Research; slip-ups

I never gave much thought to the intricacy and inherent difficulty that exists in the concept of "research" until I was in college. Now, I can see just how difficult it is to cut off the excess meat of any information to what can be considered reliable and representative. For someone who knows these concepts conceptually but hasn't yet had much chance to exercise them academically, these lessons can be hard to apply to less formal information gathering.

How does one actually go about finding out what a foreign country is "like"? Read a thousand accounts? Find one person you trust that has knowledge of it? Maybe the answer is that you don't do any of this; you find out the basics and whatever specifics people seem to convey (ask ten people about a specific place and they tend to notice the same things, don't they?), you accept that a good deal of it will not prove to be reliable, then you suck it up and leave. You can add the optional step that you forget some specific item of importance if you're me... (say, a camera?)

I seem to have slipped-up on Friday night. If loose lips sink ships, then locked doors make people justifiably mad. (No ragging on me for laziness with that couplet, please.) Speaking of research, I think I will soon be able to make a case for a causal relationship between $2 Long Island iced teas and this big "slip-up" bucket.

I laugh to realize, too, that other people were struggling with locked doors at around the same hour. I do love the dichotomies that humans manage to find everywhere.