I recently read an article listing lessons every traveler must learn and, as I was sitting in JFK waiting for a flight to Istanbul and our ultimate destination of Tashkent, I was inspired to write my own version. I don’t want to present these as universal truths. Instead, these are Erica’s travel lessons.

Although many of the lessons in the article were useful, I, myself, have never had cause to use them. These particular lessons were tempered by the author’s experience. For example, one lesson was that you will get robbed – as in, you will get held up and mugged. While I always prepare for this eventuality (these preparations also work for the eventuality of losing your wallet) I have never been robbed. Not in any big cities of the US, not in Cairo, not in Jeddah, not in Kathmandu, not in Damascus not in Tashi’s Guest House on the Tibetan plane (although a monk in a saffron robe did come through the unlockable door to our room, I think his intentions were benevolent). Another lesson was to be prepared for other tourists. Again,I found less application for this lesson. I try to prepare for being jostled by those who don’t share an American sense of space, but I also travel during the off season and I don’t usually encounter waves of other tourists.

Here are the travel lessons I have learned.

Lesson 1: it pays to be a neurotic traveler. My husband and I arrive at airports ridiculously early. As I write this, I am sitting in JFK, five hours before our Turkish airlines flight to Istanbul on our way to Tashkent. Our original flight from RDU offered no margin for error, so we watched in trepidation an approaching winter storm (Saturn, for those who ascribe to winter storm naming). We managed to get on an earlier, though much-delayed flight and arrived at JFK with time to spare and much relaxed. How early? The checkin gate doesn’t open for three more hours.

Corollary to Lesson 1: be prepared to content yourself in any situation, with or without such luxuries as sleep, comfortable seats, clean restrooms, reading material or places to plug in your iPad. Learn to people watch. Or drink beer. Or people watch while drinking beer. That’s me you see on the concourse drinking a Stella and admiring the international, cosmopolitan crowds surging past my table.

Lesson 2: apply Blanche Dubois’ dictum to travel. Specifically, adopt a long, Southern drawl and say “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” (I saw “Streetcar Named Desire” at Penn State Centre Stage Theater; now that I live in the South, I think the actress’ Southern drawl might have been a little over the top, but, forever in my head, every vowel in that phrase is pronounced aahhhh). Lloyd and I were consulting our Lonely Planet on a sidewalk in Beijing, finding our way back to the subway, when a man, on a scooter, stopped at a red light said, in perfect English, “where are you trying to go? Can I help you?” This is exactly the phrase a New Yorker spoke to me in 1987 when I was consulting a map trying to get to the World Trade Center (little understanding at the time the significance these two buildings would have on the country’s psyche). There have been multiple times in the Middle East when a third party offered to translate and negotiate a transaction for us.

Corollary to lesson 2: I don’t want to sound naive. I know there are people who want to overcharge or even steal from an unwary traveller. But I find I get a lot more pleasure from believing in the best of people and finding, 98% of the time, that I’m right. And if someone overcharges me, well, I figure they need the money more than I.

Lesson 3: Pack light and bring cold medicine. I’m still learning this one. This trip is the lightest I’ve ever packed and I think I’ve made a breakthrough. But I learned that nothing makes my travel more pleasant than having, at ready hand, those over the counter remedies that make annoying symptoms bearable.

Corollary to lesson 3: be prepared to smell badly, pay for laundry service, or both. In China, we paid pennies for laundry service at hotels. I could have packed a lot lighter. In Tibet, we had a couple of days in a town between tour groups when we booked back-to-back tour packages. I decided to have someone wash my underwear. I had lost about 30 pounds in the 6 previous months and my underwear was voluminous, white and cotton (gigantic granny-panties). I don’t know what I expected: the guest house where we stayed had no electricity and no running water; we had to take a flashlight to the squat toilets where “flushing” involved dipping water out of a bucket and washing the waste down a pipe onto the hillside below. We were eating thugpa (yak stew) at the town’s eatery when I looked across the street, at the stream running through the town’s main (one) street and saw a woman in traditional Tibetan dress scrubbing gigantic, white, balloon like panties in the stream. She would scrub, hold them up, inspect them, and lower them for additional scrubbing. I watched in horror as townspeople walked by alongside country folk in town for the weekend market. After the man carrying half a skinned goat passed by and I could see clearly what the woman was holding up I exclaimed, “Lloyd, are those my drawers?” After that, I’m ready for just about any laundry experience.

Lesson 4: Eat ANYTHING: I LOVE LOVE LOVE street food. The squid and the purple bao in Shanghai (although the bao was, technically, bought in a convenience store). The sweet, salty, peppery fruit slices shaken and served in a plastic baggie in Bangkok. The French fries by the outdoor pool tables in the dark, quiet, secondary streets of the Balad in Jeddah. The sugar cane drinks from the Balad. The sweet fondant and pistachio dessert molded into and extracted using a hammer from a wheelbarrow – the most basic food cart. The ‘choose your own pot of boiling stew from the line of pots of boiling stew’ in Bangkok. The breakfast pancakes with salty, salty soy sauce in Beijing. The gigantic discs of bread and freshly crushed fruit drinks in Xi’an. The banana pancakes in Phuket. Oh, and my first ever and most beloved street food: soft pretzels in Philadelphia.

Corollary to lesson 4: bring pepto AND Rennie. Because you never know what will work and you might need both. ‘Nuff said.

But travelers don’t HAVE to learn these lessons. Each person’s travel experiences -and, hence, their lessons – are different. These are just mine. These are all the lessons I have for now. A this trip unfolds, I may develop others.