The Shallow End

How Worldly Are You?

You Are Quite Worldly

You've done a good bit of worldly exploring, and you have an international perspective. And you're definitely looking forward to your future adventures abroad. You've got the passport, the desire to travel, and maybe even the language skills. Now all you need are the means!

"Now all you need are the means"...and the time! And better language skills...I pretty much suck at learning new languages. Four years of French in high school and all I can say is je ne parle Francais, or parle vous Francais (and then, what if they say "Oui?!")?

Ah, yes, I do love to travel, especially if it doesn't involve work. What I love most about travel is experiencing how people live in different parts of the world, what their daily life experiences are like. And then I like to imagine how my life and perspective might be different if I had grown up in a different land. The furthest I have gotten from my own personal experience was a visit to a "gated community" in the Maasai Mara, a village made from cow dung and populated with Maasai nomads.

I usually make a point to see the "tourist attractions" while I travel, although I do so reluctantly and for the sole purpose of taking a picture to document that I was there (speaking of which, the Masai do not like to have their picture taken...because this "steals the soul," and so I respected their wishes...except they did allow photos inside the gated community for which we paid $1 admission; I have a nice portrait of the gatekeeping Elder as a matter of fact...ahem, isn't this akin to selling your soul?! Well, anyway, when I tried to steal a couple of photos outside of the village, the resulting images turned out blurry, ghostlike...I think there is a message there. ;-) Rarely though is sightseeing the highlight of my travels (the rare exception being The Grand Canyon for which Jim can tell you I absolutely rave about any chance I get). It's the people that make travel interesting.

So far, I have only seen a very small part of the world, but when visiting with others I realize that I have been blessed in my travels. Not nearly as blessed as my husband though, who can boast that he has been on every continent except Antarctica and pretty much every major port city in the world. Now that's a lot of traveling!

Some of my favorite travels though are in our own back yard, like the Grand Canyon, and small town America...for a great vicarious visit to small town America, read this book.

I'm getting the travel bug again. It happens every tax season when I feel the most confined. So I start scoping out the travel deals in Budget Travel magazine and online deals at TravelZoo and the like. I desperately need a vacation this year. Last year, we went nowhere. That's simply unacceptable.

Labels: Planes Trains and Automobiles

posted by Gwynne @ 8:30 PM