One Growing Student: Why You Should Travel Too

“I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about, I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people- Americans and Europeans- come back and go, “ohhhhh.” And the lightbulb goes on.” Henry Rollins

I’m all for traveling, whether it is through studying abroad, working abroad, gap years, volunteering, missions, or backpacking. They are all different but they all involve leaving the comfort of home. I am lucky to live during a time where traveling to the other side of the world is possible and becoming more and more popular.

I first traveled abroad to Portugal when I was 12 with my Oma and Opa to visit family from my Opa’s side. They showed me Lisbon and took me to their beach house. I ate so much fish there that I didn’t eat it again for two years after I came home.

Over my 13^th birthday I went to Toronto with my family. We visited Niagara Falls and stopped at every Cedar Fair amusement park on the East Coast. I celebrated my birthday in the car as we drove home and at the midnight premiere of Ratatouille.

The summer before my junior year of high school I went on a mission to Quito, Ecuador with two people from my church, as well as a group from another church, but no one that I knew well. I celebrated my 16^th birthday there by doing manual labor and getting my face shoved into my birthday cake. I was told it was Ecuadorian tradition to take a bite out of the cake but to this day I’m not sure whether that’s true or not.

Last summer I took a cruise to Grand Cayman and Cozumel, Mexico. I went snorkeling, scuba diving, and rode in a yacht for the first time!

I also traveled to Holland last summer to visit a friend that I met at my high school when she was a foreign exchange student. I went to a 3-day music festival in Belgium that involved camping in a tent, endless rain, mud halfway up my calves, and no shower. I also biked, for the first time in years, through the busy streets of Amsterdam.

After my Thailand journey, I hope to backpack through Europe starting in Italy and staying in youth hostels. I also hope to take a trip to Africa because I’d love to go on a safari. After I get my teaching degree I want to teach abroad somewhere, even if it’s just for a summer, to experience the education system outside of the United States and learn things to bring back and implement in my own classroom at home.

Opportunities to travel are everywhere! Good stories come from traveling, which creates good conversations. Traveling has helped me to better connect with others, and make me a more global and well-rounded person. While I don’t know who Tom Friedman is, I do know that no writer can describe traveling in a way that makes the reader truly put oneself in that travel destination. Part of what makes travelling so exciting is the newness of everything. It doesn’t get old because each destination has a different feel and culture.