About
Via Latens

Hi everyone.  I’ve always been a fan of history, language, culture, cuisine, and religion. 

But my career focused on the financial services industry. 

I managed to get the best of all worlds by using travel as the common denominator. 

I lived in Japan as a business professional.  I traveled frequently to Italy and Spain.  I combined cultural activities with business trips to Europe.  I learned the history of business and financial services by visiting Italian cities famous for their contribution to and banking and commerce. 

Travel made me realize that things I had considered so different were in fact closely related.  You can’t appreciate history without an appreciation for culture.  You can strengthen your business prospects by learning a foreign language and speaking with the locals.  You can experience culture first-hand by eating true local cuisine.

In my travels, a noticed many disturbing trends over the years—which I think I can make a small contribution to rectifying.

  • Sometimes we travel without taking the time to ask ourselves why we are traveling. Vacations wind up being wasted opportunities.  With a bit of preparation, vacations can be transformed into educational experiences filled with unique interactions with people, places, and ideas.
  • We are too focused on liking something rather than experiencing Sometimes an authentic travel experience can be rewarding even if we happen not to like it.
  • In our quest to see the most popular sights when we travel, we take the most popular routes that everyone else takes. Sometimes we fail to walk just 100 meters off the tourist route, taking the hidden road, to experience something unique—something almost undiscovered.
  • We don’t know where to eat well – and we are sometimes disappointed by the food when we eat in cities supposedly well known for their food.
  • We spend time in a foreign country without ever interacting with locals. We lose opportunities to speak, learn and contribute.

So I decided to start this blog as a way of sharing some of my experiences both as a business and leisure traveler.  It’s my hope that this blog can help with the simple things during your next trip: where to eat, what to see if you have limited time, where to stay, and how to appreciate local life based on my own conversations with with locals.