captain in the wheelhouse.

I rode south along the river, past the promenade, and full of melancholy. I knew this stretch would have changed, but much of the park was as I remembered it, with new office buildings and apartments now lining the opposite side of the road. Further south, past the park, the roads used to be desolate, and the land flat with gravel and weeds. I used to turn around by a cluster of informal businesses near the Longhua wharf. I did not need to arrive to know it was no longer there.

The West Bund AI district, built on the site of the former Longhua Airport4 — a stretch of riverfront that, when I left, had been coal wharves, a cement factory, fuel tanks, and an old aircraft hangar — was standing and occupied. I rode past a pair of towers that top out at two hundred and two hundred and thirty-five meters, completed at the end of 2021. I rode past the Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center, past offices for Microsoft, Huawei, and Alibaba, past other buildings whose tenants I could not identify and whose scale I could not process from the seat of a bike.

At the far end of the district, I passed a new cultural complex, Gate M West Bund Dream Center5, across the street from McDonald’s Hamburger University campus — the company’s management training facility for the Asia-Pacific region — and I stopped, parked my bike, and stood there laughing for about a minute. I had spent five years working inside the system that builds places like this and had sat in the meetings where parcels got assigned their futures. I knew the speed, in fact, the speed was the thing I had understood best about this city. And what was standing on either side of me was not something I had a response for.

This was not the cream-paint city six miles to the north. This was the other one. They were the same government, the same apparatus, the same five-year period. The difference was the money.

I stopped for a coffee at a shop in Gate M and paid with WeChat. From the terrace, I could see gravel barges moving south on the Huangpu, the same kind of barges I used to watch from the promenade, except that across the river from them now stood a Waldorf Astoria, miles from the Bund. The West Bund now has more than seven hundred AI companies in the Xuhui district alone, and is generating close to a hundred billion yuan in annual output6. Xi Jinping had visited the Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center here in April of 20257, which, in the context of Chinese politics, meant the district was no longer a local project but a national strategy.

For the years I worked in Shanghai, the line I heard from Western analysts and colleagues was that China’s growth was a real estate story. Property and its downstream industries accounted for more than a quarter of GDP8, and the assumption — stated or not — was that the whole thing was a construction bubble running on land sales and debt. It was partly true. The developers I sat across from were leveraged to the roof, and the land auction system that funded local governments was a machine that needed to keep selling parcels to keep running. But what I was standing in was not real estate. The towers around me housed AI labs and foundation model startups backed by a sixty-billion-yuan national fund and a twenty-two-and-a-half-billion-yuan municipal fund-of-funds.9 The government had not stopped building. It had stopped building one thing and started building another.

The shift was real, but it was not yet large enough to replace what it was meant to succeed. A Rhodium Group analysis published the week after I arrived in Shanghai found that from 2023 to 2025, new industries — AI, robotics, electric vehicles — had added less than one percentage point to China’s economic output, while real estate and other traditional sectors had declined by six10. The old engine had stalled, and the new one was running but was not yet producing comparable power. The sealed lanes to the north were the result of that gap — land cleared under the old model, by developers operating under the old logic, now held by government entities that could not auction the parcels at prices that justified what had been spent to clear them.

In August of 2020, Beijing introduced a set of borrowing constraints on property developers known as the three red lines11 — caps on debt-to-cash, debt-to-equity, and debt-to-asset ratios designed to bleed air out of a bubble the Party had decided was no longer sustainable. By the end of 2021, Evergrande had defaulted on its offshore bonds. It owed more than three hundred billion dollars. It was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August of 202512. Country Garden followed into default two years later. Over the four years since the three red lines, more than sixty Chinese developers have defaulted on offshore debt or entered restructuring. A recent Caixin Global report found that only fifty-three of the top one hundred developers from 2021 were still in the top one hundred by the end of 2025. The number generating annual sales above a hundred billion yuan had dropped from forty-one to ten13. In August of 2025, the Shanghai municipal government loosened home-buying restrictions for the outer districts14, a move that would have been unthinkable during the years I worked here, when the problem had been keeping people from buying more apartments than they were allowed.

What I had walked through on Fang Bang Road was what was visible of a stall that had multiple causes and no single owner. A February 2026 Atlantic Council analysis found that surviving state-backed developers were being kept afloat with favorable funding and privileged access to undeveloped land in the biggest cities15. But in the old city, the situation was more tangled than that framing suggests. Some parcels had already been sold to developers who could not build profitably — the Fuyu plot near Yuyuan, for instance, had been transferred to a Fosun-backed development company and rebranded as “豫外滩,” but on-site visits as recently as mid-2025 showed no signs of construction. Other parcels were held by government land reserve entities that had not yet auctioned them. The Huangpu district government had designated the Laoximen area as one of Shanghai’s earliest urban renewal units and had approved planning adjustments on paper — including residential towers up to a hundred and fifty meters — but none of it had been built.

The clearances themselves, however, had accelerated during the Zero-COVID period, when compensation settlements with shikumen residents were reportedly easier to reach — the appeal of more space meaning something else entirely to a family that had spent two months locked inside a twelve-square-meter room with a shared kitchen. Between 2020 and mid-2022, Shanghai completed the requisition of 185.7 square kilometers of old housing and relocated 92,000 households in the central districts alone, finishing the thirty-year campaign ahead of schedule16. The residents were moved. And then the property market collapsed, and the developers who were supposed to build the next phase could not make the numbers work, and the government entities holding the unsold parcels could not auction them at prices that justified what had been spent to clear them. So the land sat. The buildings were sealed, and the paint was applied.

A Shanghainese friend in the real estate industry met me for coffee in Jing’an. I asked her what she thought was happening in the old city. She thought about it for a moment. She said she was not sure anyone fully knew — that it was some combination of developers who were stuck and a government that was waiting, and that the waiting could last as long as the market needed it to last, which could be years. All she knew was that a significant part of the city’s fabric was already lost.

Most of the neighborhoods that were sealed and painted are old housing stock — much of it shikumen, though not all. The old city south of Renmin Road is older and denser, a mix of lane housing that predates the shikumen form. Shikumen — the name means "stone gate" — are a building type unique to Shanghai, developed in the 1860s as a hybrid of Western terrace-house construction and Chinese courtyard layout. They became the dominant residential form in the city for the better part of a century. At their peak in the 1930s, shikumen compounds housed roughly sixty percent of Shanghai’s population. More than seventy percent of them have been demolished since the 1990s.17

In the summer of 2019, on my last visit before the gap, I walked through Dongjiadu — a neighborhood just south of Laoximen, down by the river — and watched blocks coming apart. Oceanwide, the developer that held the site, had spent thirteen years completing resident relocations for the first phase alone, and the other phases were still unfinished. But the demolition that was underway was the old kind: loud, chaotic, and porous. Life was still happening around it. Holdouts were holding out, and people were still moving through and still calling it home.

What I walked through in January was not that. The residents were gone. The compensation had been settled during the lockdown years, when the conditions for settling were different from those they had ever been or are likely to be again. What remained was silence, and buildings standing empty above their sealed doors, and no pressure on anyone to say when the next phase would come.

For five years, I helped make these projects possible in cities like Wuhan, Chengdu, and Zhengzhou. The people in those districts were not my neighbors. The lanes we proposed to clear were not lanes I had ever walked down to buy breakfast. I did not think about what happened after the plans were approved, because what happened after was not my department, and because the places were not mine. Walking through the sealed blocks east of Dongtai Road, I understood that it had mattered all along. I had only noticed because this time it was somewhere I loved. And so I started paying attention to the part I had never looked at and what happened to the people who left.

In the early decades of clearance, the government called the process 拆迁 — demolish and relocate — and the term carried the blunt honesty of its two characters. By the 2010s, the official vocabulary had moved to 征收, requisition, a word that reframes the relationship between state and resident: the state is not displacing you, it is collecting what it needs. The compensation formulas changed alongside the language. The old method had calculated payouts partly by counting the number of people in a household — 数人头, “counting heads.” The newer method counted square meters — 数砖头, “counting bricks.” The shift sounds technical, but what it meant in practice was that a family of six in a twelve-square-meter room, who under the old formula might have received compensation reflecting six people’s worth of need, now received compensation reflecting twelve square meters’ worth of value. In a city where shikumen rooms averaged around that size and the families inside them did not, this was a losing proposition.

The families who left those twelve-square-meter rooms were not, in most cases, fighting to stay in twelve-square-meter rooms. The new apartments were larger, and the kitchens were private. The offer of more space was real, and for many of the people who took it, the deal was better than what they had. I knew this. The question I kept returning to was not whether the people were better off. Many of them were. The question was what a city becomes when it clears the only kind of housing it cannot build again, to make way for something it has not yet started, while six miles to the south, the government is building a hundred-billion-yuan AI district. The future has not abandoned Shanghai; it has moved to a different part of the riverbank.

On my last morning, I went out for baozi from the vendor three blocks from my old apartment, the same stall that had been there for all the years I lived in Shanghai and apparently all the years after. I paid with WeChat instead of the coins I used to fish out of my pocket. I took the metro to Hongqiao and boarded a flight.

The city was still itself and was also, in ways that were still being decided, not what it had been. The West Bund was generating its hundred billion yuan. The coffee shops were open and were very good. The creek was clean, and the cameras were on, and the signs in Jing’an were asking, politely, that you engage in courteous traffic behavior.

When I first moved to Shanghai, my apartment was near Fuxing Park, and on mornings when I jogged through it, I would see the bird men arriving. They came with bamboo cages covered in cloth — brown cloth, blue cloth, whatever they had — and they swung the cages like pendulums as they walked, which I later learned forced the birds to grip their perches and kept the feathers tight. The cages stayed covered for the walk and were only uncovered in the park, where the men hung them from the low branches, close enough that the birds could hear one another. The birds started singing. The men sat on stools below and talked or played cards while the birds competed overhead. A bird kept under cloth does not sing.

The Bird and Flower Market on South Xizang Road was where many of those birds were bought. Now, in that area, above the sealed doors, brown fabric has been draped over the upper stories, covering the windows and the balconies and whatever remains of the rooms behind them.

In the weeks after I left, I kept coming back to what I had walked through in Laoximen and Yuyuan. In Fuxing Park, the cloth came off. On South Xizang Road, the cloth is not coming off. The buildings are standing behind it in the same condition they were in when the last families left during the lockdown years, and no one I spoke to could tell me when or whether they would be uncovered. The center of Shanghai is under cloth, and it is not singing. 🌆

If you’ve made it this far, I would love to recommend others whose work on China I greatly enjoy:

Lucy Hornby’s

Tina Kanagaratnam’s

Olivia Plotnick’s

Why Go Looking for Chinese Restaurants?

Wherever Chinese communities have settled, and they have settled nearly everywhere, a restaurant usually follows. This guide is a running attempt to find the best Chinese restaurants in the world and put them in one place.

I’m not Chinese, and I’m not here to referee what counts as authentic. What I can do is point you toward a good meal: the restaurants that serve Chinese food primarily to Chinese communities abroad, sourced through a tangle of reviews, local contacts, and platforms in Chinese or English. I’ve eaten in some of these places myself. Most I’ve tracked down from a desk.

Each restaurant that makes the cut earns a lantern 🏮 and a pin on the map. A lantern means: if you’re in the area, eat here. The selection process is entirely scientific, deeply confidential, and probably accurate. Recommendations are always welcome in the comments.

One rule holds the whole thing together: the menu has to be Chinese at its core. If it’s also serving sushi, bibimbap, or describes itself as ‘fusion’, it’s probably out. The exception is when a place is the only real option for an entire country. In those cases, we grade on a curve.

Some countries can earn dozens of lanterns. Others might just earn one. The overall lantern count doesn’t measure quality as much as it measures depth.

If you want the longer version of why these restaurants matter, I wrote about it in The World’s Most Successful Brand Isn’t a Brand at All.

This guide is organized by continent, with each region published as a separate post and linked through the navigation bar below. One note: China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan are excluded. They’re the roots and already well covered. This list is about everywhere else.

AFRICA | ASIA | EUROPE | OCEANIA | NORTH AMERICA | SOUTH AMERICA

ASIA

Asia is where Chinese food first traveled and put down its deepest roots. From the world’s oldest Chinatown in Manila to hand-pulled noodle shops along the old Silk Road, the continent holds perhaps the widest range of Chinese restaurants outside China itself. In total, 282 restaurants across 44 countries made this guide. Only Yemen and Palestine are not represented. (Again, China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan are excluded)

Top Countries:

🇯🇵 Japan 🏮 x33
Japan’s Chinese food scene operates on two tracks: the historic Chinatowns of Yokohama (est. 1866), Kobe, and Nagasaki, and a newer wave of “gachi chūka,” which are unadapted Chinese restaurants run by and for China’s diaspora. Ikebukuro’s north exit in Tokyo has become a new Chinatown with food courts and an emphasis on Sichuan and Dongbei cuisine, while Nishi-Kawaguchi in Saitama has over 70 Chinese restaurants within walking distance of the station.

Try: 湖南人家 in Yokohama or 滕記鉄鍋炖 in Tokyo

🇮🇩 Indonesia 🏮 x31
Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese community of 8–10 million is the largest in Southeast Asia, and its restaurants are quiet acts of cultural survival —the community endured the 1965 massacre, a 30-year ban on Chinese culture under Suharto, and the 1998 riots. Jakarta’s Glodok neighborhood holds restaurants dating to the 1920s, while Bangka Belitung’s Hakka tin-mining community has been cooking since the 1700s.

Try: Wong Fu Kie or Pantjoran Tea House in Jakarta

🇲🇾 Malaysia 🏮 x24
Chinese Malaysians make up 23% of the population. Penang’s Hokkien hawker scene is globally famous, Ipoh’s bean sprout chicken rivalry between Lou Wong and Ong Kee is a national pastime, and Sarawak holds distinct Foochow, Hakka, and Hainanese food traditions found nowhere else.

Try: Tek Sen in Penang or Little Hainan in Kuching

🇮🇳 India 🏮 x20
India's Chinese community is small and shrinking, but it left an outsized mark. Kolkata holds South Asia's only surviving Chinatown, centered on the Tangra neighborhood, where Hakka families have run restaurants and tanneries side by side for generations. The dawn market at Tiretti Bazaar still sells char siu bao and fish shumai to a dwindling but devoted community. In Mumbai, Ling's Pavilion, run by the Ling family for 75-plus years, is arguably the best Chinese restaurant in the country.

Try: Golden Joy Restaurant in Kolkata or Ling’s Pavilion in Mumbai

🇹🇭 Thailand 🏮 x14
Bangkok's Yaowarat is one of the great Chinatowns of the world, and its oldest kitchens have been cooking over charcoal in the same shophouses for more than a century. Phuket's old town is based on a different story. Hokkien tin miners arrived 500 years ago, married locally, and built a food culture you can't find anywhere else. In Chiang Mai and Hat Yai, the restaurants are smaller and the crowds thinner, but the woks are just as seasoned.

Try: Tang Jai Yoo or Laoteng in Bangkok

🇰🇷 South Korea 🏮 x14
Korea’s Chinese food story begins with Shandong immigrants who arrived after the 1882 opening of Incheon port and invented jajangmyeon, now a national comfort food. Incheon’s Chinatown, the peninsula’s only official one, still has restaurants descended from that founding era. In Seoul, a second layer has emerged: Daerim-dong, where ethnic Korean-Chinese from northeastern China serve lamb skewers, hand-pulled noodles, and malatang in a neighborhood where Mandarin flows as freely as Korean.

Try: Sinseung Banjeom in Incheon

🇻🇳 Vietnam 🏮 x13
Vietnam’s Hoa (ethnic Chinese) community numbers roughly one million, concentrated in Ho Chi Minh City’s Cholon district, a Chinatown founded in 1679 by Ming Dynasty refugees. Cholon’s dim sum parlors and Cantonese roast shops operate at a scale matched by few cities outside China. Hanoi has developed its own Chinese dining scene with Hong Kong–style and northern Chinese restaurants, while Hoi An’s ancient Chinese assembly halls mark centuries of Fujianese and Cantonese trading heritage.

Try: Dim Tu Tac in Ho Chi Minh City or Minh Ky in Hanoi

🇵🇭 Philippines 🏮 x13
The Philippines is home to Binondo, founded in 1594 and widely considered the world’s oldest Chinatown. Nearly all Chinese Filipinos trace their roots to Fujian’s Hokkien community, and their food influence runs deep. Beyond Manila, Davao’s 44-hectare Chinatown with four formal archways and Cebu’s heritage restaurants reflect a Chinese-Filipino community spread across the entire archipelago.

Try: New Toho in Manila

🇸🇬 Singapore 🏮 x10
In a city-state that is 74% ethnically Chinese, the challenge isn't finding Chinese food, it's curating it. Every hawker center, kopitiam, and food court has Chinese dishes worth eating. That abundance is exactly why this is the shortest list relative to the size of the scene: the lanterns here mark restaurants where a specific regional tradition has been preserved with unusual care, not the only places worth visiting.

Try: Chui Huay Lim Teochew Cuisine or Putien

🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates 🏮 x9
Dubai’s International City China Cluster is the Gulf’s largest concentration of Chinese restaurants, built to serve tens of thousands of Chinese traders, construction workers, and entrepreneurs. The scene ranges from hole-in-the-wall Sichuan canteens to Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle shops to high-end hotel restaurants. The UAE’s Chinese community is transient and trade-driven, but the restaurants it supports are as authentic as any in Asia.

Try: Liu Gui Xiang Catering in Dubai

🇰🇭 Cambodia 🏮 x8
Cambodia’s Chinese community has been present since the trading era and survived the Khmer Rouge period, during which ethnic Chinese were disproportionately targeted. Phnom Penh’s Central Market area and riverfront hold Cantonese and Teochew restaurants that serve both the remaining community and a growing number of Chinese investors and tourists arriving through Belt & Road projects.

Try: Emperors of China in Phnom Penh

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan 🏮 x7
Kazakhstan sits on the modern Silk Road, and its Chinese restaurants reflect that geography — Uyghur-influenced noodle houses in Almaty, Dungan (Chinese Muslim) home cooking near the Kyrgyz border, and new mainland Chinese restaurants serving workers on Belt & Road infrastructure projects. Astana and Almaty both have visible Chinese dining scenes shaped by trade, diplomacy, and the ancient routes that first connected these regions.

Try: Lanzhou Noodle in Almaty

The full map. All 282 restaurants, pinned and ready, is below.

Read more

The tire blew on the N2 outside Khayelitsha, and the car pulled hard to the left. I got us onto the shoulder, gravel grinding under what was left of the rubber. My wife and I sat there with the hazards on, both of us knowing exactly where we were.

We had heard the stories before coming to Cape Town. Mitchell’s Plain, Khayelitsha —names that surfaced in every video and article about driving around the Cape. Be careful there and stick to the main roads. Lock your doors. The kind of thing you absorb without questioning and carry with you long before you ever see the place yourself.

I stepped out, told my wife to stay put, and walked around to inspect the damage. The front driver’s-side tire sagged flat against the gravel. I crouched beside it, thinking of my father showing me how to wedge a jack under a frame. I must have been fifteen or sixteen. It was the kind of thing you file away without knowing you’ve kept it. The distance between us had been growing for a long time, and for reasons that don’t belong in this story, except to say that by the time I was crouching on that gravel, the man who taught me to change a tire felt very far away. He didn’t know I was here.

Change it quickly, I told myself. Keep your hands steady and get back on the road.

The gravel shifted under my shoes as I hauled the spare from the trunk, not a full tire, but enough to get us moving again, and rolled it forward. Along the fence that bordered the township, a few people began to gather. I kept my eyes set on the car.

I wedged the flimsy jack under the frame, my father’s old instructions ticking through my head like a checklist. And somewhere underneath that, my mother's voice, telling me to breathe. She had always been the one who steadied a room by being inside it.

That was when a vehicle pulled onto the shoulder behind us. My stomach clenched.

A door opened, and a man stepped out.

He walked toward us quickly, his steps deliberate.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Flat tire,” I managed.

He glanced at the wheel, then at me. “Not the place to get one,” he said evenly.

Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to his car and returned carrying tools that belonged more to a racing pit than a roadside: a heavy jack, a power wrench that rattled like a drill. In a blur, the car was raised, the flat removed, and the spare tightened fast. I barely had time to stow the feeble jack in the trunk before he lowered the car again.

My hands quivered as I thanked him, gripping the rough strength of his palm. From my pocket, I drew the few notes I carried, limp and insufficient, and held them out like an apology.

He shook his head and held up his hands. “Absolutely not.”

Instead, he told us to drive ahead and that he would follow. The next turnoff bent us briefly off the highway before we could double back to the rental car office. My wife checked the rear-view mirror, but his black car held steady behind us, a quiet shadow. Only when we returned to the highway, when he gave a short wave and vanished into traffic, did I notice the words across the back of his car, painted in ribbon-pink script: Guardian Angel.

We drove on in silence. My hands stayed clamped to the wheel.

My wife exhaled, long and deep, as if she had been holding her breath the entire time.

Only the pink script remained, etched sharper than the memory of his face.

My mother had died of breast cancer years before. I still feel her sometimes in ways I can’t explain and don’t need to. Guardian Angel is a South African roadside assistance service for women. I know that now. The man who stopped was not on a call. He saw us on the shoulder and he pulled over. The pink script on the back of his car was a company name and nothing more.

But my mother was dead, and the words were pink, and I am telling you I felt something.

Maybe that is all a story like this can honestly say. I knew the reputation of those areas long before we ever drove through them, and none of it prepared me for what actually happened, which was that a stranger changed my tire, refused my money, followed us until we felt safe, and drove away. 🚙

A different version of this story was recently published in the Kindness of Strangers by Bradt Guides.

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Nepal’s climbing season is underway. Thousands of trekkers are arriving or finalizing plans to walk the Annapurna Circuit, reach Everest Base Camp, or attempt one of the dozens of high-altitude routes that make Nepal one of the best adventure tourism destinations on Earth.

On March 12, Nepali authorities filed organized crime and fraud charges against 32 individuals in Kathmandu District Court. The accused include owners of trekking agencies, helicopter operators, hospital executives, and medical staff. Nine have been arrested. Twenty-three are still at large. The investigation, documented in detail by the Kathmandu Post, describes a fraud network that siphoned at least $19.7 million from international travel insurers between 2022 and 2025 (and that is only the period they were able to trace).

The mechanics of the scam exploit the infrastructure that is used to keep trekkers alive. At high altitude, mild symptoms of altitude sickness are common. Blood oxygen drops, and headaches and tingling develop. In most cases, rest or a gradual descent is all that is needed. But according to the Kathmandu Post’s reporting, guides and hotel staff had been trained to terrify trekkers at precisely this moment, telling them they were at risk of dying, that only immediate helicopter evacuation could save them. In some cases, investigators found that medication was deliberately administered to induce the very symptoms that would justify a rescue call. In at least one documented case, baking powder was mixed into food to make tourists physically ill.

Once a trekker was panicked or incapacitated, the money side kicked in. Single helicopters carried multiple passengers, but separate full-price invoices were submitted to each passenger’s insurer as if each had a dedicated flight. Hospitals created fake admission records using the digital signatures of doctors who had no knowledge that their credentials were being used. According to CCTV footage obtained by investigators, some tourists listed as receiving treatment were filmed drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria. The whole operation ran on a commission structure in which hospitals, helicopter companies, trekking agencies, and guides each took a cut of the insurance payout.

None of this is, sadly, new. The Kathmandu Post first reported on the fake rescue industry in 2018. The government produced a 700-page report documenting the fraud. It recommended oversight, accountability, and enforcement. None of it happened. The companies named in that report faced no consequences, and the scam, according to the CIB, grew.

The investigation was reported in detail by Nepali media last week. It is now hitting international outlets on the front end of peak trekking season. The timing could not be worse. Permits are sold, flights are booked, and the headlines landing in front of those travelers are: the people who were supposed to keep you safe were poisoning you for insurance money.

That is devastating for Nepal. Not for the 32 people charged (they will face whatever the courts decide). It is devastating for the thousands of trekking operators, guides, pilots, and mountain professionals who had nothing to do with any of this and now operate under the same cloud. Nepal’s adventure tourism industry employs hundreds of thousands of people. The vast majority of them do difficult, dangerous, legitimate work in terrain where things go wrong fast and the margin for error is small.

What the fraud network did was exploit that system, using its urgency, remoteness, and the near-impossibility of a London or Sydney-based insurer verifying what happened at 5,000 meters in a Himalayan valley. This has huge ripple effects. Several major international insurers have already stopped selling coverage for tourists trekking in Nepal entirely. That decision did not distinguish between the operators running the scam and the ones who never touched it. And if you cannot get insurance for a trek in Nepal, you do not go to Nepal.

The charges filed this month are the first real legal consequence the fraud has faced. A new government was sworn in last week. Whether any of it produces change depends on whether Nepal decides that protecting its trekking industry is worth more than protecting the people who were strip-mining it. 🏔️

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Somewhere on Substack right now, someone is publishing chapter twenty of a serialized novel. Someone else is on recipe number fifty. There are travel writers sharing photo essays and guides from interesting places around the world (hi). There are personal essayists with two years of writing that reads just as well today as the day they published it. The range of what's being built here is hard to overstate, and most of it is happening one person at a time. But once you've built that archive, how do you easily show it off?

The only tool built for this costs $999 a month (really), and it still has to be updated manually. Fine if you’re a major publication with a social media staff. The rest of us get a link-in-bio page, an ugly stack of text links that all look the same and say nothing about what you actually do. I wanted something better. So I built it.

It's called stack.pub — your publication, in a visual stack. Point it at your newsletter, and it builds a clean photo grid of everything you've published there. The design is intentional, setup takes under two minutes, and once it’s live, it just works. Publish a new story and your grid updates automatically. That’s it.

Turns out a clean visual grid of your writing is useful everywhere: social media bio link, portfolio, media kit, email signature —and every click goes straight back to your publication.

Set up yours in as little as 2 minutes.

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Every page includes a subscribe button that links directly to your publication.

Your content stays yours. stack.pub doesn't import, copy, or store your posts. We just display them.

Change the styles whenever you’d like. This is version one. There’s more coming!

Try it free with your own newsletter at stack.pub.

Here’s mine: stack.pub/scottmonaco

Before you go, I write mostly about travel and culture (with a little humor mixed in). If this is your first time here, please take a look. It would mean a lot to have you as a subscriber.

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London rewards the people who show up without an agenda.

The sights are fine. I could spend a whole day at the Tate Modern. I love Wimbledon (especially the queue). The Indian food alone is worth the flight. However, when I think about London or when I read about London, I think about walking. Not to anywhere specific. And when I’m not walking, I’m in a bookshop, Daunt Books, Foyles, Hatchards, and the many small indie stores scattered through neighborhoods that don't make it onto most itineraries. You could build an entire trip around them.

What both reading about and walking around London give you is a deeper understanding of how layered the city really is. Roman, medieval, imperial, some bombed or burned out, most rebuilt. The Windrush arrivals, who came when the city needed them and were never properly thanked. Two thousand years of people arriving, staying, and changing what London means. The skyline that still doesn’t know what it wants to be.

These ten books won’t give you a tidy London. But they're a good place to start digging.

Non-Fiction

London: The Biography – Peter Ackroyd The definitive portrait of the city told not as history but as an organism. Ackroyd treats London like a character with its own obsessions and appetites. It’s enormous book.

Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell Broke, hungry, and working dishwasher jobs in the East End, the book is more furious, funny, and more relevant than it should be. The London half of this book is one of the sharpest pieces of social observation written about the city.

Londoners – Craig Taylor An oral history built entirely from voices (cab drivers, shop owners, migrants, city workers, and night-shift nurses). Taylor disappears and lets the city speak for itself. The result is possibly the most human book on this list, and probably the most London.

London and the 17th Century – Margarette Lincoln The century that remade the city: plague, fire, revolution, and the slow emergence of modern London from the wreckage. Lincoln is a rigorous historian who never lets the drama get away from her. Excellent context for everything else on this list.

Empireland – Not strictly a London book, but essential for understanding what London actually is. Sanghera traces the empire’s long shadow on British identity with a precision that is difficult to argue with and difficult to put down.

Fiction

NW – Zadie Smith Two women who grew up together on a council estate in Willesden. One gets out, one doesn’t, and Smith is ruthless about what that costs both of them. The most contemporary London book on this list.

The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon Selvon’s Windrush-era novel follows Caribbean migrants navigating a city that wanted their labor and not much else. The prose, a creolized English that shouldn’t work and absolutely does, captures longing, humor, and displacement in equal measure.

Small Island – Andrea Levy Four voices, two continents, one city pulling them all toward each other. Set across wartime Jamaica and postwar London, Levy’s novel is about who belongs and who gets to decide. One of the great British novels of the past twenty-five years.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle Baker Street and fog rolling off the Thames. This is the London that everybody knows, and you’ll find pieces of it still intact if you know where to look.

Incendiary – Chris Cleave A letter from a London woman to Osama bin Laden, written in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Cleave turns grief into something almost unbearable, and the city is every bit as much the subject as the narrator.

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Enjoyed this? Here are more reading lists by region:

Asia:

Europe:

The Americas:

Global:

It’s tough keeping an automatic hand dryer running with your head. There I was in the bathroom of the Rønne ferry terminal, bent under the Dan Dryer, its little Viking mascot looking like it was standing on my shoulder. As the bathroom door opened, I turned to see who was coming in and caught my head on the underside. The man appeared unbothered by the soaking wet figure crouched at waist height, offered only a frown, and turned toward the urinals. I returned my focus and continued to tousle my hair.

Earlier that morning, at dawn, I had left my apartment, taken an hour-long train to Ystad on the Southern coast of Sweden, and caught the ferry to Bornholm. The crossing takes around an hour and a half. I drank a coffee and watched the sun reflect on the Baltic Sea.

Bornholm took its time to appear on the horizon. The island is Danish but sits closer to Sweden, Poland, and Germany than to Copenhagen, which has historically made it either strategically important or inconveniently exposed, depending on the century. The Soviets briefly occupied it at the end of the Second World War after the German garrison surrendered, shelling Rønne before withdrawing and handing it back. Since then, Bornholm has settled into a more agreeable role — the Danes call it the Sunshine Island as it gets more sun than anywhere else in the country, and generations of Danish families have been making the crossing every summer to cycle its coastline, eat smoked herring, and buy ceramics. It is not an island that does anything quickly.

I had not planned to take it slowly.

Upon disembarking, I walked into town and found a bicycle rental shop. The man behind the counter looked up when I came in.

“Bike or e-bike?”

I had never ridden an e-bike before. The island was roughly 80 miles around, and I was planning to ride the whole thing in a day. I had completed the annual Seattle to Portland ride of 206 miles in 11.5 hours, so the distance or time didn’t concern me. My ego was, admittedly, in excellent shape. I was carrying a backpack with a camera, and parts of the coastal route reportedly turned to gravel. The choice of an e-bike seemed, if anything, like a way to make it more enjoyable.

He pointed at a row of them along the wall and handed me a lock and a 15-foot charging cable for the battery, which took up the remaining space in my backpack. No helmet was offered. This is Denmark.

I told him I was planning to circle the island.

He looked at me for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “It’s possible.” The shop closed at six, he added, but if I was back later, I could just lock the bike outside, and he’d sort it in the morning.

I noted the time. I had a ferry to catch. Six it was.

I set off north through the forest, the smell of pine cutting through the morning air — the kind of fresh, quiet morning that makes you feel lighter. The trees were dense on both sides of the path. I tried out the bell with some enthusiasm, passing an elderly couple, who did not appear to share it.

Then the forest opened, and the sea was there on my left, running along the western coast as far as I could see. Other cyclists passed me going the other direction, panniers strapped to their rear wheels, clearly on a different, more leisurely schedule than mine.

Before long, I was met by several low whitewashed buildings set close to the water, each with a pair of distinctive chimneys that flared wide at the base. I stopped to look. A sign confirmed what the smell had already suggested: smokehouses. Bornholm has been smoking herring over alder wood for centuries, and these buildings, with their odd twin chimneys designed to draw the smoke slowly through the fish, are scattered along the coast. I noted one for lunch and kept moving.

The e-bike seemed heavier than anything I’d ridden before, but on the flat coastal path the ‘light assist’ setting made up for it. I was moving fast along a stretch of coast so unreasonably pleasant that I briefly considered whether property on Bornholm was within my budget. It was not a serious thought. Then the hills arrived, earlier than the map had suggested, and more of them. A few additional clicks of the assist and I was over them. At the top of one, I was met by Hammershus, the largest medieval fortification in Northern Europe by footprint, its towers and walls sitting on a promontory above the sea. The Danes dismantled much of it in the 1700s and probably spent the following two centuries regretting it. I left the bike at the base, walked up, took in the view, and got back on. I was making good time.

The northern coast ran through Sandvig, Tejn, and a string of villages that seemed to be doing fine without much outside attention. Mini golf courses appeared with surprising regularity — modest setups near the water, with a mix of young and old playing them, everyone taking their shot with complete seriousness.

As I rode, I kept myself busy taking in all the textures of the place — the sheep grazing, the Danish flags adorning every pole, and the ceramics studios. The most common and the most visually interesting were the gårdbutikker. This translates to farm shop in English, though these were simpler than that: wooden boxes or small shelves set at the roadside outside homes with jars of honey, jam, eggs, vegetables, a handwritten price list, and a cash box for the money. No attendant or camera, just the assumption that you would pay. I watched cars and bikes stop regularly. This appeared to be completely normal.

Gudhjem was the last town on the coast before I had wanted to turn inland. I stopped at a bakery and ordered a pastry. The plan from here was to head to Østerlars — the most intact of Bornholm’s four round churches, built in the twelfth century. Østerlars is the largest and the one everyone comes to see.

The battery indicator was lower than it should have been for where I was on the route – a heavy bike over surprisingly hilly terrain adds up. I was roughly halfway around and told myself I could ration it.

I looked at my phone. The 20% chance of rain I had checked that morning was now 100%, the radar showing a solid mass of green and yellow moving in from the west, forecast to run until evening.

It was still sunny, however, the vimpels were snapping in a wind that hadn’t been there an hour ago. I finished the pastry and got moving.

The road up to Østerlars was steep enough into a headwind that I abandoned any thought of rationing and put the assist on full. By the time I had arrived, the battery was dead. I stopped at the café across the road, wielding the 15-foot extension cord and a battery the size of a cinderblock, and asked if I could charge somewhere. The staff plugged it in by the refrigerator.

When I came back from the church thirty minutes later, the battery indicator had not moved. Outside, through the café window, a wall of dark clouds was coming in off the Baltic.

I revised my plan. Instead of finishing the coast, I would cut directly through the interior — 14 miles back to Rønne, as straight as possible with minimal exposure. Perhaps I could make it back while it was still drizzling. This was optimistic.

An e-bike with a dead battery is not a regular bike. It is a regular bike that is significantly heavier than a regular bike, and about five minutes into the first climb I was hit by wind and a torrential downpour that did not let up. The interior was mostly farmland, flat and open, no shelter from anything. There was nothing to look at and nothing to stop for. I put my head down and rode. The temperature kept dropping. The most direct route ran along the shoulder of the main road, and as cars passed, I thought about the occupants, warm and dry inside. Perhaps eating smoked fish on a smørrebrød.

I made it back to Rønne with time to spare. The man at the rental shop looked up as I came through the door, dripping onto his floor. He had been closing up early –the rain had seen to that.

“You’re back.”

When asked, I told him I’d enjoyed it until Østerlars before the battery died and the rain came. He seemed mildly impressed that I’d gotten that far. I handed back the extension cord, and he locked up the remaining bikes.

The ferry terminal was a ten-minute walk in the driving rain. I found the bathroom, located the Dan Dryer, and got to work. By the time the man walked in and offered his frown, I had made meaningful progress. The ferry back to Ystad was on time. The train from Ystad ran without incident. I got home, stood under a hot shower for longer than necessary, and collapsed on the sofa.

Outside, right on schedule, the rain stopped. 🚴‍♂️

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The top-selling trip of 2026 for EF Ultimate Break —a company that designs travel for 18 to 35-year-olds— is a cruise through Croatia where nobody drinks. The travel industry, it turns out, has just discovered something I have been doing since November 2018, and that many people have been doing far longer, for reasons that have nothing to do with wellness trends.

The first time I traveled sober was to Japan. I had been before, multiple times, and I knew what I was walking into, although I am not sure that made it less difficult. Anthony Bourdain had made a generation of travelers believe that the izakaya at midnight or connecting over the local libations was the whole point. That wasn’t just how Bourdain traveled. It was how I traveled. Late nights in low-lit places, cold Asahi and karaoke with people I had just met, and drinking plum wine in hostels. I wasn’t sure what Japan looked like without that, or whether it would still feel like Japan at all.

It was, despite being less than a month in and fighting the urge to just do it all again because I was on vacation, one of the better trips I'd taken there. What I thought I was losing turned out to be a much smaller part of the experience than I had given it credit for. Instead, I was up before the city, running the Imperial Palace gardens in the November cold, and found myself alone at a nearby temple in my running clothes because no one else was around. That version of Japan had always existed. I had just never been awake for it.

In the years following, I began noticing a broader shift around the world, with the 0.0% section at supermarkets expanding and non-alcoholic options appearing on restaurant menus of various price points. It felt anecdotal at the time, just the kind of thing you notice more once it applies to you.

It turned out not to be anecdotal. By 2025, just 54% of U.S. adults reported drinking alcohol —the lowest figure in nearly 90 years of Gallup polling.

Among Gen Z adults, only 50% say they drink, down nine points in two years, and 83% of Gen Z travelers now say they prefer to stay sober while traveling. But the trend runs wider than one generation, with 57% of Millennials and 49% of Gen X also planning to drink less this year in a 2025 survey.

The shift is not limited to the United States. Hilton’s 2025 Trends report found that one in four travelers globally reduced or eliminated alcohol in 2024, with notable declines in China (33%), Mexico (32%), and Australia (29%). The travel industry has only recently looked up and noticed, and what it saw was not a youth trend but a revenue opportunity it had been walking past for years. I had seen this firsthand, just a few months earlier.

When I checked into a hotel in Greece, a luxury stay, not the kind of trip I can usually afford to take, I was called after arriving at my room and asked if they could bring me a complimentary bottle of chilled wine. I thanked them but told them I didn’t drink. They didn’t miss a beat. Did I want the non-alcoholic version instead? They had one ready and from another local winery. Seven years earlier, that question would not have existed. The hotel had anticipated it, stocked for it, and trained its staff to offer it without making it into something. That is not a small thing.

The industry has since then seemingly only doubled down. Hotels are redesigning their bars as communal spaces rather than alcohol-forward venues, cruise lines are launching alcohol-free packages, and hospitality executives are giving interviews about how they are reimagining leisure without alcohol at the center of it. An $18 mocktail gives me pause, but the direction is right.

Until recently, the only sober traveler the industry had ever built anything for was the wellness guest who was looking for a spa retreat, juice cleanse, or the kind of stay that involves herbal tea and guided meditation before breakfast.

That’s one version of it, sure.

Here is mine: I am not hungover. I was not hungover yesterday. I will not be hungover tomorrow. This has been true for over seven years, on solo trips and press trips, trips with my wife, and raucous dinners with friends new and old, where I was sometimes the only person at the table not drinking. It is not a wellness trip. It didn’t start as one either. It is just how I live now, and I enjoy travel more because of it.

If you watch any of Bourdain’s shows, he was selling presence the whole time. All of it was about letting a place in, about not holding yourself apart from it. The alcohol was just always in the frame; in fact, it was so omnipresent that it started to look like an essential element of the experience. What I didn’t understand until I stopped drinking was how little it had to do with any of it. For Bourdain, it was clearly more complicated than that. I understand that more than I probably let on here. But the presence was always the thing, with or without a drink in your hand.

What the industry has started to figure out —slowly at first, and now in a rush— is that a meaningful share of travelers were always moving through the world this way, or wanted to. When I mentioned the Croatia cruise to people, the most common response was: why aren’t there more of those?

The demand was never really new. Operators built and pushed the same product for decades because the margins made sense, and nobody pushed back loudly enough. Now they’re finding that the margins still work, and a meaningful share of their guests will have a better trip because of it.

A while back, wandering through London, I walked past a refrigerated case and stopped. Asahi 0.0. My izakaya beer of choice. I grabbed a four-pack. It was going to be a wild night. 🍻

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The forecast said fifty degrees and sunny, which in March means something different than it does in October. In October, fifty degrees is a warning. In March, it is a reason to leave the house.

I had been inside for a long time. Not unusually long, just the normal amount of time that accumulates between November and one afternoon when the light comes through the window at a different angle, and you think, I should go outside.

Others had the same thought, apparently, and at roughly the same time.

The benches filled first. Then the grass. Some are prepared and brought blankets. Some sit directly on the ground, which is freshly littered with goose poop. Nearby, a father is attempting to erect a small tent for reasons that are not clear. His children are running circles around him as the rods collapse. Nobody is helping.

I find a bench near the tree line and sit down. I intend to be present in the way you are present on the first nice day, which is different from other days.

A jogger passes on the path, a glowing rectangle held up, mid-conversation, the person on the other end bouncing with every stride. I watch him go and instinctively turn back to the others. The blanket people, the ground people, they are all now clutching their own little glowing rectangles. Nature, it turns out, is less interesting than the people ignoring it.

Near the street, a small kiosk has opened for the first time since October, which everyone treats as a second confirmation that winter is over. There is a line. People are getting ice cream, although it is fifty degrees, which is exactly the kind of defiant optimism that only happens in March. A woman receives her cone, holds it out in front of her, and takes a photo of it before doing anything else. She waited 5 months for this cone. The cone can wait a little longer.

Across the path, a couple sits together on a bench. They arrived together, which I know because I watched them arrive. They have not spoken since sitting down. He is looking at his rectangle with the focused quiet of someone doing important work. She is holding an open book in one hand. She is still on the same page. Her rectangle is in the other hand, which answers that. Every so often, one of them shifts slightly, angling their rectangle away from the sun.

Somewhere to my left, a Bluetooth speaker announces itself with a sound like a small foghorn, and then music starts. Not quietly. The man who owns it settles back with the satisfaction of someone who has improved the situation. The birds, for what it’s worth, were already playing something. Nobody had asked for it, but it was there.

Near the playground, a father is filming his daughter on the slide. She goes down. He films it. She climbs back up the ladder, which is the part that takes the longest, and he films that too. She goes down again. He films it. This has been going on for some time. She looks over often to confirm he is still watching or filming. He gives her a thumbs-up without lowering the rectangle.

On a blanket nearby, a child has been given a larger glowing rectangle in a thick rubber case. The case is the kind designed for a child who might decide at any moment that they are done with it and want to spike it into the ground like a football. The child is sitting completely still, which is not how children sit. Around him, other children are performing physical feats of varying recklessness, and he is aware of none of it. His parents sit nearby with their own rectangles and the expressions of people who have made a decision and would prefer not to revisit it unless they have to. They are not at the playground to play.

My attention is drawn to a woman who is not dressed like the rest of us. Most of us came out dressed similarly to how we have been hibernating. She is dressed like a peacock. She holds her glowing rectangle out, checks it, adjusts her chin, checks it again. She takes several photos, reviews them, and takes several more. I have to give it to her, that patch of sun is very good. She is getting everything she can out of it.

Two teenagers nearby are filming something together, stopping, watching it back, filming it again. One of them says something and they both laugh and film it a third time. Whatever they are making, it requires more takes than they expected. Either way, the nature surrounding us is bound to look excellent through that rectangle.

Humans are not the only ones in the park today; the pigeons are here too and have gathered nearby. The pigeons are fine. The pigeons have always been fine. The pigeons are not interested in glowing rectangles. They are eating from the garbage.

At the far end of the path, an older woman is eating a sandwich and watching people pass. She has been doing this for twenty minutes with the calm focus of someone who finds this sufficient. She seems, actually, better than fine.

I look down and realize I am already holding my rectangle. I don’t remember taking it out, and it’s already glowing.

Someone has posted a video from last night’s concert, vertical, thirty seconds, the audio is some sort of incomprehensible distortion. I watch two seconds of it. Scroll. A child’s school play. Scroll. A meal, photographed from above before anyone ate it, the food already getting cold, so that I could see it for this one second. Scroll.

The light is still good. The park is full. Somewhere behind me, a bird is doing something worth looking up for.

I keep scrolling. 🌷

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Under the bridge below, a street performer is playing the guitar and singing.

Passing Through is a series of fixed, first-person observations made while moving through places. I stop, the camera runs, and then I move on. Subscribe to Nothing to Declare to see how other places move when you’re not there.

I once recommended a dinner spot in Istanbul to a couple planning their honeymoon. I’d had an excellent experience —one I thought would fit a special occasion. I knew them very well, and I was sure both the food and the view would impress them. After they returned, I asked how it was. “It was good,” the husband said, followed by a quick explanation: it had been near the end of the trip, they were exhausted, and one of them wasn’t feeling well.

Nothing about the restaurant had fundamentally changed. What changed was them.

That’s the part most travel advice doesn’t account for. By the time advice is written or shared, the story is already complete. The version of the traveler who experienced it —well-rested or burned out, curious or overwhelmed, early in the trip or near the end— has been flattened into a clean recommendation. It reads as if the outcome is repeatable. It isn’t.

Ash Bhardwaj offers a useful frame in Why We Travel: there are three distinct types, explorers, travelers, and tourists1, each with its own relationship to a place. He notes these are not fixed identities, but positions we move between. But travel advice always comes from inside one of them. The essay, reel, vlog, or listicle was created in a specific mode under a specific set of conditions. Each assumes you’re arriving in the same one. You rarely are.

Those conditions follow a hierarchy, whether acknowledged or not.

First is time. A three-day trip and a three-month stay are not variations of the same experience; they are different systems entirely. Advice built on open-ended time collapses under constraint. What reads as “wander and see what you find” becomes indecision when the clock is visible. The blogger who spent a month getting lost in a city wrote something very different from what you need with four days and a flight on Sunday.

Second is energy. It's one of the least discussed constraints in travel, and one of the most consequential. Travel advice assumes you arrive the way you felt when you were planning. But the first days of a trip have their own tax: jetlag, unfamiliar beds, and the physical reality of moving through a new place on foot for hours when your body might not be used to doing so at home. The version of you the advice was written for may not show up until day three, if at all. That fatigue accumulates quietly, sometimes sickness arises, and by the end of a trip, it has usually become something else entirely. The Istanbul dinner wasn’t wrong. It just missed on the version of the couple who were sitting there that night.

Third is access —and arguably the least discussed of all, because those who have it rarely notice they do. Language, familiarity, and logistical confidence shape what feels possible in ways advice seldom acknowledges. The same neighborhood that feels alive and navigable to someone with even basic language skills can feel closed off to someone without them — not because anything is hidden, but because the city simply wasn't written for them.

Fourth is personality. Some travelers want friction, others want flow. A full day of back-to-back museums reads as richness to one person and overstimulation to another. Advice tends to assume one default mode, usually high-energy and high-curiosity, and quietly excludes the rest.

The order matters. You can have the right personality for an experience, the right access, the right energy — and none of it matters if you don't have the time.

These variables are not side notes. They determine whether a recommendation works at all. And yet most advice arrives stripped of them, presented as if it exists outside the conditions that produced it.

We keep reaching for it anyway. We don’t just consume travel advice for information —we consume it aspirationally. We select voices that reflect the traveler we want to be, someone who moves through a place with confidence and curiosity, and sees exactly what we too would like to. The mismatch is built in at the planning stage, not the destination.

The person who planned the trip is not the one who takes it.

I’ve felt this directly. Halfway through a trip, looking at everything still on my list, I've recognized that the version of me who built that itinerary had been thinking like a traveler. What I actually needed by then was to operate like a tourist: follow the signs, take the obvious route, and let someone else do the thinking. Not as a failure of ambition. Just as an honest read of what I had left to give. The advice was fine. The plan was fine. I just wasn't the person it was written for anymore.

That’s where advice starts to fail —not because it’s incorrect, but because it gets treated as fixed. It was produced under specific conditions: a particular mode, amount of time, and degree of familiarity. You don’t think: the context was misaligned. You think: I recommended the wrong restaurant. You remember it as a disappointment, without ever tracing it back to the right cause.

The restaurant in Istanbul didn’t fail. The recommendation didn’t fail. The conditions changed.

That’s the only constant.

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“Do you know when we will return?” I asked.

The man at the dive shop didn’t look up right away. He finished stacking a few papers, aligned them carefully, then glanced at me.

“Why?” he said. “Do you have other plans?”

“Well, no,” I said.

He nodded once, as if that settled it, and went back to what he was doing. The conversation was over.

“See you tomorrow,” I added, though it felt unnecessary.

I was in Labuan Bajo, on the western edge of Flores, a place that until recently had been little more than a fishing town at the end of the road. When we arrived in 2015, it had a population of around 6,000 people. The airport had just partially opened, a low terminal that felt less like infrastructure and more like a signal that something was about to happen here.

My wife and I had been there long enough to know the man at the shop wasn’t dismissive. The question just didn’t fit the place. Boats left when they were ready; things took as long as they took.

“So how does it feel,” my wife said as we walked back, “to be the Diva of Labuan Bajo?”

I hadn’t meant it that way. I was trying to get a sense of when I might be back, for her sake —she’d be staying in town while I headed out diving in the marine park. But here, the question didn’t land. The nickname stuck.

We had come for Komodo National Park, a stretch of islands and water set between Sumbawa and Flores. Established in 1980, it was created to protect the Komodo dragon. It was later designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its scope expanded to include the surrounding marine environment.

None of that was visible from town. Labuan Bajo faced west, toward open water, its harbor lined with wooden fishing boats, small cargo vessels, and the occasional liveaboard preparing to leave. The islands sat low on the horizon, their outlines fading in and out with the light.

Getting to them required time. Two to four hours by boat, depending on conditions. A few days earlier, we had walked down to the harbor before the heat settled in. The boats were already there, paint worn from the sun and salt. Our driver waved us over as his wife loaded a cooler of homemade food onto the boat.

The ride out took a few hours. The islands appeared slowly, dry and uneven. There was no clear boundary where the park began. Only the absence of fishing boats and a brief comment from the guide marked the change.

When we reached Komodo Island, the largest of the three major islands, the boat idled near a wooden dock. A guide met us there holding a long wooden stick, forked at the end. Only after we stepped onto land, and the boat pulled away, did he say it was for protection.

I hadn’t told my wife what this would be like. I had said we were going to see the Komodo dragons. I think she pictured something contained: a path, a railing, a safe distance.

She looked at me, then at the stick.

I nodded.

This was our protection.

Komodo dragons can grow over ten feet long (3 meters) and weigh more than 150 pounds (70 kg). The guide advised us against getting bitten; their bite delivers venom that prevents blood clotting and can send a victim into shock. It wouldn’t be handled there. It would mean a long boat ride back, then an air evacuation to the nearest hospital that could treat it.

We followed the guide inland, the three of us moving first across bare ground with a scattering of trees.

It didn’t take long to see one.

A dragon lay in the shade, its body stretched along the ground. It was larger than I expected, low to the ground, and heavy. It didn’t move much when we approached. It lumbered forward slightly, tongue flicking, then settled again. We stood there for a moment, close enough to understand its size. The guide squatted down and held his stick in front of him, watching like a golfer lining up a putt. The guide asked my wife if she wanted to turn her back to it so he could take a picture.

We kept walking.

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At one point, the guide mentioned that you always bring the stick even for something as simple as going to the bathroom. Rangers sleep on the island, he said, and they don’t go anywhere without it. Once, he’d opened the outhouse by the docks and found a dragon inside.

As we moved farther inland, the ground gave way to open grassland. My wife stayed between me and the guide and our sticks. At one point, when the guide had drifted a few steps ahead, she looked at me and asked what exactly I thought I was going to do with it if a dragon started to rush.

I told her I wasn’t sure, but holding it, in a landscape like this, made me feel like Gandalf. Perhaps, then, I could plant it in the ground and yell, “You shall not pass!”

She didn’t find that reassuring.

The path narrowed as we continued, cutting through dry grass that brushed against our legs. No other groups, no voices carrying across the hills. Only the sound of our steps and the wind moving through the brush.

The guide stopped once and pointed ahead. We saw Timor deer moving through the grass below us, their heads lifting as they moved. Farther off, a water buffalo stood under a tree. The guide said the dragons take deer most often, but will also hunt wild boar and scavenge when they can.

When we reached higher ground, the view opened out over the island. Dry hills, pale grass, the sea in the distance. When I looked down, all I could see were the boats anchored off the coast—the only sign of where we had come from, and where we would return. The dragons trace back millions of years, long before anything like those boats existed here.

We didn’t see many others. Maybe a few people near the dock, but once we started walking, it was empty again. There was no schedule to the visit, just the hiking route we chose and the hours it took to complete it. You could not stay on the island. There were no accommodations, only liveaboards anchored offshore and smaller boats returning to Labuan Bajo.

By the time we returned to the boat, nothing had happened in the way you expect things to happen. No sudden movement or single moment to isolate, but it didn’t feel like anything was missing.

At the time, fewer than 90,000 people visited each year. It was not untouched, but it was not built for volume. Getting there still required multiple flights, then the boat. The airport in Labuan Bajo had only just opened. Most people passed through on longer liveaboard itineraries rather than cycling in and out on fixed itineraries. The only real constraint was the boat.

Visitor numbers have climbed past 300,000 annually. Labuan Bajo has grown with it, from a fishing town into a staging point, with direct flights from Bali and Jakarta and boats leaving on set routes into the park. In response, Indonesia is moving to limit access. A daily cap of 1,000 visitors is set to take effect in April 2026, with entry booked in advance and divided into time slots.

What we experienced had no visible edges. The newer system, by definition, does.

The next morning, I went down to the harbor and saw the same man from the dive shop. I threw my bag on the boat, and we left without discussing when we would be back.

There were only a handful of us: the man from the shop, a driver, a deckhand acting as spotter, and four guests. Komodo is considered an advanced diving destination. Not because of depth, but because of its strong, shifting currents and fast-moving drift dives. It was exactly why I wanted to be there. Three months earlier, my Master Scuba Diver card had arrived in the mail, and this was the first place I had come where it felt like I might be able to put the advanced skills to use.

We slid back toward the park, my focus shifting from the islands to the water between them. The chain sits at a junction where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, forcing tidal flow through the narrow channels between Komodo, Rinca, and Padar. That exchange pulls nutrients up from depth, feeding the reefs and concentrating marine life. It also means the water beneath the surface is rarely still.

Our first site was near Mawan, where manta rays gather.

We entered along a sloping reef. The current was already running.

You don’t swim against it. You check your depth, your air, and your position relative to the others. Then you let it carry you.

Manta rays moved through in slow arcs, circling back through the same stretch of water. Five passed through while we were there. They held themselves in place against the flow in a way we couldn’t. Cleaner fish worked along their undersides as they passed.

We stayed low and slid by.

The next dive dropped us into a channel off Tatawa Besar, where the current accelerates as it is forced between islands. You felt it immediately. We held close to the reef at the start, then let go at the edge and were flung into the open water as if from a cannon.

Sharks worked the current while schools of fish faced into it and held position. The same forces that shaped the islands above were moving here too, just compressed and faster. Komodo dragons are good swimmers and can swim between these islands, but they don’t hunt in the water, so in that regard, I was happy not to have to worry about carrying a forked stick.

There were more dives after that, all of them shaped by the same conditions.

As we rested on the boat, I looked over at the man from the dive shop, who had become my dive partner for the trip. He gave no indication of when we would be back.

I kept trying to pin down when things would start, when they would end, and how long anything would take.

It never quite worked.

The boats left when they were ready. The hikes on the islands ended when they ended. Underwater, you surfaced where the current took you.

Since then, more people have come, and Labuan Bajo has grown. Flights are easier. A daily cap is coming with bookings and time slots.

Inside, our schedules don’t apply.

The dragons still wait. The current still runs.

On our last evening back in Labuan Bajo, I passed the dive shop again. The same man was there.

He looked up and nodded.

I didn’t ask when anything would happen.

The Diva of Labuan Bajo didn’t need to. 💅

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In May 2025, I found myself standing in line outside Hagia Sophia, reading a board I had not seen eighteen months earlier.

It was large, red, and had a price list on it with different columns. One for locals, one for foreign visitors.

The line moved in short bursts toward the kiosk. I stood in it alone. My aunt and her friend had met me in Istanbul, but I sent them off to wander toward the entrance of Topkapi Palace and around the plaza. There was no reason for all three of us to wait.

I knew what was inside. The scale of it and the dim light. The low-hanging chandeliers. The first time, I just walked in because I could, but now I was standing in this queue, repeatedly getting bumped in the back by the group standing behind me.

I did the math in my head. Then again. I also knew what else we could be doing instead: getting on a ferry, sitting and enjoying a Turkish tea, or walking without a plan.

It wasn’t a question of access. It was whether to spend the time and the money on this, or keep moving.

I stood there longer than I expected to. The last time I was here, I hadn’t paused at all.

In November 2023, I arrived with the windows down.

The car moved along the highway from Sabiha Gökçen Airport, moving in slow, uneven traffic. The air coming through the window carried exhaust and something akin to progress from the factories nearby. It reminded me of taxi rides from Pudong, and with that nostalgia came the same instinct to breathe it in deeply.

The driver had turned around to me and offered me a cigarette, which I declined. He lit it and rested his arm near the window. As we nudged forward, he reached into the console and handed me a clementine. I thanked him and peeled it as we slowly made our way across the bridge from Asia to Europe.

He dropped me off on the European side somewhere near Istiklal Street, where I was told the city would be alive.

My Airbnb was above a bar. Even with earplugs pushed deep, the music and voices came through the floor and didn’t stop. Around 4 a.m., shouting rose from the street. I don’t think I slept more than an hour.

I moved the next day.

After that, the week settled into a rhythm. I walked the city without much of a plan. I moved through neighborhoods, stopped when something caught my attention, and kept going when it didn’t. Cats came and went. I followed them more than once, if I’m honest.

I didn’t think much about cost. Food, transport, whatever came up. If something was open, I went in.

The second time I arrived, I did not sleep above a bar.

I checked into a hotel that overlooked the Bosphorus, near Dolmabahçe Sarayı. The room faced the water with views that stretched. Tankers moved past at a steady pace. The city was there, but distant. There was no music through the floor or voices from the street.

Breakfast was included. It would have been easy to stay inside. But we didn’t.

My aunt and her friend had no problem walking without a plan, which is one of my favorite qualities in a travel partner. We stayed out most of the day, moving without much structure.

We made our way to Galata Tower. It had been under renovation the first time I was in the city, and I thought it would be a nice way to orient them to the center of the city while also seeing something new. There was a new ticket booth that was active, with a short queue forming out front.

Thirty euros.

I looked at the sign again to make sure I hadn’t misread it. I hadn’t. These prices do not emerge in isolation. Visitor numbers have surged, the lira has weakened, and heritage sites have now been repositioned as hard-currency generators.

I stepped out of line.

In a city like Istanbul, there are hundreds of viewpoints that awe. Paying for that, standing in that line, it didn’t make sense to me. I told them the price, and ultimately they decided similarly.

We left and kept walking. Ten thousand steps, then more. They were happy to keep going, which made exploring easy. As we walked, I shared with them things I learned on my first visit.

By the time we reached Hagia Sophia, the pattern was already clear.

Fifty euros total.

I didn’t hesitate this time. I wasn’t going in. I had already seen it —walked in for free eighteen months earlier— and the jump from zero to fifty wasn’t just inflation. It was a paywall that changed the very nature of the building.

I thought about them as I shuffled forward in line. They had flown over twelve hours to get here, and ultimately, it seemed a shame for them to miss it. So, I got the tickets and sent them ahead as I milled about more around the plaza.

When they finally emerged, the awe I expected was missing. They talked about being hustled through the corridors. Between the price and the pressure to keep moving, the majesty had been lost in the transaction. Throughput shapes the visit as much as architecture. When time is rationed to move lines, attention is, too.

After that, we didn’t go on to Topkapi or the other “must-sees”, carrying similar 50 euro price tags. It wasn’t my decision to make. They had seen enough to decide how they wanted to move through the rest of the city.

The next day, we walked down toward the ferry docks, planning to cross to what is called the “Asian side.” Along the way, men stood near the water offering Bosphorus cruises for two hundred euros, sunset included with vague promises of space and views.

We kept walking.

At the terminal, commuters moved through the turnstiles without stopping. We followed them onto one of the ferries that runs the route all day, back and forth.

The shoreline runs in one continuous line. Mosques rise behind apartment blocks. Ferries cross back and forth without pause. You can see the place as a whole, and you do not have to decide anything to be in it.

Kadıköy gave us the same relief. We walked through markets and side streets and went into mosques without paying or queuing. We did not have to translate the city into a list of highlights. We could just keep moving.

On the ferry back, the crossing was still only a crossing. People got on, found space, and looked out at the water as the boat moved. The skyline slid past in silence and kept going. 🎟️

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The text usually starts politely.
“Hey, quick question…”

You already don’t like where this is going. You reread it, even though there’s nothing else there yet. Your shoulders do that thing they do when you’re about to be mildly inconvenienced in a way you’re not allowed to complain about.

At first, you assume you’re supposed to be disappointed. You get ready for that. You think about how you’ll respond or about how understanding you’ll sound.

And then, almost immediately, you realize something else is happening.

You feel a little better.

You weren’t planning to cancel. But if you’re honest, you’d already thought about it. You’d dismissed the thought the way you now dismiss a lot of thoughts, by telling yourself you’d see how you felt later.

Later has a way of showing up as someone else’s message.

You type back quickly. “Totally understand.” You mean it. You also send it faster than you need to, which tells you more than you’d like. Your shoulders are no longer slumping.

Sometimes, both people feel this at the same time. This is the best version of it. The plans fade out without drama, like no one wants to draw attention to the fact that this worked out suspiciously well for everyone.

The reasons, when they finally appear, are never dramatic. A headache. Something related to a child. Something at work that technically could wait, but won’t. They are all the kind of reasons that don’t invite questions.

No one ever says, “I don’t feel like it anymore,” even though that’s usually the sentence underneath all the others.

No one ghosts. We’re adults.

When a cancellation comes, you respond the way you’re supposed to with concern and then reassurance. You send it quickly, without rereading it too closely.

Occasionally, the exchange stretches longer than it needs to. Someone offers a way out without quite offering it. “We could always reschedule if you’re tired.” The other person insists they’re fine. This triggers another reassurance, then another apology. By the end, the plans are gone, but now both people feel oddly implicated.

Group chats make this worse.

A plan can survive indefinitely in silence, but once someone types, it becomes unstable. The message is usually careful: “Just checking in, feeling a bit wiped today…” No one answers right away. Everyone rereads it, but the first response is always slower.

Someone admits they’re also tired. Someone says they can still go, but wouldn’t mind rescheduling. Someone else mentions they were already running late anyway. Each message is polite. Each one somehow feels necessary, but within minutes, the plan collapses completely.

This was expected.

No one says that out loud, but everyone knows it. The plan didn’t fail. It did exactly what plans do now.

The chat goes quiet again. No one is angry, but no one is relieved enough to admit it. If someone does type, it’s to say something generous and unnecessary, like, “We should definitely do this soon,” which everyone understands means not soon and possibly not this.

Sometimes you cancel something you actually wanted to do. Sometimes you go to something you should have canceled. Both leave you with the same faint sense that you misread the situation, though you’re never quite sure how.

The worst moment is when you cancel and then feel better immediately. This feels like evidence. Of what, you’re not sure, but it doesn’t feel flattering.

Plans now exist in a fragile state. They’re theoretical until you arrive and start removing your coat.

Sometimes the text never comes. You put on real clothes. You leave the house. You have an okay time. You come home feeling slightly heroic, as if you’ve done something that used to be normal.

Sometimes the text does come.

And sometimes you send it. 💬

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This week, I needed to book a flight within Europe. The budget airline was the cheapest, and by the time I noticed, I had already left Google Flights and was on my way to finishing the booking.

This was the part where you stop thinking about where you’re going and start agreeing to things.

The next screen presented three columns. Each column featured the same man in some state of travel bliss. In one, he is placing a bag into an overhead bin. In another, he walks calmly through a security scanner with his bag in hand. He smiles in all of them, as though these actions had gone exceedingly well for him and would continue to.

The columns were labeled something like Normal, Efficient, and Prepared. Each offered small reassurances of what I would expect in friendly language. I could choose any seat I wanted, “just not the pilot’s.” I could check a bag and “bring ALL the clothes and liquids!” I considered whether any of these three categories described me or who I aspired to be on this flight.

The man looked like he knew where he was going. I imagined being him, flying in a freshly pressed button-down, well-rested, as opposed to boarding before 5:45 am when this flight was due to depart.

Below the columns was a smaller line of text: Continue with Basic.

I clicked it.

A pop-up appeared. The man again, still smiling, loading his bag, with text underneath “Are you sure you don’t want to be Normal?” This made me pause. The phrasing suggested this was not a downgrade but a character flaw.

I hesitated long enough to imagine the people seated around me. What conclusions might they draw from where I put my bag?

I clicked No, I am Basic.

The site then required an account. Guests were not welcome on this budget airline. Thankfully, I already had one. I had done this before.

I hit Next.

I was shown the seat map. I could choose a seat now or be assigned one later. The second option, when clicked, came with a warning that took up most of the page. If I didn’t choose a seat now, I would be assigned one. The assignment would be random. They could not emphasize enough how random this would be.

Another banner appeared: “Most passengers choose their seat. Seats sell out quickly. BEST PRICE NOW.”

I thought again about the person I wanted to be for this two-hour flight. Window meant looking out through the accumulated facial oils of other passengers. Aisle meant stretching my legs just enough to get clipped by the duty-free cart. The middle offered constant armrest vigilance.

None of this felt aspirational.

I clicked Continue without a seat.

Next, I was shown a backpack. Then I was shown the same backpack, now standing beside a suitcase. They were on a background that made them look like they were in a police lineup. Each had heights I was to abide by and maximum weights, which required me to consider the version of myself packing for this trip.

I was warned that bringing a second bag, or a bag that exceeded these limits, would result in a fee at the gate. The fee was described as up to €90 or local currency equivalent, which implied ambiguity, but only in one direction.

I selected one small bag to guarantee future stress. The system accepted it.

Then came the extras.

Did I want Fast Track security? Did I want to purchase a meal? Did I want to offset my trip with tree planting? Did I need a rental car? Had I already thought, before booking this trip, about how I was going to get from the airport to where I was going?

Travel insurance followed, with the stern warning underneath: You can’t put a price on peace of mind.

I declined everything. I did not want peace of mind. I wanted the booking to be finished.

It asked me how I would like to pay. When I said credit card, it happily added the transaction costs to my total.

I clicked Pay.

At the end, the site summarized my decisions. Here was my flight. Here was my seat situation. Here was my bag. Here was the reminder about check-in rules, fees, and what would happen if I forgot.

This was where the site showed me who I had agreed to be.

I would sit anywhere.
I would bring very little.
I would eat later.
I would remember everything.

I would manage. 💺

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Everyone in this room has made the same decision this morning, which is to stay inside.

This is not because the city outside is uninteresting. The city is probably very interesting.

That is not the issue. The issue is that breakfast is included, and it would feel irresponsible not to take advantage of it before going out to experience culture.

So we have gathered.

Some of us are wearing real clothes. Some of us are in gym wear that will never see a gym. Others are dressed in a way that suggests they intended to come down quickly and return to bed. We are not here because we are hungry so much as because it would feel wrong not to be.

This is why the breakfast room is the most honest place in any hotel.

The room itself could be anywhere overseas. But today we are in Japan. This becomes apparent not through signage but through the buffet layout, which has been neatly segregated. At the center of the service area is a large island of Japanese breakfast carefully organized with things like grilled fish, miso soup, and rice. Circling it, like a defensive perimeter, is a ring of Western food: toast, scrambled eggs, yogurt, pastries. People circle the island once before deciding how brave they feel.

Before you do any of this, however, you must secure real estate.

Tables are claimed quickly and without ceremony. A room key that looks identical to all others. A paperback that won’t be read but is brought down solely for this purpose. Only once your territory is established are you free to forage.

I watch a middle-aged couple approach the onigiri baskets. They lean in, reading the labels with concern. There is a pause long enough to suggest internal negotiation. Then, without speaking, they pivot sharply and head for the instant scrambled eggs.

Behind them, a child is inspecting the pastries, and by inspecting, I mean touching everything. He lifts a pain au chocolat, puts it back, lifts it again, then settles on the mini donuts, which he also touches before selecting. His parents say his name in a tone that suggests this behavior is not new, only now international.

The air-conditioning is set aggressively, somewhere around 62° Fahrenheit, as though the hotel would like us to eat efficiently and leave. I am wearing a cardigan specifically for this room. I did not need it anywhere else. I packed it for this. I am prepared to stay.

The coffee machines are where the room’s patience is tested. There is a single-file line, and everyone knows exactly how long a cup should take. When someone reaches for a second cup, clearly for a spouse who is not present, the line stiffens. There are glances back to other tables that say, Can you believe this? Yes, we all can.

As I eat, I like to sit and watch others. A man in a very expensive suit is standing at the toaster. It is the kind with a conveyor belt that moves at the speed of plate tectonics. He watches his bread disappear into the machine with intense focus. Five minutes pass. The toast emerges, not to his liking. He puts it through again. His meeting is clearly not for several hours.

Because we are in Japan, there is a noodle station behind the counter. A staff member assembles bowls patiently, ingredient by ingredient. People stand there with the quiet gratitude of those being helped, enjoying the novelty of having noodles for breakfast. Nearby is the omelet station, where guests are asked what they would like inside.

This question routinely breaks people.

I watch one man stare at the available fillings —cheese, mushrooms, onions, ham— for a full two minutes. He nods thoughtfully, and he considers what his original plans were for the day. Finally, under the pressure of the growing line, he says, “All of it.” The staff member does not react. This is not their first day.

The most dangerous feature of the room is the matcha soft-serve machine. I am not interested in ice cream for breakfast. But the machine is here, humming quietly, and the logic of the buffet dictates that if I do not take advantage of it, I am somehow losing.

A child begs their parents for a cone. They relent. He takes one bite, pauses, and looks betrayed. This is not sweet. This is bitter, and it tastes like plants. He hands it back to his mother, who now has to decide whether to eat it for breakfast or let it melt slowly on her plate.

The buffet puts everyone close enough to notice things they would rather not. We stand close together, pretending not to notice one another while cataloging everything. We judge milk-to-coffee ratios. We notice who goes back for seconds.

When I leave the room, the city is already awake and busy. We’ll get to that. For now, I have gotten my money’s worth.

I was here because it was included. 🍳

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The work was created by Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez and replaces advertising on the underground platforms. The screens are designed to resemble train windows, showing anonymous landscapes filmed from moving vehicles across different parts of the world.

Passing Through is a series of fixed, first-person observations made while moving through places. I stop, the camera runs, and then I move on. Subscribe to Nothing to Declare to see how other places move when you’re not there.

The modern infrastructure of travel in the Global North is built around the expectation of frictionless motion. We have engineered our air borders to behave like automatic doors at a supermarket. You approach, you present a passport with a microchip, and the glass slides open. We do not experience borders as barriers, but instead as brief, administrative pauses in our otherwise uninterrupted forward momentum.

This is why, when the friction returns, it feels less like a delay and more like an insult.

My passport is currently broken. From what I gather, it is a physical failure of the electronics in the cover, likely from being stuffed in a variety of bags and pockets. The booklet itself is valid. There is no visible damage. The photo is clear, and the expiration date is years away. It is a dumb object in a smart world.

For the last month, as I wait for a gap in my schedule long enough to surrender the document for replacement and meanwhile waffle at the replacement cost, I have been exiled from the eGates. I can no longer walk the hypnotic, silent path of the automated scanner. Instead, I am forced to “Seek Assistance”.

By the time I reach this queue, I already recognize the people around me. I first stood with them at check-in. My passport wouldn’t scan at the kiosk for my boarding pass, so I was sent to a staffed counter. That’s where their folders and lives were out in full view.

Global mobility is not a mystery. It is ranked, indexed, and published every year. Some passports allow visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to most of the world. Others require advance applications, in-person interviews, financial disclosures, and proof of intent to return home. The difference is not subtle. It is measured in weeks of paperwork, hundreds of dollars in fees, and hours spent assembling evidence that you do not intend to disappear.

That evidence is visible in the line itself. Indian families holding folders of paper thick enough to be novels. Chinese flipping through hotel confirmations and return tickets. An African businessman pulling a sample product out of his backpack in case pieces of paper are not enough to confirm he’s just attending a trade show. These travelers are not preparing for a trip; they are preparing to answer questions I’ve never been asked in my life.

For many travelers, that preparation never ends. Borders don’t appear as isolated events but as a permanent condition, something to plan around, and absorb the cost of long before a ticket is ever bought.

I was reminded of this long before my passport went analog. A few years ago, my wife and I planned a trip to South Africa with friends. We bought a discounted fare, cheap enough not to hesitate. We were visa-free. They weren’t. Despite holding EU passports, they needed an online eVisa. The website for them failed repeatedly. Emails took weeks to get answers, and phone calls led nowhere. There was talk of mailing passports to an embassy, and the unease of them doing so, given their previous efforts.

I was unconcerned. It was still months before the trip. I told them it would be sorted. That I would make calls, and if by nothing of my sheer force of will, it would work out. They were already done. After the initial effort, they pulled out of the trip. The flights went unused, the money lost. The border had already done its work. For us, the journey was real. For them, it never existed.

This is passportism. Not just the unequal distribution of access, but the unequal distribution of exposure. Some people are forced to reckon with borders constantly, while others are allowed to forget they exist.

That difference shapes understanding. Those who move most easily are rarely required to think about what movement costs. Automation doesn’t just separate travelers into fast and slow lanes. Instead, it separates those who are expected to account for borders from those who are not. Standing in those lines, it became obvious how little space this part of travel ever occupies in the stories we tell about it.

Most contemporary travel writing is produced by people like me, people for whom borders are usually a formality rather than a condition. From that position, borders become forgettable. They sit outside the narrative, something to be cleared so the trip can begin, or only brought up if it is a story itself.

For now, I am still in that line. I talk to the people around me. I watch what they carry and what they prepare to explain. I am reminded that for many travelers, this is not an interruption but the substance of a journey that had already started long before. The border is not something they pass through once, but hundreds of times in their head before they ever approach the kiosk.

At some point, I will replace this booklet and return to the land of green lights and silent glass barriers. It will not be, however, because I am better but because the system assumes I am. For now, I am close enough to see how much of travel begins only after permission is granted and how much work is done for journeys that never happen at all. 🛂

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The kind of modern life people like us live —educated, online, and self-aware— has performed a quiet, clinical sleight of hand to make us believe we are the protagonists of everything. This isn’t just the existential hero’s journey of old literature, but a much more insidious, grinding version that permeates the mundane details of everyday life. We have reached a point where the raw data of our existence is immediately processed for its narrative value, subjecting even our most private impulses to a level of scrutiny that human experience was never meant to withstand.

This is why everyone is tired.

We are exhausted because being the protagonist no longer means being in charge of your own life. Instead, it means performing it. It means choosing the angle and editing the moment as it happens. We are perpetually asking ourselves, consciously or not, what our current state says about us: are we adventurous enough, reflective enough, or healing correctly? We narrate our lives in real-time, trying to turn raw experiences into proof that we are doing it right. The problem is that nothing survives that level of scrutiny. You are compelled to frame it, post it, and integrate it into a cohesive identity. The self has become a relentless project, and every day is just another installment in a series that never ends.

This kind of attention is often sold as empowerment, but it behaves much more like surveillance. You are always being watched, even when the only audience member is yourself. It is unsustainable, yet we lean into it harder every year. We see this tension peak in the cultural obsession with the “In and Out” lists that define the start of the year. These lists are the ultimate manifestation of the self-as-optimization project. We aren’t just living but are curating our very existence against a checklist of what makes us relevant. We have turned the quiet act of existing into a competitive sport where even our downtime is now a metric of our personal brand.

This stands in stark contrast to the way generations moved through the world before the oversharing economy became our primary language. For them, a meal was eaten, a walk was taken, and a conversation was had without the secondary layer of turning it into evidence about who they were. They lived off camera, and there was no internal or external algorithm evaluating whether their Sunday afternoon was aesthetic or meaningful. They had the luxury of being uninteresting because there was no platform demanding they be otherwise. They were allowed to just do things, rather than documenting the doing. There was a certain dignity in that invisibility, a freedom that comes from knowing you aren’t the center of anyone else’s screen.

I felt the weight of this recently during a weeks-long stay with my in-laws. For the first part of that visit, I kept thinking about what I would later write about it. I had supposedly taken time off, but I was still watching myself have the experience. That habit was still running.

I recognize that for those born into this structure, filial piety is the ultimate high-stakes performance, an exacting demand to honor the family through every word and achievement. But as someone who married into it, I sometimes find a strange, intoxicating relief in my status as an outsider. In that environment, the typical modern agency I prize was replaced by a system that already had a place for me. I wasn’t the protagonist. I was a son-in-law, a small part of a much larger, older machine. At first, the loss of autonomy always feels like a restriction, but when the pressure is confined to what is happening in that room, it is almost merciful compared to the endless, ambient pressure we carry everywhere else.

The failure of modern travel is that people like us don’t go anywhere without dragging our own story with us. We move through other countries like protagonists, turning meals, conversations, and photographs into proof of who we think we are becoming. We are not there to see the place. We are there to see ourselves inside it.

The true value of a place is that it does not care about you. That indifference gives you permission to finally be nobody. Real travel begins when the internal story quiets down and you stop performing for an audience, an algorithm, or the future version of yourself who will decide whether the moment counted. In that anonymity, the world stops being a backdrop and starts being real again.

Anthony Bourdain is usually treated as the exception to all of this, which misses the point. He was a brand, a persona, a man being paid to perform himself on camera. He was not outside the machine. He was inside it.

What made him different was not purity but resistance. He understood how easily a place collapses when it becomes a backdrop for someone else’s story. When he went to Vietnam, he wasn’t there to prove what it did to him. He was there to let it remain indifferent to him.

That is what you feel in his best work, the silences, the way he lets other people and places take up the frame. Those weren’t accidents. They were him fighting the same pressure everyone else feels: the pressure to make everything about himself.

This is why everyone is tired. We are exhausted because being the protagonist no longer means being in charge of your own life –it means watching it. Modern selfhood has turned into a form of internal surveillance. You are both the subject and the observer, constantly monitoring how you look, how you feel, how you are healing, and how the moment will read later. Even when no one else is watching, you are.

This kind of attention is sold as empowerment, but it behaves like a police state. Nothing gets to simply happen. Every impulse is evaluated and every experience is checked against whether it was meaningful or on-brand. A life lived under that kind of scrutiny cannot rest, which is why even doing nothing now feels exhausting.

The true breakthrough is the permission to stop. It is the realization that the world is vast, indifferent, and beautiful, and that you are not the center of it. There is a real, underused power in being the bystander rather than the star. The antidote to modern burnout isn’t a better narrative arc or a more polished “In” list. Even writing this is a performance, a way of trying to be seen while arguing that being seen is the problem. It is the quiet freedom of realizing that you are not here to be interesting, and that nothing is about you. 🤳

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