The great Rick Steves talks about becoming a ‘temporary local’ when you travel. We love this idea and have adopted it for ourselves. But it’s not always obvious how to do that, especially if you are somewhere that feels very foreign. Here are our four best tips for settling in fast, wherever you are.
Learn the Basics
Know the telephone numbers for emergencies and police. Locate the nearest hospital. Ideally you will master the alphabet so you can pronounce things (though we failed at this miserably in Thailand). But also, learn your way around your neighborhood, ideally by walking in different directions. For the first few days you want to be slow and deliberate, absorbing everything you can and trying to remember landmarks. Check up on where you’ve been with a map. Once you feel good about your immediate neighborhood, say, six blocks in each direction, broaden out in circles. As a test, take a bus somewhere and try to find your way home. You probably won’t get too lost, and if you do, you can always get found again.
Find your place
It can be tempting to try out a ton of local restaurants in the hope of finding the best one (this goes also for grocery stores, bars: anywhere you go regularly). But that takes time. We have instead learned to be satisficers, settling on a ‘good enough’ option that meets our minimum criteria. Might the coffee shop down the road be objectively better? Sure, but if you aim to feel at home in a new place, there is no better way than sitting at ‘your’ table drinking ‘your’ drink and knowing that at 10:30 that mom with the five kids is likely to stop by. (Extra points if you talk to people!)
Have a thing
If you are a swimmer, beer afficionado, or the like, find your people and join them. Go to the knitting store and notice what is familiar and what is different. Talk sports with the locals. Ask questions of the band. This doesn’t have to be fancy and doesn’t require expertise: for years, Laurel made a habit of getting a haircut when she was in a country where she didn’t speak a word of the language. Sometimes the haircuts were terrible (and in Korea she got her cheeks shaved!), but it was always interesting to interact with people who weren’t expecting to see a tourist when they went to work that day.
Go native
Follow national and local news, so you can talk to people you meet about the new traffic pattern or the upcoming spring festival. Watch TV (especially in another language, with subtitles!). Attend a small event, like a block party or rummage sale. Ask people what they think about an upcoming election. Real knowledge is local, so learn some details and build upon them.
Remember too that the first day is always the hardest (especially if you have jetlag). If you can manage to leave and return on the first day, successfully having accomplished a minor task, just think what you can do the following day!
