What Do I Love About Traveling?

Sometimes I find myself in front of the computer wondering “What do I want to share with you?”. It’s always so much easier if I’m sitting in front of a notebook, and I’m simply sharing everything I feel and think of.
I recently came back from a 10 day trip in Romania, and these past few days I thought a lot about what I really liked about traveling.
I feel like the answer to this question is important, and very telling.
I feel like in this answer there are 100 clues about what makes one happy, and what jobs or activities are most suitable for them.
What do I like about traveling?
I love discovering, and I love variety.
Every new country is like a Kinder Surprise egg hiding different habits, clothes, cultures, foods, scenery, people. I love discovering it all, and I love the diversity of it all. There’s so much heart in this. So many different nuances and flavours.
I love devouring it all.
I’ve loved discovering new things for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories of this is being 6 and playing a game with my sister. We would spin an Earth globe with eyes closed, choose a random spot and then read about it in a school atlas. I remember choosing the Gobi Desert once. I don’t know what about this memory made it stay with me so strongly.
I started exploring more soon after. At first the villages around mine, then the whole world.
Traveling is not the only place where I love exploring and discovering. Every mystery to solve, every book, every movie, every new food, or in music. Every hidden reason why someone is not living a dream they have, plus the hidden path out of that knot. It’s fascinating.
Every new language is like a mysterious code waiting to be cracked. I learned how to read by myself when i was 6 because I was so curious about what all those signs meant, about the meaning in the pages of that book. And I remember that the last letter I learned was lowercase “g”, with the help of my grandpa.
Exploring, discovering, understanding, are integral parts of me.
What else do I love about traveling?
I love meeting new people. It’s connected with variety, but different. I love uncovering every story everyone has to share and learning something new, or simply knowing it and connecting. And every new person I meet somehow becomes a part of me, as if there was a hidden thread linking me with everyone I ever met.
I also love the history of different places, or visiting places where different stories were set, either mine, or my family’s, or ones I encountered and liked.
I love the inspiration I get from seeing new places, and the healthy physical tiredness of wandering around. It’s all about discovering and seeing “it”, whatever “it” is.
Speaking of seeing, there’s also the aesthetic factor. I love colours, nature, mountains, seas, forests, cities, villages, roads, buildings. Everything. All the different animals. I simply love looking at everything and connecting with everything. And there’s beauty in the wretched too, not only in picture-perfect places.
Beauty, connection, novelty, exploring, discovering, variety. These seem to be the keys of travel for me. And the best part of it is that I could never run out of things to discover, even if I lived 1000 years.
What do you like about traveling?
