Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

by Adam Fletcher

Fremdschämen is a German word for the untranslatable but instantly recognisable emotion of feeling shame on someone’s behalf.

A spontaneity siren sounded in my head. “Later tonight? As in, pretty much now later?”

That’s another one for the list. Why is being in the house always considered a bad thing? Houses are a comfort zone of Internet, sofas, cushions, toast. They’re really an embarrassment of riches in a cruel, indifferent, and largely toast-less world.

Time flies when you’re on the couch.

The ultimate delusion is the delusion you can change your partner.

There’s a “better out than in” belief in China, so it’s totally okay to spit, burp, and fart at will.

He reminded me of a Chinese John Wayne, a John Wang, if you will.

Popular consensus is that China is overpopulated. Actually, vast chunks of China are as barren as the moon. The cities feel overcrowded, so much so that they’re building cities they don’t even need yet. Backup cities. Reserve cities. B-side cities. Cities full of empty homes. Sixty-four million homes stand completely empty. There’s plenty of space yet beyond their cities’ borders.

Eventually, more through luck than judgement, we found the part of the melee that had the buses in it. It was about a hundred metres past the rusted-car parts area, down the end of a narrow alley of carcasses on hooks, sharing an entrance with both the Bible and assorted brooming paraphernalia stalls. Obvious, in hindsight. Two long hours later

We’d already noticed back in Accra that if you stopped people and asked for directions, not only would they not know the answer, your having asked them the question seemed to make them also suddenly uncertain of where they were. They were like cartoon characters running off a cliff, able to keep running just as long as you didn’t make them look down.

In Ghana, big is beautiful, because big implies wealth, suggests you’ve calories to waste. I had

I thought about how weird a human quirk it is that we consider whatever is exotic or mostly unachievable beautiful. So while we Europeans are heading out to the tanning salon to get darker skin and sweating our way round laps of the park to lose weight, there are Asian people covering their faces to keep their complexions white while the citizens of Ghana double down on fried chicken to try to stay un-trim. We just love to make it hard for ourselves. We are, in many ways, quite ridiculous.

Saying “I’m sure you” has to be the absolute fastest way of creating uncertainty in another human.

Poverty tourists. Rubberneckers.

The pace of life was slow. I’d never been anywhere where there appeared to be so many people, doing so little, so harmoniously.

noticed he was no longer burdened by teeth.

“Dad, what’s the difference between me and God?”

But I also appreciated that Ghana doesn’t try to be something it isn’t, either. It doesn’t show off for you. Mostly, it doesn’t understand why you’ve come or what you want from it, and it’s not going to put on airs and graces trying to find out. I’d come around to Djarbah’s way of thinking. Not every country is trying to become Germany. There’s more to life than efficiency. Change can come, sure, but it didn’t have to come at breakneck China speeds. I tried to remember that for myself and my own project of reinvention. Ghana is what it is. It’s its own thing. It’s an African success story.

No one wants journalists or writers in their country because they have a habit of writing things, and sometimes these things are even true.

It’s funny how often people say “it’s nothing to worry about” precisely when it’s exactly a point in your life deserving of concern. It’s like they’re trying to convince themselves.

there is no limit to the number of things you can do wrong, just as long as you’re trying to do right.

Sometimes you meet someone and he’s such a brilliant, perfectly formed character that you can’t quite believe he can exist here, in highly flawed Real Life™. It’s like bumping into Hannibal Lecter in a newsagent buying Haribo.

Humans usually love any chance to confetti other humans with their opinions.

opinion puppet.

Narcissism is the writer’s superpower.

I wanted to surgically attach myself to his hip.

Going to Israel but not seeing Jerusalem is like going to the dentist but refusing to open your mouth.”

Yes, it is perfectly okay to measure time in wines. I’m pretty sure that’s what the Greeks did.

I was reminded of something called Jerusalem Syndrome, where visitors are so overwhelmed by the religiosity of the city that they stop believing they’re management consultants, golf instructors, or window cleaners and start believing they’re prophets.

It’s perfectly normal and rational to try to find something to fill that hole. Wasn’t it why I was sitting there in the first place, in a random hostel, in a random country, surrounded by strangers? Whether it’s with work, religion, drugs, hedonism, model trains, love, friendship, sex (see hedonism), or travelling to weird places (my latest drug of choice), we’re all looking for something to fill that hole. It’s very possible that if you meet the wrong people, or read the wrong book, or have a harrowing experience on the way, you can get very lost and end up joining ISIS, drinking spiked Kool-Aid with Jim Jones, or attending an Elton John concert. The mind is a fragile thing; life is its blunt-force trauma.

Usually Orthodox Jews interact with the secular world as little as possible. Judaism doesn’t proselytise. It doesn’t want new members. Jews are chosen, they don’t choose. It’s not a buffet.

Couples spend a lot of time in such conversational deadlocks, waiting for the other to say something.

I was the sort of writer who talked about writing much more than getting around to doing any of it. Like an armchair sports fan, I preferred to cheer literature on from the safety of the sidelines, where I didn’t have to get myself sentence sweaty.

how prone to overcompensation humans are. The more tenuous our right to power, the more stupendous the title we give ourselves to try to obfuscate that. The less safe we feel in our throne, the more bombastic the crown we cast upon our head.

One of atheism’s strongest selling points is that there’s nothing to remember. It’s a real boon for the absent-minded.

Since I come from England, a country with really disappointing cuisine, one of my favourite things about travelling, and globalisation in general, is how rarely I now have to eat British food.

Perhaps uncertainty is a good trait, in line with the complexity of the world in which we live.

I’ve noticed that people who are often in the company of strangers develop an ability to make those strangers forget that they are, in fact, strangers. It looks effortless, which is how everything complicated and requiring a huge amount of practice always looks.

A gin is the same unit of time as a wine, which is three-quarters of a beer.

The price was stated. We agreed, and climbed inside. He shook his head, and called us back out again. “Two more people,” he said. He was the bus, but the bus was a car, but the car must be full, but we were only two. It was Ghana, again.

I asked the bus driver of the car.

Throughout human history we’ve been mostly nice to each other, just as long as no one dares veer from the safety of the masses. We don’t do minorities well. Anwar was a minority. Those of us born as majority people will never know how much of a fight it is to live as a minority, not protected by the cushioning of statistics. This is changing, but not everywhere, and not equally. I

Visiting him reminded me of how incredibly lucky I was to be born a majority, part of the first-world-white-heterosexual-English-speaking-men-of-above-average-height-tribe.

I decided to pretend I knew what I was doing, a technique I used every moment of my life, with limited success.

I didn’t love it. But I was open to the idea of potentially loving it one day, once I’d changed my entire personality.

His face was so blank, so smooth and seemingly unperturbed by the world, it looked as if he’d just got it new from a shop.

“Moppelkotze is like what they serve at hospitals when you can’t chew,”

Many dogs were present and downward facing.

Annett had an excuse; her gods were Darwin, Dawkins, and Daiquiri. Me? I had slots open.

“You romanticise new in a way that makes you neglect what you already have. If we suddenly pack up a suitcase and move to a farm in Ecuador, what do you think that’s going to be like? In the end, we’ll have the same problems—we’ll have to make friends, we’ll have to find work, we’ll have to eat and sleep. Same problems, different backdrop. You can’t outrun your problems. Or your boredom.”