Blame Anthony Bourdain. I picked up Kitchen Confidential for the restaurant gossip and put it down convinced that the only honest way to know a place is to eat whatever a stranger hands you in an alley at midnight. He never once made travel look comfortable. That was the pitch. Airports are purgatory, jet lag is a personality disorder, and still you go, because somewhere in Vietnam there is a plastic stool with your name on it and a bowl of something your doctor would rather not discuss.

Before Bourdain, I thought travel meant landmarks. You stand near the famous thing, you photograph the famous thing, you leave. He taught me the famous thing is a decoy. The real destination is lunch. So I started booking trips around meals instead of monuments, and I regret nothing except one oyster in a landlocked country. The man sold me a worldview one bowl of noodles at a time, and I am still paying the bill happily.