Category: Travel Philosophy

Eight cities. Thirty-three days. 12.500 kilometers. A motor home transformed into a zeppelin. And one goal: live those experiences hidden to anyone traveling as a tourist; plus, get to know cities with the help of others and enlist the participation of its people.To sum up, that’s been ExperienceLess, an eight-city romp full of rewarding impressions from both a personal and professional standpoint.

ExperienceLess is a spinoff of trourist.com, created for the two-fold purpose of enjoying  unique experiences among friends and underscoring our principal ideal: to live the places, rather than merely visit them. During our crusade, we’ve scampered through Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Istambul and Barcelona – cities in which we often resorted to the unconventional in order to meet our objectives.

Seated in squares, parks, even a metro, we’ve held up a cardboard poster bearing the message: “Help! I’m ExperienceLess. I don’t want to visit your city, I want to live it. Thanks.” As you can readily see, our setting was not unlike that of a homeless person and the name of our project’s initiative was not pure happenstance.

Admittedly, there were people who when they saw us understood nothing. Others observed us with indifference. Generally speaking, though, we were quite pleased with the hospitality shown. People gave their time and interest so that we could walk away from their cities with more than just mute stares from historical buildings and museums.

Our backpack of experiences was filled with all kinds of goodies: home-cooked Dutch cuisine with a student in Amsterdam; a hoola-hoop class in a Berlin park, a birthday bash with a Budapest boy, smoking a water pipe atop an Istanbul rooftop, and collectively cooking a potato omelet with a couple in Barcelona, with a follow-up concert to boot. Not bad for four amigos who before the trip were ExperienceLess.

The leitmotiv of trourist’s travel philosophy is that experiences make the difference of a city over the others, and these experiences will be forever in a very special place of your mind. Of course, every experience needs human interaction, that’s why meeting locals is very important for us.

Last day, I came across with a very interesting article about some essential items to pack if you want to meet the locals. The following are several things to have in your bag to help breaking the ice easily:

• A ticket on the slow bus. When you board the overstuffed train or bus, likely you will be seated next to dozens of people eager to have a conversation.
• A deck of playing cards. Start to lazily play a game of solitaire and before you know it there will be a crowd of people eager to join you.
• Pictures of home, your friends and family. A few pictures are a great way to build a connection with people you meet on the road.

(my own proposals)

• Your city football team’s shirt. Football moves the masses all around the world.
• Typical food of your country. 600 grams of jabugo jam are easy to carry and can happily become in a gastronomical exchange.
• A volley ball.  A volley ball can be a good help to share some leisure time with locals (above all, when you are in a beach).

Do you have any additional proposal?

“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter”. This is how Mark Twain apologized to his friends for the length of his letters. Besides being smart, this quote is absolutely right.

In trourist we agree with Mark Twain, and we consider brevity as the best way to promote clarity. That’s why, we are very concerned about getting an appropriate format to help users to view and share experiences easily.

After doing several tests, we think an experience should not be longer than 2 or 3 twitts. This should be enough to offer your friends a positive recommendation to help them experience the destinations.

What do you think about? Is this “microblogging” format appropriate for your experience-telling? An example of an experience I had while I was in Los Angeles will follow:

“Probably is a little mess, but enjoying a sunset in Venice Beach is a must if you are visiting Los Angeles. Right there you can meet up with very strange people that will make you laugh a lot. There are also some bars offering a happy hour of beer (I was in a bar named On the Waterfront Cafe that was cool)”.

Total amount of characters used to describe this experience: 307. Does it work for you?

From our point of view there are two types of websites. In one hand, you’ll find websites that work just as a tool for users. In the other hand, you’ll find those that will steal a piece of your heart. An example of that would be Youtube and Vimeo. Both of them are used for uploading and viewing videos online. Even so, Vimeo has achieved to create emotional ties around the videos and it has been a key factor to fit in the industry.

We believe this is the best course to follow. Rather than turning trourist into a simple tool for planning trips, we would like trourist to be part of your trips, helping you to create them based on your friends’ first hand information. If emotional ties around photos, videos and music have already been created, why couldn’t be done for trips?

Every time we ask our friends about authentic experiences they’ve lived during their trips the answers are completely different. It’s normal, because not everyone has the same objectives and interests when traveling.

For us, living the destinies with the maximum level of authenticity means to take part in what the local people really enjoy. Besides visiting the most touristic places, we believe the experiences you live in each city is what makes the difference among them .

It’s not so easy to get authentic experiences. It requires a lot of information about the city and most of the time it’s hard to find it right away or is not reliable. In that case, friends are the most suitable font of information to get them. Is there any better way to feel the destinations rather than first hand information from friends? How do you feel about it? How many cities could you experience with facebook or MySpace friends’ first hand information?