Why travel?

Why do we travel?

Most all of us have left our place of birth at least once, either by choice or by default, and can say with certainty that we have, indeed, experienced some sort of travel. Even the most limited of distances can and should be considered traveling. Anytime we step out of our comfort zones and day to day routines we are donning our traveler’s caps and walking sticks and setting out on adventures big and small. My family, for example,enjoys taking weekend trips to Disney world.

I will admit to something. I used to be of the opinion that traveling was much grander a thing as a three-hour car trip with your parents to a destination that remained within your state boundaries; especially to a tourist trap and extreme waste of resources like Disney World. (Sorry, Disney.) Traveling involved going somewhere beautiful and far off and a plane ride somewhere in the equation was a must. Traveling was for savvy globe-hoppers with giant back packs and those funny looking, Velcro strap sandals that everyone wears in Georgia and North Carolina. And it had to last for at least a week, or else it would be demoted to the “trip” category.

Amazing what a little perspective will do to a person, eh? I lived up to my very narrow idea of traveling when I went to Germany. It wasn’t until after I returned home, however, that I realized how narrow-minded and egoistic I had been on my views on what constituted traveling.

Vocabulary.com has nailed it right on the head; if you are going from one place to another, you are traveling. Pretty simple, isn’t it? It really strips away all of those mental images of places that appear to be off of NAT GEO Traveler magazine covers and involve expedition-like preparation and equipment. If we all stick to this definition, we are essentially all travelers.

But if traveling is the simple act of going from one place to another, why all the hype? Yes sure, you get to see beautiful places, experience new cultures, and eat weird food. That’s all fine and dandy. Let’s file it away with all of our other cool life experiences. But what else? WHY do we feel that calling to go out, to see, to hear, to taste, to experience lives other than our own? WHY do we have this intrinsic longing to go away from our “normal” and step off the beaten path?

Evolution may have a scientific answer to all of these questions, but I’m going to look at a more spiritual one. Miriam Bird said:

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

I think every traveler can attest to that. Parents of teenage and young adult travelers call it “catching the bug”, but they only paint it in a negative light because they fear what may happen to their children out there in the big bad world. When you are young, especially, this need to travel, to delight in other ways of living to find out how you wish to live your own, it is essential.

You can learn a lot from observation. If you go to a country where you do not speak the language, sit there long enough, a few months at least, and pretty soon you will have picked the basic stuff up. Give yourself a year, and you will be fluent. And if you really work at just observing, you’ll start to pick up on the physical habits of the people around you; the way they carry themselves can show their demeanor; learn what a handshake means, when it is appropriate to hug or to kiss. We are natural observational learners. We were all babies once, after all. But looking deeper into that scenario, why do babies strive to learn so much so quickly at such a young age? They want the interaction with other people. They strive for the attention and affection of others, and the best way to make those connections is by learning the language of your people.

So why do I travel?

I know from my experience living abroad for a year away from family that often times it’s not nearly as glamorous as it looks when you read back through blogs, flip through journal pages, or even simply remember. It’s easy to forget all of the discomforts, loneliness, and boredom when it isn’t happening to you right now. I love travel, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I feel like we (or at least I personally) travel not just for the novelty and fun and beautiful scenery, but to search for people who connect with us, who will love us and be a home, no matter where in the world we are. At the end of the day it’s the human element that makes us happy. Making someone else smile, and having someone there for us when we need to cry. Trying to find ourselves on our own is often counterproductive. I have found that the more I spend time away from others to just think (and think, and think, and think) I think myself into oblivion and become completely cynical of the world and humanity. When I am surrounded by friends that truly care for me and me for them, a person can truly focus on the right now, and be happy in that very moment, which as we know is one of the keys to over all happiness. Somewhere in there is a happy medium, though I have yet to find it.

At the end of the day it’s the human element that makes us happy.

I am not yet old or wise. I haven’t been around long enough to even know what I’m good at doing. But I do know this: It all comes down to making contact. That’s why I travel, because deep down inside of me there is a longing to find others that I connect with and can call family and friends, even in the most foreign of environments. People are people, at the core of everything. We want and we hurt and we love until our time is done, and then the ones we left behind begin the  process all over again. You can choose to be an active participant in the cycle, or you can sit on the sidelines. I’m dusting the dirt from my shorts and getting in the game.

(Author’s note: This was an edited repost of a post from my other bog, Hailey in Deutschland)

Reflections on an Exchange Year

My going away brunch with friends and family.

They say the best way to learn a new language is to immerse yourself in it completely. So in the summer of 2010, that is exactly what I did. I packed my bags, said my goodbyes, and on June 19^th left behind everything familiar and dear to me to go live for a year in Germany. Don’t jump to conclusions though. It wasn’t nearly as spontaneous and crazy as it sounds. The actual pre-departure process lasted for almost eight months. There were applications to fill out, recommendation letters to be written, and personal interviews to go through, dry mouthed and shaky kneed. Then there were host family matches to be made and more interviews until finally, after so many months of waiting, the day of departure came. Ten hours later, I found myself on foreign, very German soil.

The first month I was in what the exchange student society likes to refer to as “the honey moon stage”. Germany was fantastic! The impossibly green hills rolled on for what seemed like forever under clear, blue skies uncluttered by yellow arches or Shoney’s billboards. The little villages tucked into valleys like gems in a rock with their identical, compact houses nestled next to one another depicted the sort of “german-iscity “that I had always imagined. I had no idea what any one was saying, but I didn’t care! It was all just so terribly quaint and picturesque! Through my American “goggles” I saw Germany and its people as a spectacle to behold in fascination and delight. The coffee and cake routine every afternoon was a custom I accepted readily as was the abundant, jubilant drinking culture. Everything that happened was a brand new experience, and I thought that I would never grow tired of the country.

But as these things tend to go, summer burned out into a chilly, bitter autumn, and as the leaves began to change, so did my attitude. That initial blind naivety and jubilance trickled away and left me exhausted from over stimulation. All of a sudden, not understanding what people were saying left me feeling alienated and insignificant, at times even unintelligent. Why wasn’t I learning quicker? My host family corrected me when I said something wrong, but instead of their criticism aiding in my progression, it made me feel even more incapable. In the exchange student circles, this is called culture shock. I hated how the German school system worked, and I couldn’t stop comparing it to America’s system, which I felt was far superior. I hated that the Germans ate so much bread, and I resented the people for no good reason at all. Germany, its people, and its language now appeared (through my American goggles), cold, unfriendly, and very, very German.

Winter came. I gained ten pounds and declared that I would never eat bread again. My New Year’s resolution was to get in shape, physically and mentally, and included in that was stepping up my language learning a few notches. I studied my grammar books and put an absolute ban on any English-speaking whatsoever. I read German children’s books, than adolescent aged novels. By January my host mom and I could have real, longer-than-five-minute conversations. By February I was getting passing grades in my German classes at school, and when the snow began to melt in early March, so did my perceived misconceptions about Germany.

Springtime brought rebirth. The cold, barren landscape outside my window was slowly transformed into a fairytale book cover. Fields of rapeseed bloomed bright yellow blossoms underneath the rhythmic, dancing wind turbines. We had hedge hog visitors in our garden and celebrated the birth of a lamb. The veil that had been draped over my eyes was lifted, and I was quite suddenly flooded with understanding and skill. All of those months before I had been sacrificing my personality through the language learning process. How do you make friends when you can’t tell a joke or simply understand how your friend’s day went? But with my new ability to communicate effectively in various situations, I also acquired a busy social life. Relationships with the people around me deepened, and soon I felt that I had closer friends in Germany than in America. Assimilation was complete.

When my father came to visit in April, excited though I was for our reunion, I actually felt like his visit invaded my ever-increasing knowledge of the language. Hearing the nasal tones and abrupt way of speaking that American English has, I would cringe and long to hear the guttural, rolling, sing-song German voices of my host family. Not only that, but simply walking down a street in Berlin speaking English with my father was like putting on neon red white and blue suits and singing the national anthem. We were instantly labeled as dreaded American tourists, the likes of which I had worked so hard not resemble. Had I been walking down those streets alone or with another German, I would have passed as any nice German girl. I had finally achieved my German status, but speaking my mother tongue felt like trying to fit into a pair of jeans that I’d outgrown; so great and encompassing was my integration into the German culture.

My year ended where it began. Summertime followed spring, and in July 2011, I found myself boarding an airplane in Berlin to return to sunny Florida. It was raining that day in the city, and the long fingers of autumn could already be felt convincingly caressing out coat sleeves and drip-dripping umbrellas. Sitting on the subway on my way to Tegal Airport I listened to the murmuring of voices all around me; a mother telling her son about lions, an old man grumbling over his newspaper about the Greek debt, a young woman on the phone with her boyfriend telling him she loved him. They were the voices of Germany, and I understood them.

Comfort = Complacency

All learning happens outside of our comforts zones. People don’t accomplish extraordinary feats by sticking to what they’re familiar and comfortable with. When we never stray away from the things that we are already good at we tend to get this false sense of self-satisfaction;we’ve done pretty good, why push any harder? It’s pretty cozy in the comfort zone, why venture out into the cold, dark world where we can be sure of nothing?

When I was eight I decided that I wanted to learn how to play the violin. I had been inspired after watching a movie about a lack-luster orchestra class and their climb to the top guided by their no-nonsense teacher. They were kids like me, playing music that even I, an uncultured eight year old, recognized as being something incredible. My parents, comforted by the fact that playing violin as a hobby would be beneficial when applying to colleges later in life, dutifully went along with my whim and before I knew it I had a violin in hand, standing awkwardly in the foyer of my new teacher’s house.

After my fist few lessons I was faced with the cold hard truth. Learning an instrument was going to be hard. It wasn’t just a matter of placing fingers upon strings in the right places and voila, music! I needed to learn how to read music before I could ever play it. I remember hating being asked what the notes were called. I never really learned their names, instead choosing to remember which ones were which by equating the finger number with them.

But it wasn’t just learning the music that was hard. Even when I had progressed far enough along that I was able to play Mozart and even some fiddling tunes when I felt like it, my fingers would often betray me and the entire song would be ruined by the wrong note.

Playing an instrument requires hours of deliberate practice. You have to play scales until your fingers bleed, repeat the same song until the muscles in your fingers get so worn down that they have no choice but to obey. My parents often had to make eight year old me practice the very instrument that I had begged them to buy for me.

The lesson learned? Learning is hard. No reward is well won without a lot of sweat and time put into getting it. When you try something new, a lot of times you have to put yourself out there in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes you feel like an idiot, that you will never achieve your goal or dream, or whatever it is you are pursuing. To an eight year old, perhaps this was a little beyond my realm of understanding, but to adults and young people, it’s a fact of life that instead of avoiding, we should embrace and look forward to as just a stepping stone to great accomplishments.

When my family moved to a more rural location when I was eleven, my violin lessons were put to a halt for lack of a local teacher. But my relationship with comfort zones and learning didn’t end there. When my mom and I started a natural horsemanship program with our two very difficult horses, one of the first dvds that we viewed included an hour-long class room lesson on comfort zones. Apparently humans aren’t the only creatures that this theory applies to. Everyday that I worked with my horse I observed her as she embarked on a learning adventure with me as her guide. As the teacher, I now saw what it looked like to leave a comfort zone. When I would teach her something new, she would exhibit different behavior, sometimes becoming more introverted as she struggled to process the new information, other times turning into a extroverted wacko. For a horse, leaving the familiar is a very scary thing. Life threatening at times. But oh, the places we went and the things we achieved once we worked through the discomfort of leaving the comfortable!  My horse gave me a new perspective on the process of learning, one that I ultimately took with me on my first adventure abroad.

Fast forwarding a few years to 2010, I was now sixteen and quite certain that learning a new language by complete immersion would be the fastest and easiest way to learn a new language and culture. At the month-long language camp in Germany, still comfortably surrounded by the forty-nine other Americans, I once again found myself staring at a diagram depicting the learning process. By that time, after the violin experience and years of horse training, I felt pretty confidant about my knowledge of the learning process. (First sign of complacency is confidence!) After a few months with my new host family and attending a German  school however, I was once again faced with the harsh reality that what I was doing was actually going to be MUCH harder than I had anticipated.  It is my personal opinion that the most sure-fire way to feel like a complete idiot is to be an exchange student with no prior knowledge of the language of the host country. Talk about depression, self-pity, and frustration! Never have I felt so low, so unintelligent, as I did my first six months in Germany.

I can now say that I have a fairly good grasp of German. I understand almost everything but the most complicated, intellectual conversations, and I can communicate my feelings and opinions with ease.  I consider now even the worst of times in the first half of the year to be worth what I gained.  And I gained a heck of a lot. New friends, family, tons of life experiences, and perspective, to name a few.  I continue to improve my command of the language with classes and conversations with my family’s exchange student from Germany.

Stepping out of my comfort zone has become sort of an obsession of mine.Especially when the more that you do take that step, the bigger that your comfort zone becomes. Therefore, what’s not comfortable becomes more and more extreme by other people’s standards. I’m no longer uncomfortable being by myself in a strange city. Or navigating airports, or asking for directions in a foreign language. I’m no longer uncomfortable dancing in front of others, or even failing at something. Everything that happens to me, or that I put myself through, has become just another learning experiment. The gain outweighs the risk or temporary discomfort, even when the result is not what I had been hoping for. I still can look back at every failure and say that I learned something from it, even if all I learned was what not to do next time around.

Remembering Prague

Prague was in full bloom. The red-tiled roofs and hazy sky painted a watercolor vista as we gazed out over the old city. It was gloriously warm for the first time in months. Sweat collected between shoulder blades and ran down furrowed brows. The heat was welcome after having spent the prior four months bundled up as I experienced my first German winter. It was April and my father was visiting me for two weeks.

Our time in Prague was short, but we made up for it in a fairly rigorous itinerary. Rigorous only in the sense that we walked A LOT. Our points of interest and sight-seeing was pretty much done at whim. We would pick a route described in Dad’s Lonely Planet book and proceed to meander at our own pace. Using this method we discovered a hidden gem of a park where we spent a few lazy hours with our jeans rolled up and faces turned up to the sun, books forgotten in the cool grass beside us.

On the first day out we saw signs advertising an orchestra performing in one of the grand old theatres along the river. We spent a beautiful evening dressed up among the locals listening to the stories told by the melancholy violins and moaning cellos, teary eyed because classical music does that to us. I don’t think we said a word to anyone that night. We lost ourselves in the anonymity of being strangers in a foreign land.

In hindsight it is easy to overlook the less positive aspects of a journey and only remember the amazing bits. It makes a more glamorous story to folks back home. In reality, Prague was not perfect. Despite the undisturbed beauty of the old city, seated along beside it is new Prague, a tragic debacle of architectural delinquency and post-communism social ruin. I know, because dad and I took the wrong tram upon arrival and had a little tour. Also, Prague is simply infested with tourists. I was of course one of these offenders myself, but walking down the road and hearing more American English than the native tongue was a bit overwhelming. Especially on the Charles Bridge, tourists were packed is so tightly that we felt like we had found the Czech Republic’s version of Disney World!

All of Prague’s offenses were forgiven, however, as we sat at a tranquil, outdoor cafe atop a hill overlooking the entire city. With a towering monastery behind us and breathtaking panorama below, I sipped my wine and my father his beer and listened to the symphony of languages surrounding me. The sun warmed our upturned faces and every sip of wine slipped cool and delicious down my throat. Time slowed down to meet us and we greeted it, invited it for a sit. It was a moment free of concern, worry, or any thought at all. For that moment we had complete bliss.