This week, on a Zoom call with some colleagues, I told the group that I have been traveling around Europe and the Caucasus since May. One of my colleagues responded with a flattering shout. Wow! she said. You’re not just a tourist, you’re a traveler! Which was gratifying, of course, but also made a complicated distinction.People who think of themselves as travelers are the kind who start measuring distances in kilometers before the plane even lands at Schiphol. And when it’s hot, they fan themselves and sigh, wearily, “My God, it must be almost 35 degrees.” When you get right down to it, the difference between a tourist and a traveler is probably just that the latter carries a pretentious, expensive notebook.But I’m quibbling. Travel — whatever you want to call it — is one of life’s great joys. What can be more pleasurable, or transformative, than visiting other places and cultures, seeing the world through very different eyes, taking part in richly unfamiliar experiences, meeting people who begin as strangers and develop into friends, and, especially, noticing all of the things weird foreign people do and eat and say that are incorrect and inefficient and that we do much better back in the United States?