Things you appreciate from traveling abroad
Disclaimer: I made this list on Friday as I waited at Bahnhof Flughafen (Zürich Airport train station) to reach the Google Zürich office after a four hour plane ride after arriving to the airport in Tel Aviv at 4am to make a 7am flight. And I was completely sleep deprived. This list is not definitive.
JFK Airport - May 19: All I took with me for my summer working abroad.
Things you appreciate from traveling abroad
- Learning how to pack efficiently.
- Friendly airport passport-checkers.
- Traveling backward in time through the power of time zones.
- That you didn’t watch a movie everyone’s been talking about when it was in theaters…
- Because now it’s complimentary with your flight ticket.
- The information booth at the airport.
- Real life paper maps.
- That it seems like every other country besides the US has bathroom stall doors that go all the way to the floor.
- That numbers are universal.
- The musicality of language when you can’t understand the words.
- Figuring out what a word means in your native language…
- Even if it’s just because the words look almost the same.
- People-watching.
- Public transportation.
- The kindness of strangers.
- Not always having contact with the rest of the world through the internet…
- But still finding public locations that have Wi-Fi.
- That just getting from one train station to another becomes a major accomplishment.
- That there are so many people with so many lives moving in different directions all at once.
- That you feel like you belong in the world both a little bit more and a little bit less…
- Because there’s always more traveling to be done.
- That at the end of the day, there’s really no place like home.
- That this planet is your home.
Zürich, Switzerland - June 16: Flowers on the bank of the Lake of Zürich.