I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to travel a decent amount in my life. I wish I could run an A-B test to know what my life, and my personality, would be like if I had not had those opportunities. That being said, I’m going to assume I’m a better person because of those experiences.

When Dave Delaney posted his ‘40 life lessons‘, the very first one was about travel. Here’s a video of us discussing life lesson #1:

Some things travel has taught me:

1) England. When I was 13, a troop of scouts from Maidstone came to New York and spent a few weeks with my Boy Scout troop. We took them to baseball games, to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston, etc. The next Summer, our Troop (#77, if that matters) joined our new friends in Kent. We went to Canterbury where I got to stand on an old Roman wall that’d been hit by a V2 rocket during World War II and played capture the flag in a hay field at the foot of Corfe Castle. This was crack for 14-year-old Ed Healy. As someone with a love for all things medieval, it brought to life those facts that I’d been studying in history books – not to mention giving me tons of fodder for my Dungeons & Dragons games.

England taught me that history is worth preserving. I’d always been a fan of the mini-scale battles on display at Bunker Hill, and had spent many Summers at the Seneca reservation in New York studying the Iroquois Confederacy, but I never got the same wow factor as I did when walking the halls of Windsor Castle (before it burned). Preserving the artifacts of our history is important – a fact we sometimes forget amidst the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

England also taught me that taste is cultural. To be clear – the British just can’t cook. I spent two weeks on a veritable hunger strike for want of a tasty snack. This could have been a 14-year-old’s perspective. I might thouroughly enjoy British fare should I return as an adult. I just know that our day trip to France was awesome – because I got to eat fresh bread and good cheese and … not eat what I was being served at my host home.

2) France. As I just said, I spent a day in France. A day isn’t long enough to really learn much about a culture. I did learn something, though: People just want to do their jobs. I’d been studying French in school and was excited to exercise my linguistic skills while in Calais. The locals didn’t have much patience for my broken child-level grasp of their language. I don’t think it was a case of cultural snobbery – in case that’s what you’re thinking. No, I think these people were used to English-speaking visitors and all spoke English and were just interested in doing their job – not humoring a 14-year-old and his desire to test his knowledge. This may have been my first real conscious analysis of a customer service experience. It helped me see that both parties in an exchange can have drastically different expectations of what that experience should be like.

3) Bulgaria. I’ve spent over a year in Bulgaria, over nearly a dozen trips. The longest stretch was when my family moved there in 2008, which is where I did the initial work to get my business off the ground. Having spent so much time in Bulgaria, it would be impossible to list everything I learned in a single article. And since I married a Bulgarian, it’s doubly hard to know where American culture ends in my house and the Bulgarian begins. Chez Healy is a true melting pot.

The biggest thing I learned from my time in Bulgaria is probably that we believe what we’re taught. I grew up watching Red Dawn and thinking all the communists wanted to kill my parents and put me in a concentration camp. The truth is that people everywhere want the same thing: for their children to have a better life than they have. This doesn’t minimize the inherent conflicts that will arise from the clash of cultural and political and economic systems – some of which turn hot and bloody – but it helps me to remember that people are… people.

My experience in Bulgaria also taught me that people really don’t understand America. Some Americans really don’t, either. My father-in-law thought we were all rich lazy spoiled brats – until he came to visit us. And I never realized the treasure we have in our varied and diverse culture until I lived in one that was largely homogeneous. Living in Bulgaria taught me that I need to put my preconceived notions of what something, or somewhere, is like on the back burner and grasp any opportunity to experience life for myself.

4) Greece. We spent a few weeks in Greece as a family in the early 90s. My parents, living in southern Bulgaria, would travel to Thessalonika to shop every couple months. Greece is very similar to Bulgaria in many ways; they’re neighbors, after all. They have very different cultures, though. It was amazing to see how the homes in Northern Greece look very similar to those in Southern Bulgaria, but the people are so very different. In the end, I learned that language is the carrier of culture. I don’t believe the Iron Curtain can wholly explain why two peoples, living so close to each other, can develop in such different ways.

I also learned that people like to rewrite history. I’m not going to get into a debate about ‘The Macedonian Question‘. I will say, however, that I saw numerous instances, on both sides of the border, where sites were defaced by patriots in the name of defending the ‘true history’ of their race. We’re pretty far removed, today, from many of the things that Bulgarians and Greeks fought over in the last couple centuries. I don’t believe we, as humans, are any less prone to those attitudes and mistakes, though. Visiting Greece, in light of my stay in Bulgaria, taught me to see how I, myself, can be ethno-centric. My hope is that I can be more intersted in the truth of facts, but even more interested in the joy of good people – regardless of where they live or what language they speak.

As with my trip to England, I spent a lot of time visiting Greek historical sites like Meteora, Delphi and the Acropolis. In Greece, however, I was able to visit a number of places one reads about in ancient literature (Marathon) and a number of places mentioned in the Bible (Areopagus, Corinth, etc). In all cases, these visits helped me have a deeper appreciation for the historical setting in which events I had read about actually happened. Context, I learned, is invaluable.

5) Canada. Being from Upstate New York, one would think that I’d have visited Canada more often that I did. It wasn’t until I was married that I took the time to go, though. My wife and I took numerous trips to Montreal and Quebec in the mid-90s, driving up from Albany, New York where we were living. It’s hard, sometimes, to talk about Canada in the same vein as Europe because we’re so close to them. And until my recent trip to Victoria, BC I’d never been anywhere else ‘up north’. In all cases, though, the biggest thing I learned from Canada is to have a positive attitude. Canadians are quick to laugh, even at themselves. They are quick to adopt newcomers into their groups and to adapt to the changing world around them. To me, the quintessential Canadian is my friend Philippe-Antoine Ménard, the Chatty DM. He is intelligent, curious, cordial, enthusiastic and has a rare love for life. Chatty = Canada in my mind.

6) Iraq. After 9/11, I joined the Army. Thanks to that decision, I was able to go on a few government-sponsored camping trips in the desert. As with Bulgaria, it’s hard for me to really boil down that entire experience into a couple sentences. How can one spend the better part of two years in another place and ‘tell all’ in two paragraphs? Like with my Bulgarian experiences, though, my trips to Iraq reinforced my belief that people – the people on the street – are no different, no matter where they are, what they own, or what they believe. They want a better life.

Again, just like in Bulgaria, I also learned that there is a disconnect between what people are taught – and therefore believe – about a culture, and the reality. In this case, unfortunately, I was not free to hang out in local coffee shops and talk with locals. I could not jump down in the field with a local farmer and till the soil, as I did in Bulgaria. And we really didn’t have the freedom to visit Muslim holy sites – not like I did with the Orthodox monasteries in Bulgaria and Greece. What I did learn, though, was that culture can make communication next to impossible. For example, Iraqis tend to speak to you ‘up close’. They don’t have the same sense of personal space we do. This can be a problem when you’re trying to make friends at college, but it can be very very difficult when you’re unsure whether this person wants to thank you for helping, or take your M4 off your hands. I fully recognize the problem from the other direction as well; this guy may just want to say thanks, and may not understand why that American soldier keeps backing away from him and his friendly advance. Needless to say, it was a very… educational experience.

That’s the short version of what I’ve learned through travel.

It’s by no means complete or exhaustive. It should give you an idea, though, of why I agree with Dave 100%. You should travel as much as possible, especially if you have the opportunity to actually live in another country for a stretch of time.

Where have you gone? What have you learned?