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Travelling For Experience: The Secret to Never Getting Over It

Planned in the right way, travelling can be about so much more than just crossing places off your bucket list. There is a lot to learn when visiting other countries. Open yourself up to new experiences, stay in a local homestay, volunteer with a community charity, get to know the people and the culture of each new place you visit and you’ll find that you’ll return home, not only with lots of great memories but a lot of new skills too.

You might learn about Egypt’s history, the culture of Japan and the geography of South America. But it’s the life skills you learn which can prove important in the long run.

Here are some of the reasons why you should be travelling for experience and the things you can hope to learn on your travels:

Confident Communication

Travelling, particularly if you’re going solo, is a great challenge for your communication skills. Besides the trials of communicating in a foreign language, you will be forced to strike up conversations with near strangers on a daily basis if you are to enjoy any social contact. Finding new friends and building relationships, however fleeting, requires charisma, good body language and confidence.

How to Cope in a Crisis

Anyone who has travelled extensively has come across their fair share of tricky situations. Getting your bag robbed in a city street, finding that the train you were hoping to catch doesn’t leave until next week or struggling to find accommodation during a fiesta are all problems you may have to overcome. Facing these trials, working through them and deciding on the best course of action helps you to discover new skills that you had but you were never aware of.

A New Language

Immersing yourself in a culture is a great way to learn a foreign language. Pushing yourself to communicate in that language every day and hearing it used in real-life situations all around you can be much more useful to your language abilities. Even if learning a language isn’t the main purpose of your trip, it can make your travels far easier and interesting as you organize transport and accommodation from place to place and engage with the locals in their native language.

How to Prioritize

When you’re travelling, you need to determine what is essential and what you can do without. You can’t carry everything in that one backpack, nor can you always afford to choose the most comfortable mode of transport or accommodation. You will make difficult decisions on a daily basis and learn to prioritize what is most important. And these are the things which you never to get to face when living a regular life; such as when you run daily to and from office to home or your college to home. The experience itself is insatiable.

Different Ways of Life

Sitting at home in familiar surroundings, your perspective on life is unlikely to be challenged all that often. Travelling, you get to see how people around the world choose to live their lives. You see where their priorities lie; how they view work, family, education, the environment and how this compares to your experiences at home. Understanding that there isn’t just one way to do things opens your mind to a whole host of possibilities. Your ability to question, analyze and innovate will be greatly enhanced.

Travelling can expose you to new ideas and provide valuable learning experiences, how you choose to apply that learning is up to you. Whether you learn a new language, find new ways to approach life, or simply be a more confident individual, the skills you gained throughout your travelling adventures will be there to help you for the rest of your life. And the experience you get through all these is incomparable to any other thing in life. Meeting new people, experiencing various cultures & waking up in a different environment altogether is the real secret to never getting over it.

Also Read: 4 Websites to Find the Best Airline Ticket Prices

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Written by Spencer K