We just landed back in Bangaloreāless than 24 hours agoāafter a super fun week in Singapore. The kids, S, and I soaked in all the touristy stuff, from the Singapore Zoo to Universal Studios. I didnāt get to explore the offbeat side this time, but I loved catching the little design details that make Singapore such a livable city. Iāll write more about that soon.
For today though, Iām taking a quick pause from the usual curation to revisit some of my favourite travel and Singapore-related bits from past editions of Stay Curious. Iāve freshened up a few links and added notes based on what I saw last weekāhoping it makes them even more useful.
Regular programming resumes next week. Until then, enjoy this special "Best of Travel & Singapore" edition from the archives!
Before we dive in; a quick favor ā¦
If this piece sparks even a tiny āhmmā or āaha!ā along the way, do me a kindness: tap the ā¤ļø or drop a thought in the comments. Curiosity thrives when we trade reflections, not just clicks.
And with that out of the way, letās get to our main features.
š Vitalik Buterinās Packing Guide
Vitalik Buterinās 40-liter backpack travel guide is the perfect opener for todayās curation. He dives deep into the nerdy details of his packing routineāevery item has a reason, every choice is intentional. What stands out isnāt just what he packs, but how he thinks through it all.
Most of us treat packing as a last-minute chore, spending bits of time and energy on it every trip. Vitalik? Heās already done the heavy lifting. Heās built a system that works for himāsaving time, mental load, and friction every time he travels.
In āTravelogue: Central & Eastern Europe,ā Trung Phan shares a round-up of 17 random thoughts that he jotted down in his trip to Munich, Prague, Budapest, Vienna and Dubrovnik.
The randomness of the thoughts is what caught my attention and got me to share it here. Hereāre a couple of thoughts that are coveredā¦
Hotel Showers Are Insane
River Surfing
European Timezones and Parenting Benefits
āNo Stags Allowedā
European āInnovationā
He is talking the common man traveler language. The you-and-me traveler. Maybe, a little more observant and intellectual than us. Some tidbits from the postā¦
On hotel showers
We stayed in a nice (but older) hotel outside of the city centre. The thing about old hotels is that they need to be renovated. My amateur analysis is that itās possible to renovate most older structures and maintain the charm of the original facadeā¦except the bathroom.
Updating the toilet and shower to modern standards often involves making it look modern and, therefore, a bit out of place.
This is all fine except for the fact that hotel showers have turned into SAT exams. We stayed at 8 hotels on the trip and every single one had a different and confusing knob/heat/spray setting (half of them had to include instructions).
[...]
Look, I love the option to have a rainfall shower. But the knobs always take me 5-minutes to figure out. It doesnāt have to be this difficult. When you need a shower instruction manual, it is time to go back to the drawing board.
And some stories of shopping at Airport Duty Free shops
Not surprised that ErnÅ is minted. My 2x2 Rubikās Cube cost ā¬29 at the Duty Free. Thatās not a typo. It was really annoying but then my kid spent a solid 9 hours over the next few days trying to solve it, which works out to only ā¬3.22 an hour in babysitting equivalent cost. Kinda worth it.
On European bottle caps (yes, they are a big innovation!)
The story behind this incredible drink innovation is that the EU wanted to reduce plastic waste from loose caps and mandated they stay attached. Itās just peak EU regulation for probably very little long-term effect. While the caps do stay on (annoyingly), they require more plastic to manufacture. I canāt wait for the research paper in 5 years to show that these things had zero impact on the environment (similar to how the paper straw mandate accomplished nothing).
I havenāt read a ton of travel writing, but one name I keep coming back toāand always recommendāis Pico Iyer. Heās a travel writer, novelist, and essayist whoās spent over three decades in Japan, writing deeply and beautifully about its culture and people.
If youāre new to his work, start like I didāwith two incredible podcasts: āThe spiritual case for Travelā and āUnderstanding Japan.ā These conversations are some of the most thoughtful Iāve heard in a long time. Pico has a poetic rhythm in the way he speaks, and it shows in how he captures even the smallest moments. He talks about how Japanese culture values ālistening,ā and you can feel it in how attentively he observes the world. His voice alone has this calm, almost meditative charmāI could listen to him for hours.
After those podcasts, I picked up āA beginnerās guide to Japan: observations and provocations.ā Iām so glad I did. Itās a quiet celebration of curiosity and stillness. Pico takes the most ordinary things and paints them with so much beauty, you canāt help but get pulled into his world. I found myself smiling through every page.
This oneās a keeperāa book to return to whenever you want to see the world with fresh eyes. Itāll teach you how to notice better, which is half the joy of traveling.
Hereāre a couple of bits from the book:
āStrangers routinely sleep with their heads on strangersā shoulders on Japanese trains, and the leaned-upon agree not to flinch. A sign of trustā of community, perhapsābut also a reminder that what constitutes public and what constitutes private is something subtler than homes and walls.ā
āJapan has a sharp-edged sense of what can be perfectedāgizmos, surfaces, mannersāand of what cannot (morals, emotions, families). Thus itās more nearly perfect on the surface than any country Iāve met, in part because itās less afflicted by the sense that feelings, relationships or people can ever be made perfect.ā
Some content formats are so predictable, they just fade into the backgroundāairline safety videos are a perfect example. Youāve seen one, youāve seen them all, right? Thatās what I thought too, until I watched Singapore Airlinesā version. It had such thoughtful storytelling that I found myself actually watching itāevery single time they played it.
Backspace newsletter had a full deep dive on this, featuring standout safety videos from different airlines. Each one is a brilliant example of how even the most routine content can come alive with the right narrative touch.
Sharing all of them hereābecause theyāre worth a watch.
In āSingapore urbanism,ā Noah Smith dives into how Singapore became the megacity it is today. I saw a lot of what he described firsthand. Coming from Bangalore, I actually found the roads and pedestrian paths in Singapore to be pretty friendly and enjoyable. But Noahās take is a bit differentāmaybe our benchmarks for usability arenāt quite the same.
Singapore is on the ocean and just a few miles from the equator, so itās hot and humid pretty much all the time. In that kind of environment, the cheapest way to avoid having your city be overrun by rain forest is to just remove all the plants. Instead, Singapore has decided it wants to be the worldās greenest city. That takes an incredible amount of money and effort to pull off without having the city start to look like a ruin in a jungle (like parts of Taipei). All that foliage must be landscaped, and thatās never cheap. So Singaporeās gorgeous greenery is really a spectacular demonstration of wealth.
This brilliant visual essay from NY Times (archive here) talks of how Singapore is dealing with the challenges of rising temperature in urban areas. It covers a couple of highly ambitious projects (including Marina Bay) that are playing an active role in this crusade.
One bit that provides a good hint towards of a universal solution:
āIf you wanted to invent the most effective kind of climate management technology from the ground up, you could spend a lot of time trying to do that. You would just engineer a tree.ā
Greenery and a deep respect for conserving natural resources are hard to miss in Singaporeās urban design. I was lucky to stay near Bedok Reservoir and got to visit it a couple of times. Along with Marina Bay and a few other large reservoirs, itās part of Singaporeās long-term push to become self-sufficient in drinking water over the next few decades. Walking around Bedok, watching people out for their daily runs (this city loves its fitness), was genuinely energizing.
Straits Timesā digital graphics team and photo desk teamed up to programmatically extract Singaporeās hues from thousands of photos. They published it as Singapore in Colour. It is a beautiful visual essay to treat your eyes to Singapore's beauty.
While this edition leans heavily into travelāshaped a lot by my week in Singaporeāitās only fair to bring in a contrasting view. Agnes Callardās essay āThe case against travelā (archive here) offers just that. Itās a sharp, thought-provoking take that challenges the usual ideas we hold about travel. Worth reading if you want to reflect a little deeper on why we travel in the first place.
On why travel is not useful
If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid ātouristyā activities. āTourismā is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.
On what is travel
āA tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.ā This definition is taken from the opening of āHosts and Guests,ā the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: āTourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.ā We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.
Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. āI went to France.ā O.K., but what did you do there? āI went to the Louvre.ā O.K., but what did you do there? āI went to see the āMona Lisa.ā ā That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the āMona Lisa.ā Itās locomotion all the way down.
On travelerās behaviour
When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.
Some hard-hitting ideas in thereātough to deny the truth in them. Itās a strong perspective, and you donāt have to agree with all of it. But itās the kind of piece that nudges you to pause and think. Read it, sit with it, and figure out where you stand.
Listen to āThe siren of scrap metalā by 99% Invisible podcast for a beautiful story of an iconic sound that echoes in repeat in the noisy bustle of Mexico City. The Pudding had done an equally beautiful audio/visual story around the sounds in Mexico City. Check out that as well. (featured in #111)
Scott Kelby tells us how to use your iPhone for Travel Photography. Only simple tips & tricks - nothing fancy. Two things that I discovered and found super useful - 1) How to take better food photos & 2) We should only use optical lenses and not use the digital zoom. (featured in #152)
ICYMIā¦
The internet moves fast, but great ideas stick around. Last weekās post is one of my favorite curations in recent times. It was filled with timeless classics. Donāt miss it. You can find it here:
If this piece sparked something for you, Iād love to hear what stood outāleave a comment and letās keep the conversation alive. And if you know someone whoās always asking "why?" or "how come?", pass this along to them. The world gets more interesting every time a curious mind shares what theyāve found.
Vitalik sounds like he'll overthink everything the power of N.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm in Japan next week and I'll listen to podcast + read the book to prep myself :)