Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Bulgaria, Germany, Kuwait, Iraq, and Amsterdam. What do these countries all have in common? Nothing. Each one has it’s own lifestyle, language, smell, feel, and taste to it. Each one has it’s own label, i.e. “Feared”, “Hated”, “Loved”, “Misconstrued”, “Beautiful”, “Ugly”, “Saddening”, and “Festive”. I, for one, can tell you this is true. I have been to each one of these countries and have seen the reasoning for these “labels”.
Anybody can look at these countries from the comfort of their own home and judge them by the way it “seems” in each place. I call this being blind travelers. I don’t mean “blind” as in physical status, but more of a metaphorical meaning. A meaning such as the person judging a country just by the way it looks, instead of actually physically stepping foot onto the turf of the foreign land and taking in all the glory first-hand. For example: The person sees Jamaica on their T.V. screen and says, “Wow, that place looks wonderful!” The next day, this person goes to his/her buddy and says, “Jamaica is the most beautiful place ever!”. What that person does not see, is the poverty stricken village people walking their homeland barefoot on littered, hot, broken dirt roads. They don’t see the five-year old kids buying cigarettes from a street vendor, and they don’t see the elderly man urinating in the streets, because he has nowhere else to go.
I’m not going to sit here and harp on the subject, because I’m sure most people know exactly what I am talking about. If any of you would like to know more about the other countries I have been to, feel free to reply to this blog, and PLEASE share your experiences to which most people wouldn’t even realize is out there.
-E. Donovan
