Going on a vacation with your friends for a few days to somewhere like Miami or Las Vegas is awesome. You get to have fun, make memories, and party! But it is a completely different experience to travel outside of the United States, or wherever you live, and experience a different way of life
Traveling teaches us that the world is so much bigger than our small cultural bubble. It opens our eyes to the fact not everyone lives the same, eats the same foods, or even learns in the same way. In the U.S., there are so many different people from all over the world living together, but how many times have most of us actually taken the initiative to learn about those cultures, or study another language that wasn’t through a required course (that we probably don’t remember how to speak anyways). Traveling offers us a unique experience to step outside of our comfort zone and embrace a new way of life, and depending on where we go, a new language. For example, after visiting Paris for a few weeks I began learning sentences and phrases in French, just from being immersed in the language and out of necessity.
Increasing knowledge and widening perspectives through journeying to a new country can make you a valuable asset to any employer and increase your quality of life. In a USA Today article titled Educational Benefits of Travel immersion into a different culture provides us with two different types of journeys, outer and inner. “The outer journey describes the physical experience of travel…The inner journey defines your interpretation of the experience.” Instead of simply where you went and what you did which is typically what most people take away from vacation, traveling abroad provides us with what we learned from the activities we did, and how those lessons have shaped us and altered our perspective.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson