What Summer Travel Actually Teaches You
Now that summer is winding down and everyone is starting to head back to school, one of the first questions people ask is pretty predictable: “What did you do this summer?”
For a lot of us at an international school, the answers involve travel. People scatter in completely different directions once school ends, visiting family, going back to countries they consider home, exploring somewhere new, or, in my case, sometimes traveling for racing as well. By the time everyone comes back, it feels like we’ve collectively covered a pretty significant part of the map.
I've been fortunate to travel a lot throughout my life, and obviously there are things about it that never get old. Seeing a place you've only seen in pictures, trying food you can't really get anywhere else, or standing somewhere with hundreds or thousands of years of history is pretty incredible. But the older I get, the more I've realized those aren't necessarily the things I remember most.
Usually, it's the normal stuff. I notice what time people eat dinner. Whether everyone drives or takes a train. Whether a city gets quiet at 8 p.m. or feels like it's just waking up. I like going into grocery stores in other countries and seeing what takes up an entire aisle there that might be almost impossible to find somewhere else. Even something as simple as ordering a coffee can be completely different depending on where you are.
None of those things would make a "Top 10 Things to Do" list, but I think they tell you a lot more about how people actually live.
Transportation is something I've become especially interested in. In some cities, having a car feels almost necessary. Somewhere else, you can get nearly anywhere by train, bicycle, or walking and barely think about it. You start noticing how much the design of a city influences people's everyday choices. If public transportation is clean, reliable and easier than driving, people use it. If neighborhoods are designed for walking, people walk. Those differences also have environmental consequences, even though most people probably aren't thinking about sustainability every time they decide how to get to dinner.
Travel also makes you realize how many things you assume are universal when they're really just habits from wherever you grew up. How people greet each other, how loudly they speak, whether shops open on Sundays, what counts as being "on time," how people dress for certain occasions… there are hundreds of tiny rules we follow without realizing they're rules at all. I've definitely gotten some of those rules wrong before. I probably will again. But I think that's part of traveling somewhere new. You pay attention, ask questions, and adjust.
Growing up internationally has made travel feel normal to me in a lot of ways, but I don't want it to ever become something I take for granted. There's a big difference between collecting countries and actually being curious about them. You can fly halfway around the world, stay in a hotel, take a picture in front of something famous and leave without learning very much at all. For me, the best part is getting even a small glimpse into somebody else's version of everyday life.
Now we're all heading back to classrooms, schedules, homework and normal routines again, and I'm sure within a few weeks summer will already feel far away. But everyone comes back with something they didn't have when they left: a story, a new favorite food, a phrase in another language, a different perspective, or maybe just a better understanding of somewhere they hadn't been before.
That's probably my favorite thing about summer travel. You come home to the same place, but hopefully you notice the world around you a little differently!