How travel can open your eyes and mind

A view of the Grand Canal from Venice's Academia bridge.
A view of the Grand Canal from Venice's Academia bridge.

Last year I had the perfect opportunity when I decided to study abroad in Belgium. I lived in Europe from January to June, and although most of that time was spent in Brussels, I dedicated about two months to seeing as much of the surrounding continent as I could. Traveling solo, I visited 10 countries, living out of a backpack.

Like a lot of things, backpacking is less intimidating and more mundane when you're actually doing it. Don't get me wrong - it was a breathtaking and humbling experience that I wouldn't trade for anything. But sometimes it's hard to appreciate the moment when your tired feet are crying for you to stop walking.

I saw the Eiffel Tower and the Sistine Chapel, the Brandenburg Gate and Buckingham Palace. And I visited places off the beaten path but much more memorable: a chapel in the Czech Republic built out of human bones; a Belgian speakeasy crowded wall to wall with swing-dancing couples; a Scottish glen sprinkled with fairy pools.

Throughout my travels and since then, several people have told me how outgoing or courageous I must have been to leave home and spend six months on another continent, but it never seemed particularly courageous to me. I'm a nerdy bookworm, an introvert, a picky eater; "outgoing" is not among the words I would choose to describe myself.

But if I can backpack solo (and love it!), that shows that travel adventures are feasible even for people who don't think of themselves as adventurous. Like roller-coasters (another fear I've conquered), the hard part is convincing yourself to get on the ride. Once you're there, you'll be having too much fun to remember why it seemed unattainable in the first place.

Traveling through Europe with local budget transportation options like Ryanair and Ouibus, whose lowest fares are in the single digits, staying in hostels and living out of a single backpack is a totally different experience than hiring a tour guide and staying at a resort.

For one thing, it's a lot cheaper. It's easy to find nice hostels for less than $20 a night, and with dozens of online reviews you can be sure you're not staying someplace shady (a benefit my mother didn't have when she backpacked in 1990). And when you stay in a hostel, you usually have access to a kitchen, so you can buy food at the local grocery instead of constantly eating out.

While the cost-saving benefits are remarkable, the real reward of traveling this way is harder to measure. In hostels, you'll meet people from all over the world. For example, in Prague, I befriended people from Norway, New Zealand and South Korea, just to name a few. Even when traveling solo, you don't have to feel alone. There is a spirit of camaraderie among these travelers.

United by the journey and an innate sense of wonder and curiosity, we shared with each other what we could. As we sat around the dinner table, we swapped tales about the city we'd just come from and where we were going next, which museums one should visit and which aren't worth the time.

Backpacking allowed me to really see all the things we as humanity have in common. The things that divide us, ordinarily so easy to fixate on, seem so trivial when you travel.

In England, I heard Brits distance themselves from the strange foods and greetings of "the continent." Then, once I was on "the continent," I heard people generalize the uptight and cold northern Europeans and the laid-back Southerners. And when I was in Italy, I learned that all the stereotypes I had about Italians - large families that spend hours each day cooking and eating - really only applied to southern Italians, at least according to northern Italians.

This "us versus them" mentality even exists at the level of city blocks - but it is also there that it is being challenged. One of my favorite experiences was a walking tour I took of West Belfast in Northern Ireland. The tour guides told the story of "the Troubles," a period from 1968 to 1998 when unofficial guerilla war between Irish Nationalists (mostly Catholics) and British Loyalists (mostly Protestants) left nearly 50,000 people dead or injured.

Their story will stay with me always. It was not just about a few run-down blocks in West Belfast, it was a story that can be told anywhere.

If I'm grateful for one thing from my months of travel, it's not the souvenirs I bought or all the pasta I ate in Italy (although that's a close second). I'm grateful I had the opportunity to witness humanity at its best and its worst; the divisions of the past and the hope for the future.

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