Wednesday, April 6, 2011

On Traveling

I love to travel.  Traveling gets me out of my skin, as well as out of my house, my very safe state, and sometimes my country.  It makes me think, and it gives me lots to think about.

On a trip to Central America last month, we hadn't yet left the US when we learned what it felt like to be in a foreign country.  When we arrived at the AeroMexico desk in the International Terminal at O'Hare, we were the only non-Mexicans in sight.  All of a sudden, my blond hair felt like a beacon of differentness, and it wasn't comfortable.  I thought that maybe, that might be a tiny bit of what my African-American friend Brenda feels like when she visits Boothbay Harbor, alone and different and no way to not stand out.  It was a feeling I hadn't expected to experience and I was still in Chicago!

When we visited Nicaragua, I saw poverty more severe than I had ever imagined.  They are trying so hard to develop a tourism industry, but there is still trash everywhere on the dusty, dry landscape.  How can you worry about picking up trash or recycling when you're just trying to find enough to eat?  A few miles south, in Costa Rica, the countryside is neat as a pin, lush, green and welcoming.  I learned that, unlike Nicaragua which is still recovering from the civil war of the 1980s and '90s, Costa Rica gave up its military in 1849 and decided to dedicate its resources to education, health care and tourism.  Costa Rica is one of only two countries on this planet, Switzerland being the other one, that doesn't have an army and that has stayed neutral for more than a century.   The literacy rate in Costa Rica is more than ninety percent, and the health care system is first-rate.  Costa Rica has become a destination for medical tourism, successfully combining plastic surgery expertise with tourism.

To me, traveling is about more than sun and surf and warm ocean breezes; don't get me wrong, I love those things.  But I also love learning things I didn't know and seeing my own life through a different lens.  I've enjoyed counting down the days with my friend, Anne, as she gets ready to travel to England in 13 days, because she gets it, too.  We love putting ourselves in different places and different situations and seeing how we react and how it changes us when we re-enter our lives back home.   And, now that I've unpacked and done the laundry and put away my travel supplies, I can get ready for the next adventure:  Ireland in October.

1 comment:

  1. Ten days now. Can you put pictures in your posts?

    ReplyDelete