Let’s talk travel!
Last year I was invited on stage in Poland to talk about my travel experiences. This 30-min discussion was with a great friend of mine, Marek, who also spoke about his own travel experiences. My leitmotif was that I get to travel through my work though it’s not exactly what many people think of as travel.
The average person equates travel with time away from work, anything from a few days to a few weeks’ worth of time off, usually in an exotic destination. I offered my experience of living long-term in only a handful of countries.
My story started when I went hitchiking for up to 2 months at a time when in high school and had to do odd jobs to support myself during that time.
Later I went to USA and also worked construction jobs there for a few months, renting an apartment and mostly staying put in one place (NYC), though I did the “traditional travel” (road trip across the East coast of the US) too.
Next, I lived in Ireland for 5 years and now in Japan for another 5 years (working for the same company, Amazon.com). Before that I never would have chosen to travel short-term to Japan (always thought of it as kind of the Germany of Asia, neatly organized but utterly boring). However, when offered a chance to live there long term I jumped right at it as I knew deep down that this is a totally different experience from a short visit as a regular tourist and that it may prove my assumptions about it wrong. And indeed, long term stay offers a much more in-depth insight into the country’s culture and lets you explore it much more thoroughly.
I emphasized that in order to be able to do that, one must continuously think of developing one’s skills and marketability so that you present a real value to other countries’ job markets. So that was my angle to travelling in that discussion. I hope I inspired someone to think of travel in those terms, not as a part of a package tour but rather a long term resident.