So I have been meaning to write this post for the past few weeks but as is customary in my imperfect world, I am just now getting around to it.  There are lots of things that I love about traveling.  I love seeing beautiful buildings and landscapes, learning interesting things about history, and eating as much fat food as I want because I am on vacation and calories don’t count.  But perhaps my most favorite thing about traveling is the way it makes me feel when I come home.  After I get over the exhaustion and jet lag.  It makes me feel refreshed and almost peaceful.  Getting to know different people and places and experiencing different customs and ways of life while you yourself are completely outside of your comfort zone is so enlightening for me and I always come home with what I think it a greater perspective of the world.  It is so easy in our daily lives to get stuck in our little loops and ways of thinking about things and we become so accustomed to our way of living that it is very likely that we start to feel that this may be the best or only way of existing.  When I travel I am reminded that our lives are so small in the big picture and that the vast majority of people in the world exist in a way that is completely different than we do.  They have different experiences, religious views, prejudices and values.  And theirs are just as valid and true as ours are.  I can see how this would be scary to some people to consider as it is human nature to want to feel we are the masters of the universe.  But for me, it makes me feel better about the world and the people living in it because no matter who I came across whether it was a student from Lithuania working in Bath to help his girlfriend come to be with him, an Irish man whose dream it is to open a bar in the Caribbean like in the movie Cocktail or a Saudi man who didn’t much care for American government (but very much liked American people), it was easy to find common ground and mutual respect for each other.  That, to me, is very encouraging because that is reality no matter what the news media would have us believe.  Despite all of our differences, I truly believe that we have far more similarities.

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