It really is the little things...

There are tons of blog posts out there about why you should travel (whether young or single), things you learn by traveling, ways travel changes you, etc..  Most of them are great, and as someone who's done short-term leisure travel and longer term travel, I can certainly relate to many of the points presented.  For me the things I've noticed most this time are the little things.  Maybe that's because Australia is the least "exotic" country I've ever visited,so the things I notice can't really be viewed as some sort of cultural difference to be embraced.  I had started a list of these little things to help you understand what I meant, but deleted them all because it just didn't seem all that interesting.  One of the reasons I keep blogging about my time here is because, as Angie Castells put it:

You lack the (and yet you have too many) words.  When someone asks you about your new life, you lack the right words to convey all you’re experiencing. Yet later, in the middle of a random conversation, something reminds you about ‘that time when’…, and you have to hold your tongue because you don’t want to overwhelm everyone with stories from your ‘other country’ and come across as pretentious.

One of the things I dread most about returning home from a trip, especially the long ones, is the inevitable, "how was your trip?"  I never know what to say because I don't know how much time they have or if they really even want to know, because asking how a trip went does seem like the polite thing to ask when seeing someone who just returned from overseas.  Like it or not traveling changes you and sometimes there's just no way to explain why you've changed.  For me, blogging about my trip, as it happens, is a way to get out of having to really tell people about my trip when I get home.  Maybe I shouldn't have admitted that, but I guess it really is true.  That's also one of the reasons I enjoy scrapbooking my travels.  Instead of telling people about the trip I can just hand them a book.  If they have questions they'll ask and if not they can just politely flip through the pages and at the end say, "wow it looks like you had a great time" and I can smile and say, "yeah, I did".

I have a terrible memory when it comes to these things and by the time I get home I'll have forgotten half the things I've seen and done.  I got a book out of the library the other day called "Letters to My Sixteen Year-Old Self".  It wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be, but it did make me realize that I couldn't write a letter to myself at 16.  I wouldn't know what to say because I don't remember what being 16 was like.  I'm sure I have a journal somewhere from that age and if I read through it I could then write myself a letter, but without that I'd be lost.  Anyway, as I stated earlier, it's the little things that you notice most, so say a quick "Thank You" to God next time you use your freezer, paint your nails, give your sister a hug, or bake some brownies.  Those little things are so nice to be able to do without giving it another thought.  Maybe it's not so much the little things in life, but the way travel changes your perspective on those little things.