> I had my worst-ever packing experience in the late nineties, when I was a teen-ager.
Is hyphenating a word like teenager a New Yorker idiosyncracy? Or is that a "soft" hyphen that crept into the final article copy?
On the topic of packing, my advice is to roll your clothes instead of folding them. Rolling avoids wrinkles and allows more space-filling options. That plus the general advice of packing just a few universally-appropriate items. If you really need something else you can always buy it locally and then discard it (or something else) when you pack for the return trip.