Trying Travel

It’s completely correct to say that home is the best place in the world. After all, it is the place where your loved ones are and where you can always be yourself. But once in a while, one needs to go out and take a break. One needs to travel- to discover places and to unveil the marvelous magic of Mother Earth.

Imagine living for seventy five years and never being able to see snow in all your life! Of course, the Taj Mahal and the pyramids of Giza are just a click away on the Internet Explorer but it’s not the same as looking at them up close and feeling the sun in your face over a different latitude.

But then, travelling just doesn’t mean staring at art pieces in the Louvre museum or clicking away pictures in front of the Statue of Liberty. It means losing your luggage in the Singapore airport, losing yourself in the really huge and equally deserted Frankfurt airport and it involves trying to make the airhostess understand that you require coke without ice (next time remember to say “Coke no ice”)!

If you travel once, you’ll carry lots of tissue paper on your second trip, sick bags on the third and a bottle of Tylenol on the fourth- travelling makes you wiser by the summer.

The whole subject of geography exists because someone travelled. Although majorities of the people have no intention of attaining that much of knowledge, they’ll at least learn why the shadow of the tower of the Brihadeshwara temple at Tanjore is never cast and how exactly the Opera house at Sydney is built. You don’t have to gawk and look stupid when your aunt’s brother-in-law’s grandchildren tell you about the breath taking view of the Grand Canyon if you’ve already been there.

Some places feel just like home. Take for example- Udupi. You’ll never figure out how you’re able to eat three times as much as boiled rice than the cooked rice back at home. You’ll never be able to tolerate the sticky sweat but you can forget all of that while chatting away with the friendly Hegde and Shetty crowd.

Some places can give you a totally flabbergasting experience. You could be at France, eating frog’s liver and not realizing it… It tastes exactly like chicken!

If you lose yourself in the labyrinth of New York City, you’ll be kind enough to help a foreign tourist find his way back in Bangalore. When you are in a condition where you are unable to communicate with the native of some place, you’ll involuntarily form a bond of friendship with him when he goes through the trouble of helping you out. Next time you eat your Mars bar, you’ll look for a trash can. In a nutshell, travelling changes you for the “good of the world” (and gives people the impression that you are extremely rich if you travel too much)!