Trifter

1. Do not stay at a hotel
Get a local friend, rent a house, live homeless, but avoid the whole hotel culture that intends to sell you a prepackaged, safe version of the local life. Staying at a hotel while abroad is like going into a five-star restaurant and ordering Hot Pockets. Apart from the fact that you never learn anything real about your destination, you will be doing things that you could do at home, or closer to home, at a fraction of the cost. Having a contact you can trust in a foreign country means that you get everything from somebody who has something of a stake in your experience. 

2. Eat what the locals eat, where they eat
Yes, even if you get sick. Risk is a big part of what makes life worth living. The fact is that hotel chefs are instructed to tone done the local food, to adapt it to what sissy tourists can handle. You think you are getting the real thing when really you are getting a milder bastardization of it. If you want a real experience, if you want to truly experience life at your destination, try the street food. 

3. Engage people not in the industry
Just like civil servants, all tourist-industry people are alike, the similarities cut across all ethnic and cultural boundaries. Their careers depend on impressing you and so you will never get the whole truth, just the nice stuff, exaggerated to make it seem even nicer and more interesting. From groundskeepers to taxi-drivers, they live on the industry you are supporting, so trying to get the truth from them is like trying to find out from the chef if the food in his restaurant is any good. If you have heard one, you have heard them all. Everything you get from them is spiel. 

4. Take public transportation
It may be uncomfortable, especially in poorer countries, it may be somewhat unsafe as well, but these things just mean that not many tourists have done it. It will also be more real and more local than any experience you could get on the grounds of a resort. You will get to listen, to observe and to gain a deeper knowledge of the people who live where you are. If this kind of intense people-experience is not what you go abroad for, then maybe you should just stay right where you are because foreign countries tend to be full of foreigners. 

5. Research, ask questions beforehand
Get as much objective information from people with no interest in your visit as possible. Find people who don’t like it there, or who had a miserable time, just to get an idea of what to look out for and avoid. 

6. Watch local TV, listen to the radio
A point often neglected by tourists who spend their time getting drunk by the pool or on carefully managed sightseeing tours that provide the same information you can find on Wikipedia. Watching TV, for many seems to clash with the vacation-vibe. The local television stations are what the residents watch, they cater to them, and will tell you more about the audience more quickly than any other source. 

7. Pay attention to your surroundings
Don’t let the novelty distract you from what is going on around you, watch for the subtleties, listen to other people’s conversations if you can understand the language. 

8. Lose your local stereotypes
Don’t go assuming that the people who live there are like the immigrants you know. People behave differently in their own environment. Clear your mind of all preconceptions and prepare to form new ideas. 

9. Avoid tourists
They will suck you into their boring little experience. You may be tempted to associate with them, or else be associated with them in the eyes of the local people. They have nothing to offer you, nothing that you could not have gotten at home, anyway. 

10. Wear normal clothes
Nothing says “idiot” like a tourist dressed like a retarded version of a local person. It may seem funny to you, and may make the pictures that you email to your friends seem festive (I’m having fun, look at my shirt!) but it’s pathetic and nobody around you is amused. It looks like you have never been outside your own country, which, if true, is not something you should go advertising to people. In poor countries it is usually not a good idea do go around drawing unnecessary attention to yourself.