Welcome back!
What will you learn about yourself if you take the plunge into the life of an expat or take that two month backpacking trip around Southeast Asia? Long-term travel has many lessons to impart, and I’ve decided to create a series of posts highlighting the top 5 things I’ve learned on my own travels to here, there and everywhere. What is number one you ask?
1. Self-Sufficiency
The number one thing I’ve learned from traveling extensively is how to solve problems on my own. You have no one to rely on but yourself when your support network is 5,000 miles away.
Who is that strapping young lad you ask? Well, that’s me in Brussels circa 2004, on my first trip outside the country. I had just graduated from high school, and accompanied by my best friend Davy and his older brother Michael, we set off to bike about Europe for two months. Inevitably, we ran into some problems during our time there.
That bike in the photo is pretty isn’t it? Almost as if it was… brand new? Well, it was. I had to buy a brand new bike in Brussels when my perfectly decent used bike was stolen on the street by hoodlums. And regardless of what my Dad contends, I took all reasonable precautions, but it’s hard to withstand industrial strength lock shears.
So there I was, stuck in Brussels sans bike, with my two companions itching to get back on the road. Did I mention I didn’t speak French? We had to look up, locate, and talk to a bike shop in Brussels that was willing to sell me a new bike, and negotiate features and price all in a language I’d never heard outside of walking by French classes in high school. We got it done — with our fair share of headaches and things lost in translation — but we got it done.
And you know what? I’m glad it happened. When you’re alone in a foreign country and you fix a huge problem like that on your own, you get a newfound sense of worldliness. I was headed off to college when I returned from my trip, and I was very nervous before leaving for Europe. But following the bike theft and myriad other problems that cropped up while there, what could college really throw at me that I couldn’t deal with? I came out of the whole ordeal all the better for it.
If you encounter problems of your own while traveling, embrace them! They’re bound to happen, and dealing with them while outside your comfort zone will only make the problems you encounter back home seem insignificant in comparison. I lost a bike, but I came back to the US ready to handle whatever came my way.
