I don’t travel much. Some minor business travel now and again, a couple of international trips, and a few zig-zags between New England and the Midwest in my college/grad school years. It’s not that I don’t like to go places, it’s more a case of not being afforded the opportunity to do so on any consistent basis…not to mention not having the sense enough when I was a young person to take the time to do it then.

Part of the fun of living online, thus, is getting to learn about other parts of the world from people who live there and getting to enjoy travel somewhat vicariously through the travels of others. Lately, it seems like a lot of people I know online have been gallavanting here and there. Blog-buddy John Tolva is just back from an extended trip to Ghana as part of a project he is doing through his employer (a well-known International Business Machines company) to assist local craftspeople in selling their goods internationally online. I’ve been following his blog posts about the trip, as well as his Twitter feed. He offered up some great posts about what he saw and did in Ghana, along with great photos:

The Twitter posts were, of necessity, more terse but in their own way much more telling. He came down with a malaria-like sickness that he’s still taking meds for, and I gather his trip home was…eventful. But he also DJ’d in a disco, met wonderful people, and obviously learned to love a place that most Westerners do not have the faintest idea about.

Maya Waldman is a mutual friend of Andre Torrez who has spent most of the last three or four years travelling around Asia, including a year-long stint in the Marshall Islands as a teacher. She’s presently making an extended return visit to India, and I would not be the least bit surprised if she stayed there for a long time. It’s easy to understand her fascination and feeling for the place. Check out this amazing photograph of spices at a local market:

On a slightly different note, Brittney Gilbert, another MFOT, relocated from her birthplace of Nashville, Tennessee last year to the San Francisco area to take a job with the CBS television station there, KPIX, as their resident blogger. Even though Nashville is urban, Brittney has been going through that fish-out-of-water experience one inevitably has when moving to a huge metropolis. Especially one as unique as San Francisco (and even moreso, since she lives in Berkeley). She seems mostly happy in the Bay Area, but in this recent post on her personal blog, she talks about the sometimes astonishing differences. I can relate to her experience much more than I can either of the other two, having moved betwee small-town Maine and Chicago a couple of times in the 1980s, and still sometimes shaking my head when I walk through places like Harvard Square.

I doubt I will ever see Ghana or India in person. I have spent a little time in San Francisco, but not nearly enough to feel like I know the least bit about it. It’s just great to be able to benefit from the sharing of these three individuals’ experiences and have a small taste of the rest of the world.