"Adventures of a Continental Drifter" by Elliot Hester

This book of short travel stories follows Elliot Hester, who quits his job as flight attendant and sells all of his personal belongings so he can fly around the world for one year. His travel locations run from the familiar (Argentina, Barcelona, Australia) to the unusual (Ethiopia, Estonia, Lithuania), and the author pretty much describes not really what he did in all of these places, but the crazy, weird things that happened to him while on his journey. In some of the locales, Hester describes locations beautifully, like the Taj Mahal. Other places, he just gives a dopey story about the odd thing that happened to him. What I learned from the chapter on Barcelona: it’s noisy at night. Bring earplugs. Unlike other travel memoirs, Hester makes no real personal journey, as we never really learn about him as a person, except for the fact that he used to be a flight attendant. The short chapters make this an easy read for people who can only read for short bursts, and also because none of the chapters are really connected to each other. In short, this is not a good book for insights to various countries, but a memoir of crazy stuff that can happen while traveling around the world (like peeing on yourself in an Argentinean airport, or getting food poisoning in India).