The cute Brazilian girl in the cell phone store looks up at me and sputters a series of syllables in my general direction. She’s been fiddling with my phone for 15 minutes now, the phone I just bought for twice as much as I would have paid in any other country. Now she can’t get it to work. Explanation is pending – at least until I decipher the Portuguese syllable soup she continues to vomit at me.
I’m frustrated, if you didn’t notice.
“Não entendo,” I reply, for probably the twelfth time. It means “I don’t understand.” One of the only Portuguese phrases I know.
The coy smile she had given me the first few times I said it are now replaced with an aching impatience. She frowns at me, then the phone, and then sighs. She pulls out a Post-It note, scrawls some Portuguese on it, hands it to me along with my dysfunctional new phone and slowly instructs me to go to another store in the mall and have them deal with it. She has to repeat these instructions three times before I understand them. This is the fourth cell phone store I am being sent to.
Apparently there are a lot of bureaucratic procedures involved with buying a cell phone in Brazil, the details of which are obviously sailing clear over my head. And since none of the store clerks speak English, they’ve all eventually reached a breaking point, lost patience and sent me down to the next store to be somebody else’s headache.
The entire process has taken close to three hours… and it’s still not over. The mall cell phone nightmare continues.
(Although, to be honest, it should have only been about an hour and a half, I fell asleep in the Claro store waiting for a customer service rep to call my number. I awoke 45 minutes later to find they had proceeded half a dozen customers beyond me. I strained to convince the rep to take me next since I had been there an hour. But my Portuguese persuasion skills weren’t very effective… OK, since we’re being honest right now, they were non-existent. I couldn’t say a thing, and therefore I hardly raised a fuss. Thus I took a new number and sat my ass back down, this time forcing myself to remain awake for the ensuing 30 minutes I would wait… again.)
I never resolved my cell phone issue that day. I finally found an old man in the mall who spoke English and was kind enough to come translate for me — yes, I walked around a Brazilian mall randomly approaching people to find someone to translate for me.
It turns out that Brazil requires an identification number to activate any cell phone bought within the country, the equivalent of having a Social Security Number in the US to buy a cell phone. There’s a whole formal process that’s required and if you’re a foreigner and don’t work for a Brazilian company, then you’re screwed unless you can get a friend to come in and register your
phone under their name. As is probably obvious, I did not have any Brazilian friends with me. So almost four hours after arriving, I left the mall, having paid too much for a phone I still couldn’t use.
…And then got lost going home.
International travel is not always peachy. In fact, at times it’s downright difficult and lonely.
If you’re reading this book, then you know about the amazing adventures, the exciting experiences, the beautiful locales, the new cultures – that’s why you’re here. That’s why we’re all here.
But I want to talk about a slightly subtler benefit of world travel.
Anyone who has done extensive traveling knows that it can affect you on a deep level. If you push your personal boundaries as hard as you push national borders, you will find that you will likely come home a different person than when you left.
In my life, extensive travel abroad has been one of the defining influences throughout my adult life and has established a lot of my character traits. I strongly believe that travel can have major
positive effects on a person both emotionally and psychologically and can even be used as an avenue for personal growth.
The Altitude Effect
The most pronounced difference one feels when they travel extensively is what a friend of mine refers to as the “altitude effect.”
In sports, exerting oneself at higher and higher altitudes becomes more difficult. It takes the body time to condition itself to the new altitude and make do with the thinner oxygen.
Then when returning to sea level, they find that what they used to believe was strenuous has actually become much easier, without them being conscious of it.
The same effect happens with your confidence and self-assurance when you travel.
Living and traveling for extensive periods of time in other countries and cultures exposes you to hundreds of tiny stressful situations. Not knowing anyone and having to make new friends again and again, getting lost and finding your way back in a foreign city, being stripped of many of the
conveniences and products you take for granted back home, the awkward conversations through language barriers, making a fool of yourself or accidentally offending someone because of cultural differences, the self-sufficiency required, the attention you must pay to your safety – I could go on forever here.
You’d be surprised how confusing it can be just to buy a cell phone
The point is that exposing yourself to these endless series of minor discomforts, insecurities, and
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when you go back to sea level, everything feels a bit easier.
I remember feeling socially anxious at times back home when I went out with my friends, especially if we went to a really nice club and there were beautiful people walking around.
Then I went and lived in Buenos Aires for three months and bounced around Europe for a while. When I came back, the same social situations, the same venues, the same beautiful people – they felt like a joke. Not only was I comfortable in those situations, but I was almost bored by them.
The altitude effect applies to more than just social situations. It can increase your confidence and your self-reliance. It can make events that once felt stressful feel simple and easy. Suddenly waiting in line at the post office becomes much more tolerable when you’ve had to spend six hours bribing your way across Cambodian border patrol with no one who speaks English.
Usually the altitude effect is not noticeable as one major life improvement, but rather it feels like 100 or 1,000 tiny, barely noticeable things all improved at the same time, and they add up to a larger, more noticeable whole.
Homesickness and Relationships
That first moment where you walk out of the train station or walk out of the airport – there’s a thrill to it. Those first few weeks in a new city or country are exhilarating, so many new places to explore, interesting and intricate cultures to absorb.
Then as weeks turn into months, some of the pains and struggles of living alone or living in another country begin to take form. You start to miss your friends back home, the food you used to eat, the places you used to go. Calls home become more invigorating for you and you find yourself more and more waking up with a lack of energy and excitement, a jadedness for those same new
experiences that once thrilled you.
There’s a honeymoon period with long-term travel, particularly for people who are not accustomed to living abroad or living alone for long periods of time.
My experience the first year or so I was traveling was that my limit seemed to be about three months until I would begin becoming homesick and lonely. This is back when I was hopping from city to city every few weeks for months on end and was much worse at making connection and making friends wherever I went. The loneliness caught up to me fast.
Other perpetual travelers I’ve talked to seem to be able to last six or eight months before the loneliness sets in. Others it doesn’t seem to affect at all. Some people want to go home after just a few weeks. It differs for everyone.
There are two factors going on that causes this inevitable loneliness in travelers.
1. The first is simply not making enough significant connections as they travel. The rent-a- friendship quality of the backpacker lifestyle eventually begins to run dry. Language barriers feel daunting or you spend so much time doing touristy stuff that you never settle down enough to meet some locals.
As I wrote in a previous chapter, I began to focus on friendships first and foremost anytime I landed in a new country. This went a long way to stymie the loneliness and keep me excited and appreciative for longer stretches of time.
The other change that helped considerably was merely spending more time in each place. Homesickness is mostly a starvation of connection – a feeling that one has lost meaning in one’s relationships and day-to-day life.
Living in each place for 2-3 months (or more) rather than just a few weeks at a time helped me establish much sturdier friendships and relationships with people. Since I switched to this more “long term” style of travel, loneliness has all but disappeared.
2. The other factor of homesickness and loneliness is that there are many people, places and things we rely on emotionally back home for support that we take for granted, and when we move abroad and remove those sources of support, many of us feel the emotional repercussions.
The beautiful and frightening thing about traveling is that it disconnects you from a lot of what you use to cope, it severs a lot of dysfunctional but codependent relationships you may have in your life. Whether it’s your regular drug hook up back home, or the “best friend” who you actually have a symbiotically dysfunctional relationship with but you could never get away from, or mom and dad always handing you extra money and using it as a tool to keep you close, or your group of friends who largely decided what you would do with your free time. Once these precipices are removed, it grants you a larger and more powerful personal freedom, but it also forces you to confront your insecurities and self-esteem head-on.
This can be difficult and at the least, emotionally draining.
Like I said, the first year or so that I traveled, my trips rarely made it more than three or four months without me returning home. In the beginning, it was because I missed and needed my friends. I still miss my friends back home when I’m away, but back then it felt like I NEEDED my friends back home.
But when I went home, it became apparent that my friendships had changed quite a bit. Spending six out of eight months out of the country will go a long way to show you who’s really your friend and who was merely a friend of convenience.
My relationships back home morphed. My time away had made some of my connections far
stronger while causing others to crumble. And after overcoming the disappointment of the latter, I became a lot more comfortable in my relationships back home and the homesickness was far less
Time abroad can also affect your family relationships and the way you see perceive your family members. It can help you become independent for the first time or gain perspective on any unhealthy codependencies that may be going on.
There’s nothing like removing you from your relationships to give you profound perspective on what they really mean to you.
Perspective and Humility
Living abroad can also give you new perspectives on life – and not just, “Oh, these people can’t afford Dominos Pizza delivery,” type of perspective, but deep, profound, perspectives.
For instance, I wrote a long piece on my website about how dating foreign women caused me to question my concept of masculinity and how I was expressing mine.
Living in Eastern Europe made me question the definition of friendship and what it means in my own culture. Living in South America has given me widely new perspectives on expression and the value of emotional honesty.
You gain new political perspectives, not just by chatting politics with foreigners (whatever you do, just don’t mention George W. Bush), but by seeing how their society works and functions. Having lived in Germany and visited places like France and Holland, it drives me crazy when American politicians rag on “European policies” as if they were some backwards hellholes where everyone was miserable and a failure. If people went and spent a month or two there they’d see quite the opposite.
And then, of course, there’s the poverty. Crippling, unimaginable poverty.
Sure, you’ve seen on TV, you’ve seen in movies, you’ve read about it in school, but when you stand there and look at it and walk through it, it’s quite another experience entirely. One can’t help but be affected emotionally and start questioning one’s priorities.
All of this hinges on maintaining an open-mind – something, which if you bought a book about long-term travel, I’m going to assume you already have. But there are those who are exposed to these completely different worldviews where nothing sinks in, and that’s unfortunate.
Chasing After the Rush
For many people, going to a new place is a huge rush. And I mean that somewhat literally – the magnitude of the new experiences and stimuli create a surge of dopamine in our brains.
For some of us, that surge can become addictive. I’ve seen it in myself. When I started living this way, my interests weren’t too varied: I wanted to see Europe, Argentina and Brazil, Japan, the
highlights of Asia perhaps, and I guess Australia. That was about it. I was hardly aware of other, more obscure regions of the world, much less interested in them.
But what I’ve found is that the more places I travel, the more places I want to travel. I clearly remember telling my ex-girlfriend (who runs education programs in Africa) that Africa had no appeal to me. Now, I could rattle off probably 12 African countries I’d be curious to see.
A vague interest in Israel has turned into a larger interest in the Arab countries. A six-week stint across Russia and Ukraine now has me wanting to become fluent in Russian and take the Trans- Siberian railroad across it, stopping in towns (and Mongolia) along the way.
Kazakhstan is no longer a funny name I saw on the movie Borat. Obscure and barren islands in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific suddenly sound very exciting.
As with anything, the line between passion and addiction is blurry. As is the line between enthusiasm and escapism.
Setting off for long-term travel is a lifestyle decision, with repercussions that will reverberate across your personal landscape for years. You will lose old friendships, become disconnected and disillusioned from things you once loved, worry your family and perhaps even cause yourself some financial turmoil.
You will become enigmatic, multi-cultural and at times, self-righteous.
But you will also see and discover and experience things you and few people back home ever knew existed.
And that is a choice in priorities. A choice in passion.
Take that passion out into the world and savor each moment, each blindingly beautiful vista, each 2,000 year old monument, each flight delay and visa application. Enjoy the burning fire of life and then bring it home with you, wherever home may end up being.