What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
I love visiting new places. Often they are not the places other people expect. I have travelled on every continent, including Antarctica, and some of the places that have most moved me were not the polished or well-known ones. They were places with human texture. Places with story. Places where ordinary life was visible on the surface.
That is why this prompt is harder for me than it first appears. There is no one place in the world I would name without hesitation and say, never. My answer is less about geography than about the kind of place a place becomes.
I loved Tanzania. It was poor by any obvious measure, but that was not what defined it. What I remember is joy, generosity, dignity. People gave what they had. Friendships began there that have lasted well beyond the trip itself, and the relationship has been a gift in both directions. Poverty does not frighten me. It never has. Some of the warmest, most human places I have known have been in developing countries.
Venice had the opposite effect on me. Its history was astounding. Its old displays of power were almost otherworldly. I could see why people are drawn to it. But I found myself strangely cold there. It felt like a place arranged for admiration rather than inhabited life. Everything was spectacle. Nothing felt ordinary. Nothing felt mutual. I left impressed, but not moved.
That, I think, is the dividing line for me. I am not drawn to places built around luxury and display, where image matters more than life. And I do not want to visit places where power has been secured by pushing others aside, where contempt has settled into the landscape, where human dignity has been trampled for so long that it begins to be accepted. There are places like that all over the world, under different flags and from different ends of politics. I have no interest in visiting them.
So the place I never want to visit is any place where people seem to matter less than power, possession, or performance. Give me somewhere poorer, rougher, less famous, but alive with dignity and human connection, and I will gladly go.
The Afterword 
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