Posted 2 months ago
Radvent 7 - Travel
(The radvent series of blog posts are inspired by Princess Lasertron’s blog.)
Radvent 7 is a subject very close to many of my (mostly expat) readers’ hearts: Travel.
What would you pack if you had only one bag to live out of?
I am having a hard time answering this because my instinct is to approach it from a survivalist perspective, with emergency blankets and a flashlight.
I think that’s probably not the spirit it’s meant in, though, so let me try again: Money? Big stacks of money? hahaha.. just kidding. OK, last try!
A ukulele. A pair of pajama pants. Seventeen hair elastics, since I can never find one and always want one. My dog. My phone, which would magically be big enough to hold my entire music library, and which would also serve to replace 357389 other gadgets I’d find useful, including a camera and a translator. Good walking shoes. I guess not much else, though. Have you ever tried to carry an overstuffed bag up three flights of stairs and down some cobblestone street in europe? It sucks.
Write about a place that taught you something unforgettable:
We cover England daily. Moving on!
Before I lived in England, I had a job that meant I spent a lot of time in Spain one year. Among the ten or so people in our tiny office in Barcelona, we had people working from the US, Spain, Finland, Belgium and Germany. Every single day was a crazy cultural mashup and experience in learning to navigate cultural differences, from an agreement about what languages to use when speaking in the office to disagreements about what is acceptable when it comes to holidays throughout the year.
I always think of myself as being open minded, but that year was a real challenge to that idea. I was constantly asked to explain things that I did or said, and had to think a lot about what I do thoughtfully and what I do just because it’s “just the people do things.” The question became, “sure, but WHICH people?” I also learned SO MUCH about listening to other people. The language barriers meant you had to have a careful ear and a lot of patience, to give people time to express what they meant in a language that wasn’t their own. But I also realized that I was surrounded by people who were really good at examining all sides of an issue without ever getting defensive, and it really highlighted for me where I *did* get defensive for no reason at all, just because someone’s ideas were not the same as mine. I am really grateful for that experience, and honestly, without it, I think integrating into the UK would have been a lot harder for me.
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