How to “Go Local” as a Tourist

A stand-up paddleboarding lesson on Lake Geneva, which came with all equipment and instruction, that we found via an on-line postings board. May 29, 2021. Lausanne, Switzerland.

If you only have a few days in a place, focus on seeing the top sites. In other words, be a tourist.

Trying to “go local” with your activities, when on travel for tourism, means you miss the main reason you’ve chosen to visit a city or a region. Your priorities: Seeing the place and its treasures and understanding their importance.

Yet if you have a little more time on your visit and want to go a little deeper into exploring it by getting a feel of the life in that place, you can find opportunities.

Finding opportunities for glimpsing local life—“doing like the locals”—will take you a little more effort than following along the well-mapped tourist track, though, and you’ll need a lot more comfort sticking out from the crowd, especially if you don’t speak the local language.

Because let’s be honest: Even if you “do like a local,” you’ll rarely pass as a local in a place you’ve traveled to for tourism.

If possible embarrassment doesn’t make you shy away—and it shouldn’t, as life is too short!—and you have the time for going deeper on your trip, I’ll share a few tips for how to find activities filled with the people who live in your destination doing the things that people who live there do.

Find an Event or a Class

A chocolate making class I found to take during a trip to Avignon, France. March 5, 2022.

Festivals, classes, talks, and beyond—you’ll find them if you search sites like Eventbrite and Meetup (and any local listings and sites you can uncover).

Check out as well the local universities and associations and clubs to see what they offer for the public to attend. Most universities, associations, organizations, and clubs have public lectures and events for free or at a low cost on all sorts of subjects.

If you don’t speak the local language, or don’t speak it fluently enough to follow a full lecture, I promise you’ll still find events that require less of you in terms of speaking or understanding the language if you search.

Visit one of these listings websites, plug in the dates of your visit and the types of events and activities that interest you (most of the sites offer filtering based on different subjects and formats), and see what pops up. You’ll find lectures, networking events, language exchanges, happy hours, classes (I’ve taken them for cooking and pottery, for example, which don’t require language fluency to follow along), art gallery open houses, and beyond.

Every time I’ve ventured into local events like these, I’ve had wonderful experiences, met interesting people, and learned a lot about the place I visited. Often I’ve learned new skills and about new subjects, too.

Drop in for a Workout

How about an event and a workout? A Pilates and brunch event I found on-line and attended in Lausanne, Switzerland. July 10, 2022.

Check the neighborhood around where you’ll stay in your destination for local fitness studios and gyms.

Many fitness locations—typically only frequented by locals, of course—offer drop-in classes and day rates where you can get in a workout with the locals. (Sure, if you have a stay booked in a hotel, you can go to the hotel gym—but you won’t see locals there in all but the rarest of cases.)

Only in a few cases will you need fluency in the local language when working out in a gym. You don’t even need fluency most of the time when taking a fitness class. In a gym, you do your own thing. In a fitness class, you follow along with what the instructor and the other attendees do. Understanding verbal prompts rarely poses an issue.

I’ve now taken yoga classes across the globe at different local studios and I’ve loved the insights they’ve given me not only into my yoga practice but into the local culture and the local “angle” on my fitness activity of choice.

Eat Where the Locals Eat

The best pizza we found in Milan, Italy, hidden in an office district and catering to the corporate lunch crowd. November 26, 2022.

You can find restaurants catering to locals near the touristy areas—though rarely.

You’ll need to venture further afield into residential areas to find local-focused restaurants and you might have to use your translation app and a few words of introduction to place your order, but if you’d like a glimpse of locals living the local life—and to eat actually local food that typically has a much better flavor profile in establishments that provide much better dining experiences—you should really try to find a place for breakfast, lunch, or dinner where the locals dine.

How do you find these places, then?

First, don’t go to the phone apps and websites that you visit in your home country. Even if these apps and sites list options in your destination, they feature mainly tourist-focused restaurants. (A tip-off: If the overall write up or the reviews are in your language in a place with a different local language, the restaurant caters to tourists.)

To find restaurant options, use a search engine to look for key phrases in the local language. Use phrases like “best restaurants in,” “best food in,” or where to eat in” as starting points. If you crave a certain type of food—as we did when seeking the best pizza in Rome—type in “best pizza in Rome.”

In your list of search results, prioritize local and personal blogs and local magazines—not results from travel sites like TripAdvisor, for example.

And because I can’t say it enough: Search only in the destination’s local language. Not your native language. (Unless they’re the same, of course.) Do not make the mistake of thinking you can find local-focused restaurants in a web search by searching in your native language in a place where the locals speak something else.

When you search in English in a French-speaking region, for example, search engines will find websites and results written in the language you’ve used to search. If you use your native language, you’ll by default get results that cater to tourists.

After all, the locals don’t search for restaurants in a different language than their own.

When to Give “Going Beyond” a Try

I can’t emphasize enough that for most people and for most destinations, focusing your energy on tourism—not “doing like a local”—makes the most sense for a vacationer’s investment of time, energy, and funds.

However, if you do have an extended visit or have a flexible time window for whatever reason and want to push beyond your comfort zone and the normal tourist “limits” to get a glimpse of the life of a place, give one of these options a try.

And if you’d like more tips and tricks on planning your vacation, follow along over on my article on how I plan my trips!