How I Travel: Lana Condor Is Spending a Month in Japan When This Is All Over

Though she’s a passionate traveler, actor Lana Condor has found a certain pleasure in staying still during the pandemic: It allowed her to settle into Seattle, her new home, with her boyfriend Anthony De La Torre. “It was the perfect timing to make a home, because all we have right now is home,” she says. “For the first time in years, I have roots—because I do travel so often, and I’m very much a nomad, and spent the last six or seven years living out of a suitcase. It’s been really nice to use the same bar of soap.”

Condor’s latest film, To All the Boys: Always and Forever, will be released on Netflix on February 12. It’s the final story in the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy, and it’ll tug hearts just in time for Valentine’s Day. In anticipation of the movie, Condor chatted with Condé Nast Traveler about underground ramen, airplane sweatsuits, and an unforgettable trip to Vietnam.

What she misses about travel:

Traveling, to me, is ironically incredibly grounding. When I get to see different cultures experience different ways of living, it reminds me how our universal needs as human beings are all very similar. We like to laugh. We want love, whether or not we will admit that out loud. We like to eat, and we like to gather. All those things are very universal and it just makes me feel more grounded and connected with life. I miss feeling like I don't know what's going to happen during the day. When you go to a different place and don't speak the language—honestly, I wish I was a little bit more of a structured traveler, someone who plans out their day to the T, but I've never really been that way. I miss that sense of waking up in a new place and being like, "Okay, I guess I'm just going to walk outside and see where that takes me."

Where she’s longing to go when it’s safe to travel:

I would love to go back to Tokyo. I went to Tokyo twice, but those were for very short trips and they were for work. I would love to actually spend a month there, exploring other parts of Japan. The majority of my traveling has everything to do with food and almost nothing else. I always bring charcoal and ginger, just because I'm the type of girl that will eat any and all street food, regardless of the consequences. So Tokyo, the fact that you can have ramen in the subway and it'd be a Michelin-starred bowl of ramen? Could you even imagine eating ramen in the subway of New York? I couldn't. So that's the first place I want to go to when we can travel again.

On settling into Seattle in a pandemic:

I haven’t been able to explore the city very much because much of it is closed down. But it’s just nature galore out here. My boyfriend and I went camping. I am not a camper, I’ve got to say. I don’t think I’d ever slept on the ground before. But I loved it. We’ve taken some drives. I grew up on Whidbey Island—oh, it’s so beautiful. My boyfriend and I will drive to Whidbey for the weekend, stay in this really pretty cabin. So I’ve been able to do some nature stuff, but in terms of Seattle proper, I’m still very much new to it.

Her go-to flying outfit:

I typically wear a matching sweatsuit. I love sweatsuits. I have an addiction to them, and I think the pandemic has definitely fed said addiction. It's all I ever wear. Unless I'm flying to a specific work thing where I know I'm going to have to look presentable when we get off. Sometimes I'll bring an outfit on the plane and I'll just change before we land. I remember, before working, I would be like, "Why are all these people dressed up for flying? Aren't you so uncomfortable?" And now I get it.

How she spends her flight time:

I’m typically catching up on scripts. I try to stay on top of them, but sometimes, man, I just fall off. I’m catching up on work and catching up on movies. I also really love to just sit and do nothing on really long flights. I turn off the screen and sit there in darkness. I’m not really good at sleeping on flights at all, so I like to be awake and [think]—it sounds so weird—wow, I’m surrounded by humans and everyone is asleep. It’s such a weird feeling but it’s very peaceful to me.

How she packs beauty supplies when flying.

It depends where I'm going. When I went to Korea, I packed almost no skincare and almost no makeup, because I knew that I was going to get a lot there. Korean skincare and beauty, their products are next level. But in terms of packing a carry-on, I always bring a sheet mask, I always bring a night mask, and I always bring wipes. As we all know, when you're flying, you are like a raisin. It is so drying.

The place she could go to a million times and never be sick of it:

Nairobi, Kenya. The Maasai Mara is the one place in this world I was so aware of being human. It sounds so hippie, but you're so aware of how we're all connected, not just with humans, but also with animals and the Earth. You can go far in life and probably not feel that way for a long time, but it was just like I felt connected to the smallest, little tiny bug. 

The stamp in her passport she’s proudest of:

Vietnam, for sure. I was adopted from Vietnam and I had never been back. My family and I went a year and a half ago to visit where I was born and see the orphanage. When I landed in Vietnam, it felt like my body chemistry knew I was home. I’ve heard other people say similar things when they go back to the place they were born that’s not the environment where they were raised. My skin felt better, my vision felt better, my hair looked so good. I don’t know if it was the humidity or something, but it felt like my heart slowed down. It felt like my body knew it was meant to be in that humid environment. I’d love, love, love to go back and spend more time there. I was there [also] to do work with Mrs. Obama, but we retraced the steps of my parents’ journey to how they found my brother and me. It was incredible.