It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.
Interpretation
Engaging with locals during travel deepens understanding and connection.
In this quote, Brandon Stanton emphasizes the richness of travel that comes from personal interaction with local people. By conversing with individuals off the beaten path, travelers can gain a deeper insight into the culture, values, and stories that shape a place beyond the typical tourist experience.
In practice
In a speech about cultural exchange, I might say, 'As Brandon Stanton suggests, immersive travel is about connecting with real people and their stories.'
When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.
Wherever I go, I just try to show normal life. If the work helps to dispel stereotypes, it's because I seek not to portray the extremities of a place, but the vast majority of people who are quite normal and are having normal life experiences.
I think that even though some of the things on 'Humans of New York' are kind of very personal and very revealing, I think the discomfort with sharing that tends to be overwritten by the appreciation of being able to distill the experience of your life into a story and share it with other people.
I always say that my favorite people to interview are the people who are at the beginning and the ends of their lives because they have two alternate perspectives of the world, and neither of them are less profound.
Somebody's willingness to let me photograph them, and willingness to tell me a story, has nothing to do with the words I say. It all has to do with the energy I'm giving off, which hopefully is very genuine, very interested energy. It's just two people having a conversation in the street. I think that's where genuine content comes from.
In general, in my life, one of the coolest things that I've been able to do is to go to different places and meet different people and see how they view the world and to learn what their music is and what their language is, and the food they eat and everything. That idea of the beauty of the vastness of the world has just been my life.
When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
Each time I go to a place I have not seen before I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know. I assume it is natural for a traveler to seek diversity, and that it is the human element that makes him most aware of difference. If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.
Gonna travel, gonna travel wild and free_x000D_ _x000D_ I'm gonna pack my bags because this great big world is calling me
Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying.
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