Experiences abroad
“And October came. Before, there had been a summer full of expectations mixed with sometimes biting anxieties. But it had also been a funny and tender summer, since I had spent an entire month at the seaside with my grandparents, who always, or at least as long as I could remember, spent June, July, August in the same house in that town on the coast.
It was funny and endearing, now at the dawn of my twenties, to still go on holidays like when I was a child, even if this time without a shovel and bucket and without eating my grandmother's scones at mid-morning, on the beach. But it was also a way to say goodbye.
Because now everything was ready, my luggage, the things I would need away from home. And my father patted me on the back with a certain embarrassment, because they weren't his usual gestures; and the mother... well mothers are always worried about their child, but mine had told me that I was no longer her child, that I was a man now, and she was proud of me, that I would be honored wherever I went , that I would get to know the world and become a better person, even if for her, he added smiling, I was already doing very well just like that.
In short, the next day I was leaving, leaving my country, and who knows when I would return."
[Abel Agudeza Reyes – “My Life or Everyone's”]
Travel, we know, is the metaphor of life. We all go on a journey in our time on this planet. But traveling is also a representation of youth, of the rite of passage that leads to new life experiences that invite us to change, to become different people.
Travel as knowledge of the world, places, people, ways of life, languages is also self-knowledge, growth. By immersing ourselves in the discovery of the new, priorities are changed, knowledge of what surrounds us is amplified, the value and importance we give to things change: problems that seemed insurmountable at home can prove easy and surmountable when travelling. But not because the problem was solved with the journey: simply because the way of looking at it has changed.