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Local Markets, Neighborhood Water Holes, Out Of Doors Gathering Spots, Community Events And Local Accommodations Are Among Ways To Escape The Brand-Blitzed Landscapes That Globalization Has Created.

Last week we, well I anyhow, bemoaned the rampant globalization that has spread chain stores and brand names and demolished a lot of what is special in the world. This week, as guaranteed, we are here to assure you : All that is special has not been lost. You can still find it, those unique aspects of a place that imbue it with its own special character.

Over time, as globalization has squeezed out the mom-and-pop stores, the rough-hewn and the aspects of a culture which can lead to that uncomfortable shock, travelers have evolved. They've identified what are now fairly good strategies of finding the real folks, the everyday life, and the guts of a place and its folks. In fact , there's a entire movement, "slow travel," concentrated on doing just that.
Websites on slow travel

Slow travel is "in" nowadays, so look carefully at the source of the info ("About Us") and the main points of what they're calling "slow" (A 14 day bike tour through three states? Nah.) Here are a few of the well-established sites that may motivate you to get up and go slow :

Slowtrav.com : Focus is on finding vacation rentals ; the Firm has spun off many themed sites for bulletin boards and pictures, a favored forum (slowtalk.com) and some destination-specific sites, for instance: slowtrav.com/Switzerland.
Slowtraveltours.com: A grouping of independent, small travel businesses offering group tours they lead themselves. Most tours are based in one place.
Slowmovement.com: Australia-based site and slant, but has pleasing features on slow travel, slow towns, slow food etc .
Theworldinstituteofslowness.com: Established in 1999, the institute is now a self-described "think tank for the slow revolution."
Slow books: The World Pequot Press distributes some of the new guidebooks on slow travel, including "Eat Slow Britain", "Go Slow France", and "Slow Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly." Information is on their website: globepequot.com.

Local marketplaces, neighborhood water holes, outside gathering spots, community events and local accommodations are among paths to escape the brand-blitzed landscapes that globalization has created. Incorporating such experiences and encounters on your trip likely will present new challenges and get you out of your zone of comfort at least initially. But they may also result in your most enduring travel memories. Not to mention a greater appreciation of how continually entrancing life is on this planet.

Here are ways to go about finding special experiences, wherever you are:

Go Off-season

When the visiting hordes have subsided, there's no-one home but the neighbors. Some places close up, but what remains open for business will be quite enough. I'm a massive fan of the Jersey Shore in winter ; some towns are far more all year than others, for instance : Cape May, Spring Lake, Red Bank. The sand will not be bath temp, but it may twinkle with frost in the morning ; you will still find great restaurants, pretty inns, better rates and time to chat to the neighbors and visit unexplored parks, galleries, shops. Another off-season favorite is Yellowstone Countrywide Park. The 30-below readings may frighten off the masses, but that just means you'll get the total attention and understanding of the park rangers and winter lodge staff as well as a graphic, even visceral, notion of the opposition for survival in natural habitats ; nature everywhere is at its savage, beautiful best.

Take Public Transportation

Yes, it can be puzzling even in your hometown, you may not have the hang of it. But abroad, trains, buses, shuttles are all part of life. I've rubbed elbows well, elbow-to-feathers with a colorful array of passengers (including cattle) on an Ecuadorean train in the Andes and shared a curry meal with a local family on a long train trip through India.

Stay Local

Apartment rentals are crazy-popular, in part because they're more cost effective and gave you more space / amenities than a hotel room. But tenants quickly realized they furnished another entry to the local way of living. Leave your key in the lock inadvertently, you may meet and begin to know your neighbor (say you've lost your pussy-cat, you'll make fast friends with a whole neighborhood, la "Amelie"). You'll be among neighbors instead of other travelers (though given the popularity of rentals, you may find your neighbor is a local would-be as well).

Other types of local stays include renting a room in a home airbnb.com, a relatively new company, offers both whole-place rentals and a room in someone's home, with the host (hopefully) becoming a type of insider guide-cum-mentor for a local experience. Home stays are also a choice. My first visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early '90s included a stay with a Russian family and without them, I'd possibly have done something impossibly nerdy and wound up in some KGB-esque netherworld.

Agriturismo is another growing lodging option. Farmers and others whose lives are connected to farming have begun opening their houses and offering accommodations to travelers in part because they want the bucks, but most will not treat you like an ATM. You can simply stay over and eat what will without doubt be a killer excellent meal or 2, but you can learn about or perhaps pitch in with their work. In rustic Umbria, we paid a visit to a family that had been inclining a massive sweep of olive trees for four generations. I ate the most memorable spread of tapenades of my life, acquired a new appreciation of the entire olive oil making process, and also gained one or two pounds in the procedure. Finally I lost the weight, but I carry the memory of the sunset heating up the peach walls of the villa to this day.

One travel writer has spent his whole career traveling and meeting folks this way. I am not that gregarious, but I've managed to yammer my way to invites without intentionally doing so . Solo travelers have a better shot at this option, I suppose, though safety is also more of an issue if you're alone (a camera with an exceedingly large telephoto lens is always my first line of defense). After a Bedouin taxi driver in Egypt started talking about his normal bread-baking stove, I raised questions till he took me to his home a little place with a mud floor, chickens running through the rooms, a cheery, friendly toddler and a sweet better half offering me some of their bread. Later on my Egypt trip, when I was surrounded by kids begging for money, a man came out and shooed the youngsters away, invited me in, and he and his wife sat down with me in their living room and talked about the impact of tourism on culture. "You give them money, they think of you as dollar bill with legs," announced the man, a schoolteacher. I will be able to never forget the couple, standing with their baby in the wife's arms, as I left their house, resolved not to make a contribution to the ruination of any more cultures.

People-to-people Programs

My first was in the Bahamas, in a cruise. It may have been a nondescript three-hour stop in the port of Nassau. Instead , I hitched up with an area woman who'd volunteered for the town's P-to-P programme, which was new at the time (fifteen to twenty years back). I joined her as she stopped at a primary school to pick up her child, to a neighbor's for coffee, to her mom's local dress shop chatting and learning about her life all on the way. Such programs have caught on everywhere. Check with the destination's tourism office to see if there's one.

Attend a Local Performance

Sure, you want to see the Kirov Ballet if they're performing at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. But think outside of the high-ticket-price shows. I was staying with a local family in that beautiful Russian town and they advised a performance by a local orchestra from one of the city's bunch of fine music and arts colleges. It was in a theater with wooden chairs and great acoustics, and the performance was amazing particularly as the young musicians were so balanced, enthusiastic, brilliantly gifted. Later, youngsters coming out to welcome their pals and family, smack kisses and proud words OK, I could not translate, but I knew were as memorable as the music. And a heads up that while we have our differences, some human behavior is universal.

Volunteer

There are lots of volunteer chances to work with area folk teaching English to adults or youngsters, working the land with local farmers, building houses, or reconstructing them after a disaster as I did in the train of Katrina in New Orleans. Usually, I volunteer for programs that focus on helping animals. But they bring me new insight into the area folk, also. In Namibia, the fourteen day PAWS enormous moggy restoration project was absolutely connected to the community ; without learning their philosophy and traditions, anything we did would be opposed, ineffectual or completely futile. So when we went to rescue a leopard that had been trapped on a farmer's property, we managed to talk to him a man who in the past may have just shot the animal because it's a threat to his cows and sheep. Our connection, on his land, chatting for several hours, provided an epiphany for me, and I came away with an understanding that would not have been possible were I to remain in my ivory tower of environmental idealism.

Local Marketplaces

In cities and rural areas worldwide , the convention of the local market has somehow endured. In small town parts of many EU states, markets have naturally evolved an efficient schedule that will keep family fridges and cabinets stocked weekly. A good concierge or manual can provide you with the days and places to be to partake of the colorful, regularly loud and absolutely down-home scenes. The high level view of Dubrovnik, Croatia, I was treated to from a walk along the old town walls was sublime, but at floor level, the Saturday market in the square, with its bright, lined-up produce and shuffling elderly men and hind-leg-walking dogs and outgoing sellers touting samples and calling "Try it!" in Croatian and English was what I can recollect best.

Specialty markets, particularly those with artisans and artists, are also full of local flavor. They're especially bounteous around vacations. While you may encounter the infrequent slick, dull entrepreneurs, for the most part these local craftspeople are earnest and keen on their work, and like to speak to passersby. During the annual Shrimp & Petrol Holiday on Louisiana's Gulf Coast, a serious attraction is the massive tented area with folks selling their home-made and often regionally flavoured creations. I will be able to never forget the beautifully balanced young mom behind the counter with her teen daughter, all their hand-crafted jewellery spread out before them ; a unusual reversal of roles, with the studded-nose girl amazingly businesslike and the ethereal mom simply wanting to talk about her daughter, the economy and how I liked this bit of Louisiana.

Remember the shops. Visitors don't spend a little time getting a shop cart and hunting for lettuce and dishwashing liquids. But if you're looking for daily life, get thee to a grocery store! In Paris, just understanding the proper way to extricate the cart from its neighbors is fun (requires an EU Buck coin deposited in a slot that allows you to turn a key unlocking a chain you get the coin back when the store gets the cart back). What's on the shelving (no-one beats our cereal aisles), how the neighbors buy (small quantities, and yes, the 4-euro bottle of wine flies off French shelves), the chats, the packing, the packed junk food, are all areas of local insight. And of course, being able to bring my dog into the Monoprix food store (he sat nicely in the cart) was something you'd do only in Paris!

Pedal or Bipedal Power

Wanna stop and smell the roses and start up a conversation, read a makeshift poster, pet a dog and speak to its hiker, drop in someplace unplanned but that strikes your curiosity? Ride a bike (more cities have public bike rental systems) or walk!

I have employed all of the methods above at one time or another. Little do I'm sure that they have been wrapped up and now define a new movement : slow travel.

Slow travel is an off-shoot from the "slow food" movement that commenced in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against the opening of a McDonald's in Rome ; the idea was to instead preserve regional cuisine, local farming, communal meals and conventional food preparation strategies. Today, the idea has spread into a movement, a strategy of living that stresses connection food, first, and in the case of travel, also to local races and cultures.

Rather than attempting to squeeze as many sights or towns as practicable into each trip, the slow traveler takes the time to explore each destination comprehensively and to experience the local culture. As founder Pauline Kenny puts it on her web site SlowTrav.com, "Slow Travelers assume that they do not have to see everything on one trip, that there'll be other trips." The key is slowing down and making the most of each moment of your vacation. You will stay in one place long enough to recognise your neighbors, shop in the local marketplaces and pick a fave coffeehouse.

All of the above strategies are a part of the movement, from finding a place to settle in for a week, to using local transit or biking, or your feet to get around and meet the people next door, do the shopping, enjoy the mundane and the night pastimes, cook the local tactics for example. And find points of interest from their perspective.

It isn't necessarily simple : If you're shy (like me), it'll take overcoming some fears to get out the door and get speaking. There could be language barriers to conquer, as well as currency conversions, weight and size conversions, getting lost, getting tired, and we are, after all Northern Americans being frustrated by all this slowness, writes tagza.com.