[lionhearted]

> But IMHO travel is so much more meaningful than that, and in fact I don't see much of a point to the jet-set lifestyle at all.

As you travel, you slowly get friends around the world who are doing amazing things you'd like to see. I wish I could see my grandmother back in Boston right now, go to my best friend's birthday party in Los Angeles, visit Beijing to catch up with a couple old friends and talk business, and also be here in Vietnam for a couple weeks, also doing some business and adventuring with great people.

I have traveled the world slumming it. It's great, it's awesome. But as you do it, actually, the jet-setting lifestyle becomes more appealing, not less. I wish I had the freedom of action and mobility to be where I want without regard to money. Well, I'm working on that right now, actually. Well, not right now, I'm screwing off on HN right now, so umm, back to work for me :)

[_delirium]

I have friends and family around the world, but somehow that makes me even more opposed to this quick-trip view of travel. I have a life and family in the United States, and a life and family in Greece, and I tend to not like mixing them a lot. Visiting Greece for a weekend feels hugely disrespectful to me--- I tend to visit for a week at the minimum, preferably 2+ weeks. It's a context switch, and I find that short trips fail to fully implement the switch, instead treating it as just another location, like any other location, rather than getting into the local language, mood, culture, etc. Even just linguistically, it takes me at least a week to get comfortable using Greek as an everyday language again. You really need some time to properly switch contexts and treat it as somewhere genuinely different, imo.

That, and the jet-setting lifestyle would alienate me from friends and family: if I were the type of person who flew in to Greece for a 3-day weekend, I would no longer be one of them.