When you go outside your routine, you often expect to see new ways of doing things. However, when you embark on a journey to completely remove yourself from everything you’ve grown accustomed to, you learn that the standards which you’ve held to and which you have been held to, are just part of your environment.

Example:
To have a family and kids, you should get married.
4 weeks of vacation is a lot.
Racism is pervasive.
French are rude.
Hitchhiking is unsafe.
Planes rides are more expensive than trains.
Trains and buses are for low-class travel.
You can’t eat fried food every day and lose weight.
Arabs hate America.

These were all ideas and standards I had hardwired into my brain that I believed before I this trip. Everyone of them was proven wrong. While I’m willing to believe that meeting the hospitable Frenchies was a fluke, I don’t believe that any of these I listed are “exceptions that prove the rules”.

These are all ways we have grown up to believe, because America and it’s amazing citizens live in a bubble! It’s time to challenge that which we’ve always accepted to be true. I invite everyone to give up on the idea that it “HAS TO BE THIS WAY”. I believe that we think we know everything already and we’ve given up on one of the most important questions of our lives: Why?

May 16th, on my plane back to Dallas. Sad that my trip is over. Happy that my new life has begun.