At happy hour today, my co-worker and I were discussing about
traveling and the Europe backpacking topic came out. Taking a gap year
after high school before college seems to be more common in the Western
culture compared to the Asian culture. I, unfortunately, didn’t have the
opportunity to experience that. Although living abroad in different
places since I finished my 8th grade probably gave me a somewhat similar
experience, only minus the 24-hour travel time. Instead, I probably did
80% of studying and 20% of traveling. But I guess it gave me more time
to experience the culture more in-depth compared to a short
couple-of-days visit to a new city.
Nevertheless, thanks to all the people out there who are willing enough to share their adventure with the rest of the world online, my interest about travels seems to have grown
these past couple of months. Reading and watching the things people
posted online about their travel experience seem really fascinating to
me. It also made me feel like I haven’t seen or experienced anything close to what they went through in their journeys.
In terms of traveling abroad, I feel a little envious to those who
are an American passport holder. American passport holders don’t have to
deal with the fuss of applying for visas when they want to visit other
countries. You know those scenes that you see in the movies where the
character spontaneously bought a ticket to fly somewhere overseas in the
next couple hours? I don’t think those scenes would ever happened to,
say, an Indonesian passport holder like me since there’s no way we would
be able to get visas in less than 24-hours. Or I guess it’s possible if
you have applied for a bunch of other countries’ visas in advanced—just
in case something like this happens. Just saying :P
Traveling to Europe is something that I’ve had on my bucket list for a
while now and hopefully, sometimes soon, I’ll be able to visit all the
places and see all the paintings and architectures that I’ve read about
when I was in college. One of these days. One of these days.
