Learn TRAVEL ENGLISH Phrases & Expressions

You know, I'm really bored. I'm like... I've spent far too long at home and it's really

time to go on holiday again, so I thought I'd come and speak with you guys and share

some really good phrases for talking about going on holiday. I've got some excellent

phrasal verbs in the second part of the lesson, so make sure you listen and watch until the

entirety of the lesson has finished. Very good. Okay, cool. Let's get started. My name's

Benjamin. What's yours? Let's just have a bit of a hello to all my viewers in different

parts of the world, because we're thinking about going on holiday. So, hello to my friends

and viewers in Spain. ¿Qué tal? Estoy muy bien, gracias. Friends in North America, hello.

China, Asia, Europe. Namaste, I hope you're well. Let's get started. So, we want to go.

We might have itchy feet. It means we can't stay still, we need to keep moving. We want

to go somewhere different. To get the travel bug is where your passport just has loads

of stamps in because you want to go to that next place and experience a new culture and

a new, I don't know, way of life. Different types of holiday. So, maybe you're a working

person, you can't go away for a long stretch, so you go for a city break to, I don't know,

a place like Prague or Lisbon. Go there for the weekend and do some sightseeing and enjoy

the highlights of the city. A bit different to a much longer type of journey. Backpacking,

okay? So, you put your backpack on and you travel around India for six months living

out of your suitcase, yeah? All of your belongings are in your bag and you're kind of self-sufficient-ish.

Adventure tourism. This might be if you're going to do a particular type of activity,

like a bungee jump in New Zealand or kayaking somewhere. So, you're going for the purpose

of adventure. Maybe you're just going to go and catch some rays, and "rays" referring

to sunshine, okay? Lying under the sun, relaxing on the beach. Planning your itinerary. You

might want to pack a lot in or have a lot to pack in. That means, you know, you're someone

who wants to have an activity in the morning, the afternoon, you want to sort of... Everything

planned out. Or maybe you're more laissez-faire, more laid back, and you're going to see how

the mood takes you, yeah? You're not going to make a plan, you're going to wake up in

the morning and maybe do something, maybe not.

Few other phrases on your style. So, "to travel on a shoestring", okay? This is not the literal

meaning, you're not hopping around on a shoestring, it just means that you don't have any excess

funds for any kind of type of luxury, yep? You're the bare minimum. A shoestring budget

means a very tight budget. You're going to be staying in hostels for €5 a day, not

hotels for €500 a day. "To travel light" means that you're not going to take a 20 kilogram

bag stuffed with things that you don't need, you're literally going to have a small little

backpack. I remember being in India back in 2003 and meeting a Frenchman there who just

had this tiny little backpack, and he had, like, one pair of pants, a pair of socks,

and he was like, "Well, it's cheaper to buy the things out here than back home, so I just

come out here and I get what I need." "To live out of a suitcase", so maybe you are

traveling around quite a bit, maybe you're staying at a friend's house, and, like, all

of your things are in here, and you're kind of getting them in, and you're getting them

out of the suitcase. It means, like, this... This thing here, it's like your wardrobe,

yep? It's like your house. It's your bedroom, it's your office, it's your living room, everything

is in here.

Now, are we having a good time or a bad time? If you're having a good time, you need to

press subscribe, share, send it out, share the love, yep? Let's make this thing grow.

What about your holiday? Good time or bad time? So, we've got four phrases here. What

I want you to do is just read them and decide if they are a good thing, yeah? Happy face

or sad face? Culture shock, to feel right at home, right up my alley, not my cup of

tea. Okay, they're quite straightforward. Culture shock, "Whoa, I'm in somewhere different.

This is not what I was expecting." Yep. Probably more this one, a little bit fearful, yep?

To feel right at home, yeah? No problems, we're all good. Right up my alley. So, this

is sort of a metaphor, "alley" meaning a place, something that you really, really like, an

activity that is just perfect, yep? Got the nail on the head, hit the nail on the head.

But if it's not your cup of tea, no, that's not what I like, yeah? I like something different,

yeah? I like... I like adventure tourism. I'm not into city breaks. Right, let's go

and learn some phrases all to do with wagons, cars, and trains to make your vocab sore,

like that plane you're going to get on very, very soon.

Here we've got six idioms to do with travel. Now, we often think of a journey as being

a metaphor for life. For example, "middle of the road", yep? We're not in the fast lane,

we're not in the slow lane. Middle of the road, things are just going along as normal.

What about this top one here, "my way" or "the highway"? So, this is something you say

to someone if you mean you either agree with me or off... Go off really fast. The highway

is somewhere where you go really fast. So, you're going to come my way or we're going

to split. "To be on the home stretch". Now, if you think about a Formula 1 track, you've

got the sort of black and white flags at the end, but just before that, we've got a straight

bit of race circuit, that's the home stretch. So, you can see where the finishing line is,

and you're accelerating and you're nearly there.

When would we use this phrase, "to be on the home stretch"? We're talking about a project.

Maybe you've got to write a big, long thesis for college, and mum asks, "How are you getting

on, darling? How's the essay going?" "Oh, it's okay, mum. I'm on the home stretch now",

meaning I've nearly finished. We've spoken about middle of the road. Usage, maybe you're

describing a type of car as being a little bit middle of the road, yeah? A little bit

unimpressive. "To be on the wagon". Obviously, the opposite of "on" is "off", yeah? On/off

switch. Now, if you're on and then you're off, then you might fall off something, but

what are we falling off? The wagon. What is that? It's a very basic vehicle. Maybe it's

got kind of wooden wheels and perhaps it's pulled by a horse, very sort of old-fashioned

vehicle. If you fall off the wagon, then you're no longer sort of going along and making the

progress that everyone else is, because that's the good thing that's going along there, and

you're no longer on that. So, if you fall off the wagon, then maybe you don't keep up

with your practice of your musical instrument. "I fell off the wagon a little bit" means

maybe you got a little bit lazy, you got into some bad habits. Falling off the wagon. Okay.

Next, "asleep at the wheel". You could imagine a steering wheel, you could imagine a great

big wheel of a ship. Now, if you're the captain of a ship and you fall asleep, then we've

got a very dangerous situation. Likewise, if you are the CEO of a company and you fall

asleep and bad things start happening and your ship or your business goes into the rocks,

goes into danger, then, you know, we've got a big, big problem. We've got people's jobs

and livelihoods at risk. Okay? So, if you're asleep at the wheel, you are in charge of

something and you haven't been paying attention. "The wheels have come off". Obviously, if

you've got a car and the wheels come off, it's not going to go very fast. So, you've

got a project that was going okay, but now it's kind of... It's lost its momentum. So,

the wheels have come off, the momentum's gone from... From something. Okay?

Hope this has been useful to you. Do remember to do the quiz now just to try and reinforce

that learning, try and revisit it. It's a really good idea to write down some of the

phrases that you learn in these videos to have a kind of a learning record and to revisit

them a couple of days afterwards. If you enjoy my videos, do make sure you subscribe, and

I'll see you in the next one.