Everyone has their own travel philosophy. Some people take bus tours. Others visit every museum listed in the guidebook. Some plan their itineraries down to the minute, leaving no room for spontaneity or the possibility of accidentally discovering something interesting.

I have a simpler approach. Walk everywhere possible and eat at as many places as humanly feasible.

Ideally, I will walk 20,000 steps a day, which I consider a perfectly reasonable justification for the alarming amount of food and drink I consume along the way. It’s not gluttony. It’s a carefully calibrated wellness strategy involving urban exploration and carbohydrates.

But there’s a more serious reason I travel this way. I want to understand how people actually live. Not just what their cities look like, but the unwritten rules, social norms, and scripts for navigating everyday life. The stuff you won’t necessarily find in a guidebook because locals don’t even realize it’s something worth explaining.

Like discovering that Colombians love their dogs so much that some shopping malls have special dog strollers and carts. That Guinness really is a thing in Ireland, even for someone who isn’t particularly a beer drinker. That roadside barbecue in Antigua can be spectacular. That Turkish coffee is genuinely strong enough to make you reconsider your entire relationship with caffeine.

Or that the monkeys in Costa Rica apparently have no respect for anyone’s sleep schedule. They’re loud. Very loud. Nature is lovely, but apparently some of its residents have never heard of quiet hours.

Then there’s Vienna, where walking on the correct side of the sidewalk matters, and Tokyo, where the sheer volume of commuters moving through the streets makes you realize that you are merely one tiny, slightly confused person in an extraordinarily well-orchestrated human migration.

These are the details I love. The little discoveries that make a place feel less like a destination and more like a world you have briefly been allowed to enter.

Walking helps because you notice things when you’re not hurtling past them in a vehicle. You see what people eat for breakfast, how they interact with strangers, where they gather, how they dress, and what seems to matter to them. You make mistakes, occasionally get lost, and learn the local rules by watching everyone else and trying not to look like an idiot.

Eating helps because food is its own cultural anthropology. What people eat, when they eat it, how long they linger, and whether dinner is a quick necessity or a three-hour social event tells you something about how a society works.

And yes, sometimes you discover that the best meal of the trip comes from a roadside stand you would never have found if you’d stayed on the tour bus.

I suppose this is my version of experiential learning. I’m a psychologist, after all. I’m interested in people, behavior, and the invisible rules that govern our lives. Travel simply gives me a much bigger laboratory, preferably one with excellent coffee and something delicious on the menu.

So my advice for exploring a new city? Put on comfortable shoes. Eat things you can’t pronounce. Watch what the locals do. Walk until your feet complain, then find somewhere to sit down and eat some more.

You may not see every famous landmark. You may not learn every historical fact. But you’ll come away with something arguably more valuable: a sense of what it feels like to inhabit that place, even briefly.

And if you happen to walk 20,000 steps along the way, you can tell yourself the extra dessert was practically medically indicated.

I’m not saying that’s scientifically established.

I’m just saying I’m willing to conduct further research.