The grass is never greener
"Of course," I said.
This is a daily occurrence during our month long stay was.
would we in before playing for hours to our favorite restaurant "downtown". The owner would teach us Thai and local Chao Lay, during our inability to laugh spicy food treat. We would laugh with him to share a few jokes, and head back to the beach.
During the night, we would walk barefoot on the island beach, and with generators humming in the background, drink and smoke with our other friends until the early hours of the morning.
Then, when the generators off and we had only starlight to illuminate our way, we would have another good night until the morning, when we would do it again.
In short, I was looking for my version of The Beach .
The Beach published a book in the 190s about backpackers in Thailand, fed up with the marketing of the backpacker trail in Asia, sought from an authentic, unspoiled paradise.
Ko Lipe is an island filled with banana pancakes, Wi-Fi, and tourists. It was not paradise, but it was my paradise
The Beach exists, but it is not a specific location or target. it is a moment in time, as complete strangers come together from opposite ends of the world, share memories and create bonds that last forever.
to find those moments over and over again, and if you do that, you begin to realize that travel has been trying to teach you from the beginning:
does not matter where in the world are, we are exactly the same
And so simple. Realization is the most exciting "Aha!" Moment you can ever experience.
Before I travel I started that elsewhere in the world dreamed the grass was greener. That while I was stuck in my boring office job, the people in the cities I dreamed only did great and exciting things.
If there were but I would be my life better and more exciting.
But to travel around the world has taught me that the grass on the lawn of neighbor is exactly the same shade of green as your own.
The more you travel, the more you realize that the daily life and the people around the world are exactly the same.
And so, you come to understand the beauty of our common humanity.
Local culture is simply how other people do things. I love how the French obsess about wine, the Japanese are so polite, Scandinavians love their rules, Thais seem to have a watch that is always 20 minutes late, and Latin cultures are passionate and fiery.
This is culture. This vine is why I travel.
I see, want as people live life all over the world, from the farmers on the Mongolian steppe to the clerk in fast-paced Tokyo at the tribes of the Amazon. What is the local take on the mundane things that I do at home to get back?
But even with this diversity of cultures, people living around the world, their everyday lives the same way. You wake up, commuting to work, to pay worried about their children and the bills, relax, spend time with friends, and to enjoy her family. They laugh, they cry, the concern as you. We want to believe that the world nonstop excitement is everywhere but where we are - but it is not. It is the same.
I used to live in teaching English in Bangkok. While I I had flexible hours still treated with shuttling bills, landlords, wearing suits to work, and everything else that comes with an office job. I along with friends after work for dinner and drinks and it did again the next day.
It was I, of continents away from home, and it was like I was in that cell in Boston everything was over.
the day-to-day lives of people around the world halfway is no different than yours.
on Ko Lipe, the locals would take their children to school before they open their businesses. They would talk about their hopes and dreams, and they would complain if they are not enough tourists got off the boat. We'd birthday parties, specialized language instruction to participate, and head out fishing with them. It was a routine to their lives.
see people doing things differently, wherever you are. Sure, it's fun eating on the Seine, sailing the Greek islands, or a motorbike to Hanoi race. But the locals do not every day. They simply live their lives, just as you are now.
As tourists, we look often to other crops, as looking whether exhibit in a museum, gawking at people and how they do things. "Is not that funny," one might say. "How strange they eat so late." "It makes no sense to do it that way."
But to me these cultural differences are just like the little quirks of a friend, no more or less exciting than your own (but sometimes more interesting).
If you are as similar realize our lives, you realize we are all together in this. You do not see more people as a "different", but recognize in them - the same struggles, hopes, dreams and desires you have, they have for themselves
And so, when an interviewer asked me. last week about the biggest thing to travel the world taught me my thoughts raced immediately by all those moments on Ko Lipe, and without hesitation, I answered:
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