The International Rice Purity Test

How This Works

Cried In Two Airports This Week

Family greeting someone with flowers at airport arrivals, luggage cart piled with snacks

The original Rice Purity Test assumes everyone in the room grew up in the same country and left it once, for college. This one is for people who've cried in two airports in the same week — once saying goodbye, once being met at arrivals.

Forty boxes about passports, visas, snacks smuggled in a second suitcase and the word you forgot in your own first language halfway through a sentence. Tick what you've lived. The number climbs.

Do you need to have moved abroad to score? No. Half the list happens to anyone who's ever been the only one at the table not getting the joke. The other half is for people who've stopped converting the currency in their head, and know exactly what that moment felt like.

How The Test Breaks Down

The 40 Questions Split Into Airports, Languages, Paperwork And The Life You Built Anyway

Four postcards laid on a desk: an airport goodbye, sleeping beside a suitcase of snacks, paperwork and a calendar, and sitting alone at sunset

Part 1

The Airport Part

Passports, pointing at menus, the goodbye at departures. Most people who've traveled at all pick up four or five here.

Part 2

The Language Part

Dreaming in your second language, losing a word in your first, the snack suitcase. This is the part expats and second-generation kids tend to sweep.

Part 3

The Paperwork Part

A visa tied to somebody else's job, money sent home every month, the accent that shifts depending on who's on the phone. Fewer people tick these, and the ones who do usually tick all of them.

Part 4

What Came Out Of It

The solo trip, the milestone missed, the name you shortened because nobody could say it, and whether you'd do it all again. Ten questions, and the last one is the only one on the whole test that asks how you feel about the other 39.

Three luggage carts of increasing size, from a single light suitcase to one piled high with belongings and a pet carrier

After You've Revealed

Anyone Under 10 Has A Passport But Hasn't Needed It Yet

No official scale here either, so this is the honest read.

0–10

You've traveled. You've pointed at a menu and got a plate you didn't expect. But you always had a flight home booked, and home was one place.

11–25

You've lived somewhere you weren't born, or loved someone who didn't share your first language, or both. The paperwork questions start getting ticked here, and those are the ones nobody lists on a travel blog.

26–40

You've had two lives on two continents and missed a wedding or a funeral for one of them. You've been the tourist in your own hometown. The last question on the list is the one you tick without thinking.

Same catch as every edition — two people at 20 can have opposite stories. One backpacked through a dozen countries with one bag and a return ticket. The other never left the second country because the visa depended on somebody else's signature.

The International Rice Purity Test

Part 1 of 4

Part 2 of 4

Part 3 of 4

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