Life Nomadic: Fringe Time

One of my favorite parts of traveling is something that, if you’re like me, you may not even consider until you actually become a nomad. I love the fringe time, the extra hours surrounding normal life which become a lot more interesting when you’re in a foreign city.

An example: a couple days ago I spent the day working at my favorite UK restaurant, Inspiral (amazing veg food). I met a couple fellow nomad friends there for early lunch, and we spent the day working by the window overlooking the canal, waiting to be hungry enough for dinner. In between our two meals there we considered what we ought to do after dinner.

In our home cities, our options would be limited. We would have already done everything really exciting, so second tier activities like watching a movie or going for tea would be the likely options. Boring. But London is relatively unexplored and exciting, so we ended up going to see Les Miserables, one of the greatest musicals of all time.

Not a bad way to end the work day.
We left London way before it gets ordinary and predictable, which I’ll admit would take a while. Now I’m in Marakkesh, home to a whole new set of fringe activities to fill my spare time.

Staying in countries where foreign languages are spoken, as I do for most of my time, brings similar benefits. I may eat the same type of food for dinner, but if I’m in China I’m ordering and chatting with the waiter in Chinese, and thus improving my proficiency in the language. Call it fringe learning.

The benefit of Life Nomadic isn’t so much that it replaces your life, but rather that it upgrades the predictable background of daily existence. I still write and work on my site all day most days, but the days I take off and the time I’m not working becomes a lot more interesting.