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The best thing about a long Summer vacation isn’t the length itself, but the fact it gives you enough cushion time to make big, spontaneous decisions and follow through with them. I’ve always wanted to travel, but until this Summer I’d actually never left North America (and I only left the U.S. if you count Tijuana). I kept thinking, this Summer would be the ideal time to travel, but kept putting it off. I was just about consigned to waiting for some other future vacation to start travelling, when I had a moment of clarity/insanity and realized… life’s short, there’s no time like the present and for all I know, the rest of the world could sink under the oceans by next year. Before any psychological defense mechanisms could kick in and talk me out of it, I bought tickets for Japan, non-refundable.
Now that I’ve lost my travel virginity, an unquenchable wanderlust has been planted in my heart. I’m already thinking about where to go next. Meanwhile, the one trip has already changed me.
I should emphasize, I didn’t do a conventional tourist trip. With around a month between arrival and departure, I initially booked only the first four days sleeping accomodations, in cheap-ass youth hostels. I was determined to let fate steer me. What’s more, I was determined to see the real culture, not just take a prolonged tourist route. My motto is “Go toward danger” and I’m always looking for ways to push the envelope, burst out of the comfort zone. The Western, United States way of life was like a warm, comfortable mother’s womb, and I wanted to bust out of there: pop out naked, speechless, and crawling on hands and knees. That’s pretty much what I did.

There are way too many things I gained from the journey, so I decided to boil the major things into a nice acronym, and came up with “SPEAK”: Self-confidence, Presence, Expression, Appreciation, and Knowledge. Let’s go over each of them.

SELF-CONFIDENCE

If life is a video game, then stepping foot in an alien culture is like upping the difficulty a few levels. Suddenly you’re dumb and illiterate, you don’t know the social expectations, your phone stops working, everything you know suddenly gets challenged. And that’s what makes it so awesome. Living and thriving in such an environment is like training with weights on. It hits your self-confidence and ramps it up. Return to your native country, and everything suddenly seems a little easier and simpler.

PRESENCE

What is presence? Presence is living in the moment, here and now. True, deep presence means a higher level of awareness of your world, without analyzing or labelling things, simply letting the light hit your eyes and observing it. Side effects include unshakable inner joy, courage, and increased effectiveness in whatever you do. Immersing myself in a totally alien, foreign environment really upped my presence. Because everything was so new and unlike what I know, I was constantly being yanked into the now to observe the things around me.

EXPRESSION

I feel like I became much better at expressing myself, when I had to do so with only very weak linguistic connections. Language is full of treacherous, vague idioms and words. And English, with its diverse roots, is full of decisions, which word to use when they mean the same things. When talking to English speakers, a false step makes me less effective in communicating, and might even make me look nerdy if I pick a hard word when an easier one would do. But the English speakers are fluent in the language, so the conversation continues, often with no warning about the mistake. Speak to people with broken English, though, and any mistake you make will bring the conversation to a crashing halt until you fix it. It’s like being shocked with electricity whenever you make a mis-step. You quickly learn to express yourself more effectively and efficiently. I also feel that my body language was strengthened, since of course the universal language of gestures and signals is all the more important when the spoken word is weakened.

APPRECIATION

As a United States citizen, it’s easy for me to read in the news about something happening in another country, and it seems somehow a little less real. At an intellectual level, I know all the other nations exist, but it wasn’t really hammered in as much at an emotional level before. Now I can appreciate other cultures and nations a little better, having spent a month outside my own. I also came to appreciate some things in my own culture. Seven-Eleven was never really on my radar before: it was just an expensive convenience store. But in Japan, Seven-Eleven is a godsend for its international ATMs. Similarly, Kinkos is the best place to get free internet in Tokyo if you don’t have a laptop. I see certain establishments through new eyes now. I can now really appreciate certain features of the U.S. which I never “saw” before. Like the brilliant address system with street names. In Japan, only big streets have names, and the address system is a nightmare.

KNOWLEDGE

Travelling in another culture for a month gave me, I think, a better boost of knowledge than I would get by studying that culture in textbooks and classrooms for a year. Certain types of knowledge are particularly enhanced. Obviously I learned heaps about the Japanese language. And I learned lots about geography. I also learned about the technology outside the U.S. Japan is definitely one of the world leaders in technology, if not THE technology king.

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There are so many little benefits I gained, they add up to a lot but it would be impossible to enumerate them all. I hope the “SPEAK” classification provides a good overview of some of the benefits. I’m going to do a lot more travelling now that I know how awesome it is. I encourage you to travel whenever you can. Maybe we’ll even run into eachother in some foreign land. You’ll know its me cuz of the glowing face.

Here are some other articles I wrote. You can print them out and read them during your overnight plane trips.
Meeting the Geisha
Is Society Biased Against Smart People?
What Is Fluency?

September 18, 2009
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Category: Observations, Travel