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

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.

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.