No Place for Beginners or Sensitive Hearts
In mid-February 2025, I was on a Eurostar train from Paris to Amsterdam when I spotted a building with a message in huge letters on the side. If I’d been thinking faster, I would’ve snapped a picture, but before I had the chance the train had continued on.
At first all I saw were the words: “NO PLACE. . .” and I thought this was a strange way to announce that the building had no vacancies at the moment.
Then I saw the rest of the message: “NO PLACE FOR BEGINNERS OR SENSITIVE HEARTS.”
When I googled it, I found the lyrics to the classic Sade song, “Smooth Operator” — “No place for beginners or sensitive hearts / When sentiment is left to chance / No place to be ending but somewhere to start.”
There are some places in life where you have to be toughened up before you can enter.
When you travel to a big foreign city like London, Paris or New York, you may arrive wide-eyed and awestruck, but everyone around you is just trying to get to work. You may be on vacation, but to the locals you’re just the person on their morning commuter train taking up space with your roller bag.
What is new to you is old hat to them, which can make you feel like you should already know all this stuff — you should already know how to open the Metro doors in Paris or that an ideal temperature in your London apartment is about 20 degrees Celsius.
My dad said international travel sounds like being dropped into a real-life puzzle. It’s true: the world can feel like one big escape room — figuring out basic survival like where and what to eat, how to get there, and what to do with the rest of your time.
I’ve had my best travel experiences when I embraced my ignorance and opened up like the Fool card in the tarot. With arms outstretched I try to roll with the inevitable punches like riding waves. Everyone is a beginner sometime. And if you never allow yourself to be afraid or uncomfortable, you may never find the treasure you came looking for.
In this space, I will be adding essays and practical tips from my own travels that may ease some of the fear of the unknown for those following in my footsteps. It is a work in progress that will (hopefully) continue to grow with new travels.
Another song comes to mind, called “For Beginners” by M. Ward: “When you're absolute beginners / It's a panoramic view / From her majesty Mount Zion / And the kingdom is for you.”
My European Vacation: Midlife Crisis Edition
The first time I went to Europe was right after I graduated from college in 1999. One of my best childhood friends, Jessie, was doing a summer program at Oxford and, like the overachiever that she is, she planned our whole trip from beginning to end.
I met her in London and then we went straightaway to the Lake District. In the mornings we had a full English breakfast (beans, toast, stewed tomato, egg, sausage, bacon). In the afternoons we strolled around lakes and were chased through fields by sheep.
From there we went to Prague before heading down to Italy and the French Riviera. We only spent a day or two in London and Paris though, so I’d always thought I’d be back.
I just didn’t expect that it would take 25 years.
Party Like It’s 1999
A travel journal . . . 25 years later
“Fuck it. I bought my ticket.”
By the end of 2024, I was burnt out and jobless. I was getting some freelance work, but something wasn’t clicking. I needed a perspective shift.
My best friend from high school, Hari, had been traveling around Europe off and on since the pandemic and for the past five years I’ve been thinking: What if I just buy a ticket?
So in December I spent $800 on a roundtrip fare to Heathrow. I would depart from Denver International Airport on January 31 to meet Hari for a week in London followed by a week in Paris, with a few days left at the end for who knows what.
Even though I had no job and no idea how I’d pay for it, I told Hari, “Fuck it. I bought my ticket.”
Understanding England
As an American, England has always felt like that ex who you still share a house with even as you’re both living separate lives.
They say we broke up in 1776, but ever since then we’ve maintained this magnetic attraction to each other. Especially since I was born after the British invasion of the ‘60s, it has always felt like our two cultures were inexorably intertwined.
But as I prepared to return to London for the first time in 25 years, I realized that maybe I don’t know Brits at all. Sure, we get a lot of our TV shows from the UK (although they are Americanized). I’ve watched a lot of British murder mysteries and listened to a lot of music made by Brits. I watched The Crown and Downton Abbey, so what else is there to know?
Turns out, quite a lot, actually.
Understanding England
Why can’t we quit you?
An American in Paris
We didn’t need to announce our Americanness in Paris: Everyone saw it right away. As soon as we entered a restaurant or shop the people started speaking English.
There was a fabulous cafe on the corner of our block in Montmartre called Au Bon Coin. We went there twice because it was so good. Many restaurants in Paris don’t serve dinner until at least 7:00pm, and we’d arrived a little early. While we were waiting, I watched our server bustling around the dining room, chatting with his co-workers in French.
Imagine my surprise when he approached us and his voice dropped a couple octaves as he said in perfect English, “So, uh, what’ll you have?”
I couldn’t help myself from saying, “Wow, your English is amazing.”
He was like, “Yeah, I’m American.”
Suddenly he looked less like a sturdy French farm boy and more like a Texas high school quarterback who’d been dropped in Paris. That’s the power of language: It’s not just the words we use but the quality of the sounds. French is a language that seems to demand vulnerability. It bares the soul.
The only thing I knew how to say was “thank you.” I said it everywhere, a thousand times, when I came and when I left. It was my anchor, my only expression: Merci. Merci. Merci. Merci.
“I’ll tell you one thing about Americans,” I can hear the Parisians saying to each other, “they sure are grateful.”
Paris 2025
Merci! Merci! Merci!
Getting There
DO NOT STAY HERE NO MATTER WHAT.
I had a bit over a month to plan my first international trip in many years, but I was confident.
February is off-season for tourists. A quick look at AirBnB showed dozens of cool-looking apartments for under $1,000 US for the whole week in London.
Paris was even cheaper. People may love Paris in the Springtime, but they don’t tend to go in February, it seems.
But a lot of the places I could afford (or at least afford to put on my credit card) had only one bed. I was looking for enough space for two old friends to cohabitate while still having some semblance of privacy.
Details while travel planning have never been my strong suit.
Once I booked a room in Washington DC that turned out to be a lot more like a squat in a drug den. We stayed for one night and then ate the cost and found the most basic Sheraton/Hilton/Anything But This Place hotel we could find and snuck out at daybreak.
I’ve always been kind of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of traveler, an “it’ll all work out” kind of person. Besides, Hari had family in London and she’d been doing housesitting around Europe for years. I asked her what London neighborhoods I should look in, then I picked one of the medium-priced ones and I sort of forgot about it. Until about a week before I was set to leave.
Something told me to just double check the place I had booked. On first glance, there were no bad reviews of the apartment itself. But then I looked closer — there were no good reviews either.
I clicked on the host’s profile and the first review that came up said, “DO NOT STAY HERE NO MATTER WHAT.”
Well, fuck.
Where to Stay
Read the stinkin’ reviews
Just because the pictures look good doesn’t mean that the place will feel good. No reviews are a huge red flag. Sometimes even if the place itself has no reviews, the host or management company does. Even if you’re impulsive like me and you book a place without doing much research, sometimes you have a window of time (like 48 hours) when you can still cancel without penalty. Unfortunately, I had paid outright so there was no way of getting a refund.
Beyond AirBnB
(Gasp!) a hotel?
When I suddenly had to book new accommodations a week before I left for London, I looked on AirBnB, but had no luck. AirBnB gives hosts 24 hours to accept a reservation, so I waited two days for hosts who did not accept — and did not reply to my messages at all.
I was starting to get desperate, so I began looking at hotels. I figured it was the off-season so maybe I’d get a deal. The affordable hotels had zero ambience — I may not as well even go on the vacation at all. The trendy boutique hotels had rooms but only for one or two nights.
I finally just started googling and landed on Booking.com, where I was able to book a private residence that had good reviews in Hackney, which was one of the neighborhoods Hari had suggested. More like a hotel reservation, there was no wait time between my request being sent and it being accepted.
In the end, I was out $900 from the nonrefundable payment I’d made to the first place.
If I were doing it all over again with enough time to book in advance, I would seriously consider a hotel. Especially during the off-season, it likely wouldn’t have been much more expensive and would’ve had a lot of perks.
Who You Gonna Call?
International phone plans
The first time I went to Europe was so long ago that we used calling cards — a literal card that you carried around with you that had a number you could enter that allowed you to call long distance.
Oh, how times have changed.
Even if you don’t contact your phone provider to tell them you’re leaving the country, they can tell (obviously). As soon as I landed in London, I got a text from AT&T saying that my phone had been covered by an International Day Pass that let me use it in the exact same way I do at home — for $12 a day.
I would only be charged on the days that I used my phone for things like calls (ha!), texts and cellular data. And I’d only be charged for up to 10 days per billing cycle. So, $120. If I had done my homework before I left, I could’ve made a more informed decision about whether or not this was a good deal given my usage.
Note to readers: OK, so I haven’t written these tips yet, but I will be updating this page in the weeks and months to come.
Getting Through Security Without Losing Your Sanity
Laptops stay in and non-high-heeled shoes stay on
Border Crossings
Smile for the camera
Don’t Peel the Baggage Stickers
Just put the dots together, Love
Don’t Stop Until You See Your Gate
It’s always further than you think
The Jet Blue Lady Will Be Ruthless About Your Bag Size
Hari: “I’m scared of that woman.”
Things I Wouldn’t Carry
You can’t reabsorb your luggage into your body no matter how hard you try
Travel Survival Kit
3 Things I used every day
Meeting People in Airports
Kwadwdo (kway JOE)
Traveling in the UK and EU
They don’t announce the gate until 30 minutes before . . . ready, set, go!
London
Passports and Visas
A brief history of Brexit
Ode to British Airways Flight Videos
They should get a BAFTA for these
On Heathrow
Can you actually take luggage on the escalator, or . . . ?
Leaving Heathrow
To Oyster card or not to Oyster card
Brits Don’t Know Where to Walk
Or is it the rest of us?
London Trains Split Off
Be sure you’re in the right car
Opening Doors in London
You’re going places now!
Red Double-Decker Buses and Black Cabs
And Uber works here too
Turning Things On in London
Needy power outlets
London Appliances
And hidden silverware drawers
Use the Coat Rack
Advice from Londoners
Beware the Phone Snatcher
On British bogeymen
The Lidl Cart Wars
And self-scanning at Sainsbury’s Local
Please Sir, Can You Spare a Curtain?
Unintentional public showering
English Churchyards
Heaven knows I’m miserable now
Borough Market
Can I just live here?
Free Museums and Shit
London edition: The Magna-fucking-Carta!
London Pubs
Wh-Hare is the door to this place?
Gordon’s Wine Bar
And round-the-corner ramen
Ode to Walthamstow
God’s Own Junkyard, indeed
Children of London
They’re the future. And they’re everywhere.
Look Kids, Big Ben … Parliament
On speaking statues
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
On hidden identities
Seen in Camden
Amy Winehouse and a secretly Brazilian bartender
London Buddhist Centre
Sending love
You Might Get Kicked Off the Bus
And it might be f-f-f-freezing
Where Can I Get Some Tequila in This Place?
Turning tables ‘round in Marks and Spencers . . . they don’t seem to mind
Eating in London
Sunday roasts, Scotch eggs, and whatever a French taco is
