Goal 4 (Part 2)

Traveling is not the same as vacationing.

Or thoughts from talking to others, pondering to myself, and reading medium articles like this one.

If you read my last post, you know about "the checklist personality": the urge to do the easy tasks for that instant checklist gratification. It's pretty common in this generation, and it's not surprising given all of the life hackers, overachievers, and yuppies of today (me included). And when I say it's a personality, it really does define how you approach more than just the tasks you write down. It becomes the way you accomplish goals, build relationships, and most notably, travel.

Because when you go somewhere new, there's a difference between traveling and vacationing. Traveling is when your destination is the purpose. You've made it there and you're keen on fully immersing yourself in the culture, learning from the people, noticing the nuances, and embracing the differences, even if they make you uncomfortable. Vacationing treats the destination as the final goal. There's no personal journey: the focus is on instagramming the coolest sites, attending the hottest events, and coming out of the experience with stories to impress your friends back home. But most notably, there's always the us and them. Your identity is always tied to home.

And that's the danger of a checklist experience: all of the changes happening are in your external environment, not internal. There's no chance to change and grow. I'm still not quite there: I don't yet embrace all of the differences, I retreat back to the comfort of familiarity quite often, and I'm still distinctly American. There's a lot of cultural changes that I'm reluctant to embrace: I miss American openness and I crave the order of MIT's consistent scheduling. But just because I'm uncomfortable with some of the changes doesn't mean I don't appreciate the nuances; it'll just take a little longer to get used to.

So noticeable differences between traveling and vacationing?

There's a lot less of an urge to take pictures of everything. I've taken maybe 8 pictures so far, and 5 of those have been of the adorable stray cat that I adopted for a few hours one night.

I'm living like a real person instead of as a perpetual tourist. That means making a healthy lunch every morning (and I've lost 10 pounds! Shout out to Goal 3 ;)), going grocery shopping, and making time for myself. I know I'm in it for the long haul and that means I don't need every hour to be exciting and I need to make time to vegetate.

I'm focusing on the nuanced differences. I'm living with these people for the next 6 months, and I want to know what subtleties I appreciate and what things I miss that I didn't even realize were important to me. For one, I miss the outward friendliness, personal sharing, and obnoxious laughter that now seems so uniquely American.

I spend as much time as possible with people as different from me as possible. My goal is to learn how to perceive the world differently and see how culture can shape how people think. There's a lot of cool studies on this, but on the personal level, I just want to be exposed to new views to help me be a more open-minded, empathetic human being.


Studying abroad can be much more than being a long-term tourist. It can be about the relationships made and the deeply personal conversations shared and the things about yourself that change that you can't even put words to. It can be about struggling through the differences, adapting to them, and creating bonds that teach you new ways of seeing the world. And that experience is not tweetable, it can't be checked off a list. Perhaps the value of an experience is inversely proportionable to its check-offability. Ironically, the things worth accomplishing are never the ones you can check as accomplished. Visiting sites, taking pictures: those are checkboxes. Throwing yourself into an effort with no definition of success at the end, that has nothing checkbox about it, but everything opportunity-wise that I value. This doesn't call for a complete lifestyle redesign, but I wouldn't have realized the incompatibility of my checklist goals and traveling values without having tried to embrace both.

I love vacationing just as much as the next person and there's definitely a time for it, but that's not now. Now, I'm traveling.