Traveling Interest
A curious explorer & 20+ countries visited
I love traveling around the world, discovering new places, and experience a new culture. I have done solo-traveling, traveled with friends or just simply traveled with my families. I have stayed in a cabin in the woods, a hostel with many foreigners, a boutique hotel, a resort, or any type of lodging that you can think of ?. No matter who I went with or how I stayed during my trips, every journey was uniquely awesome and gave me some life-lessons and experience.
To me, traveling is not the pure joy of finding relaxing moments or having some temporary pleasure. It is more about long-term developing and sharpening individuals. Adaptability, Planning, and Communication are some of the several skills that I learn throughout my local and global trips.
Adaptability
Traveling has taught me how to overcome the jet lag of +12-hour flights and how to get used to a new culture and local people’s traditions quickly. One time I went to a beautiful, mountainous area called Feng Huang Gu Chen (Phoenix Ancient City) in China with my friends for 3 days, I was so amazed that people here do not usually eat meat but very spicy vegetables and tofu. To ‘survive’ in this place and explore the surroundings (this area is famous for the natural scenes), I had to eat rice and noddles with stir-fried cabbage for the entire 3 days! The trip was worth it to me because the city was magnificent and very unique!!!
Some pictures of Feng Huang Gu Chen
Planning
In my opinion, planning for a trip is very similar to planning for a project. They both have time and resources constraints. And like the utmost goal of a project is to satisfy the stakeholders, the goal of a trip is also to satisfy whoever travels with you and yourself in terms of happiness. From booking of flights, rooms, and trains to researching means of local transportation to travel around the city or food culture, everything can be difficult if you forget to plan but very easy if you do put some thoughts on it. Trip planning gets even harder and more fun when the location that you are going to has some restrictions, just like software or integration restrictions of projects, or you are on a tight budget. This lesson, in fact, applies to a lot of my trips, including one to Cuba and another one to Italy. As Cuba is a country with LIMITED or NO wifi access that is very inconvenient to tourists, I had to download an offline map, make an itinerary with restaurants and tips, and install an offline dictionary, etc. For a trip to Italy, I traveled under a small budget at that time and heard that its flight ticket and train ticket could vary hugely depending on the booking time. I had to search for deals a month in advance and found out a $12 flight ticket from Paris to Rome or a $1 train ticket from Rome to Florence!!
Rome Manarola – Cinque Terra
Communication
Lastly, I have learned to develop my communication skills a lot. This is not necessarily about building speaking and listening skills, but about utilizing your broken language to do greater things or understanding the body language of the locals. I led my group of 10 friends to Cuba with only 3-hour Youtube courses of Spanish. With the help of my broken Spanish and traveling experience, I visited a lot of beautiful places that do not have many foreign visitors and had opportunities to have new experience such as ziplining, doing lobster cruising or eating lunch inside a cave.
Doing a lobster cruise is really hard for foreign visitors! A peaceful view of Cuba with its beautiful, iconic cars