A travel & ideas journal

Notes from elsewhere

Dispatches on travel, psychology, culture, and economics — four fields that keep circling the same question: why people do what they do, and where.

Travel · Psychology

The Psychology of Jet Lag

Your body has more than one clock, and they don't land at the same time. What desynchronized rhythms actually do to attention, mood, and memory.

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Travel · Economics

What Street Food Prices Tell You About a City

A plate of noodles is a cleaner economic indicator than most spreadsheets. Reading rent, wages, and inflation off a menu board.

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Psychology · Culture

Culture Shock Is a Cognitive Bias, Not a Feeling

What predictive processing says about why new places feel exhausting — and why the "stages" of culture shock are really just a brain updating its priors.

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About these notes

I'm Emily — a psychology student who spends a suspicious amount of time thinking about airports. This is where I write about the places minds and places overlap: how jet lag rewires attention, why a bowl of street food is secretly an economics lesson, and why culture shock feels less like an emotion and more like a glitch in the brain's prediction engine.