By Bella Richter de Medeiros
Unexpected things you learn while traveling for a year with your family:
You’re going to miss home a lot more than you think you will. You’ll miss things that you didn’t even give a second thought about, but you only now notice its absence. (I’m talking about boxed macaroni and cheese here.)
Hanging out with your family 24/7 may sound incredibly appealing but it has its limits.
Showers. You never know what kind of shower you’re going to end up with. You get used to freezing cold showers, you get used to 30 second hostile water-saving showers, you get used to showers whose strongest water pressure is the equivalent of a dripping faucet, you get used to showers with no doors that leave the entire bathroom soaked, and, most importantly, you get used to being chill with whatever shower you get. You figure out how to be matter-of-fact and say, “Okay, well, either I use this weird shower, or I don’t shower.” and work with what you have.
Good, reliable Wi-Fi is hard to come by. Living without it for a while sucks but it’s also not that big of a deal. (Unless, of course, you have deadlines in your online schooling, which brings me to:
Online schooling with a poorly designed curriculum is less stressful than traditional schooling, but also it requires 100% reliable wi-fi, which is not always available. So sometimes you have to scramble and do one class’ three lessons, assignments, and tests in one day.
If blogging and vlogging was a full-time job, I would have been fired three months ago.
You learn things about your family that you didn’t know before. For example, “Oh hey, upon having a conversation with my dad as if we were just two people and not just father and daughter, I have learned that he is a conspiracy theorist.”
There are times when you just have nothing to do. You never think that this will be the case, but sometimes you’re stuck inside all day and you’re sick of all your books and you can’t talk to your friends due to time differences and you’re just bored out of your skull.
Your favorite artist that recently became incredibly popular back home? You don’t even have to worry about getting sick of them because you’re not there to hear them get overplayed.
Traveling is truly an eye-opening, humbling experience. You expect this, and this is the reason you got on that plane in the first place, but you’re constantly awed by the beauty of different places and the cultural differences, both good and bad.