The food that people eat, the clothes that people wear, the languages they speak, the ways in which they travel around their towns: all of these things make up a community’s culture, and cultures can vary from city to city, country to country and continent to continent. Each community, from Seattle to Khon Kaen, has a culture, and I think we can learn something from every single one.
When I returned home from Rome, I felt the urge to meet more people who were willing to share their culture with me, so I could learn from it. When you encounter other cultures, it sometimes makes you reflect on, or think about, your own. When in Rome, I caught myself wondering silly questions, like why tomatoes were such a big staple in Italy and not in the United States, or why so many Italians stood very close to me when we were talking, and why my friends in Seattle didn’t do that. These questions were exciting to me, and something that I wanted to explore more.
At that point, I knew that I had to travel again. You could say I caught the “travel bug” and I haven’t been able to get rid of it since. This means that I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to travel to Thailand to teach English in Khon Kaen. I knew that I wanted to travel here because I wanted to learn more about cultures, both Thai culture and my own.
In my travels, I’ve found out that the best way to learn about culture is to learn the language and make friends in that language. Whenever I tried to speak in Italian in Rome (my Italian was pretty awful at the time), I was shown compassion and gratitude from locals there. Since moving to Thailand, I have found the same thing to be true here. A common language can bridge a gap between cultures.
