When I travel abroad, I become a different person. I find myself doing things i would never do at home.
Last week I landed in Billund. It’s small, Danish town, and home of Lego.
The hotel was in Aarhus. Perfectly reasonable. Except getting there required taking a coach.
A coach.
At home, I would rather walk fifty miles through driving rain whilst carrying a mattress than take a coach. I would befriend a pack of wolves and ride one of them, alpha style, directly to my destination.
Yet there I was, happily getting onto this coach like it was normal for me. I gazed out the window at Danish motorway infrastructure. I might have actually said “lovely” out loud at one point, though I cannot be certain.
The same transformation applies to walking.
At home, if you suggested I go for a walk I would remind you that I have a car and a sofa.
But abroad? Different story entirely.
Thom asked if I wanted to get dinner in the hotel lobby… a place which had a perfectly functional restaurant with food and chairs and everything you could reasonably require for the act of eating.
The temperature outside was the kind of cold that makes your face hurt. Maybe Scandinavians don’t even notice it, but that level of cold makes a British person question their life choices.
“We should go out,” I suggested. “It’s nice to walk, maybe we can see some sites.”
It was dark. It was freezing. I had no idea where anything was. I couldn’t name a single landmark in Aarhus. But none of that mattered because I was international man.
I don’t think this is unique to me. Usually reserved will strike up conversations with strangers in the hotel lobby. Or will start to photograph random street corners as if they’ve discovered the lost city of Atlantis!
It’s as if the moment you hand over your passport, you also surrender your normal standards.
At home, a 45-minute bus journey is a minor tragedy. Abroad, it’s an authentic cultural experience. At home, getting lost is infuriating. Abroad, it’s an adventure. At home, eating at a chain restaurant is admitting defeat. Abroad, finding a McDonald’s feels like discovering civilisation after weeks in the wilderness, and you’ll actually feel a tiny bit excited about it.
The security industry operates on a similar delusion. We love things in theory that we’d never actually tolerate in practice.
Multi-factor authentication? Brilliant idea. Essential. Should be everywhere. Except when it’s on your own account and you just want to check your email without juggling three devices and a biometric verification that never works on the first attempt.
Zero trust architecture? The future of security, obviously. Until you actually implement it and realise you’ve just made everyone’s life so inconvenient that they’ve started storing passwords on sticky notes again, which is roughly the opposite of what you were going for.
We’re very good at enthusiasm when it’s not our problem. When we’re observing from a distance. When we’re abroad, metaphorically speaking.
Maybe that’s why conferences exist. You fly people somewhere else, put them in uncomfortable chairs, feed them sad sandwiches, and suddenly everyone’s nodding along enthusiastically to ideas they’d reject immediately in their own environment. It’s the professional equivalent of being willing to take a coach.
I had a perfectly nice dinner in Aarhus, by the way. After walking through the freezing cold to find it. The food was fine. The walk was miserable. But I felt like I’d done something properly foreign, which apparently matters more than comfort or common sense when you’re away from home.
Javvad Malik 