There are so many reasons why traveling around the world is one of the best things you can do to enrich your life. From past experiences, traveling has helped me gain insight into other cultures and other ways of living. There are some people who prefer to stay local and cannot imagine going more than a couple of hours away from home; however the benefits of stepping out of your comfort zone, quite literally, and exploring new places are plentiful. For one, traveling enables you to broaden your horizons and expand your outlook on life. In addition, it encourages you to be open-minded about diversity. By engaging with different people from different parts of the world, you are able to see things from a variety of perspectives and come to the understanding that the world is not perceived through one lens. Instead, every person sees the world differently and by being exposed to a varied range of schools of thought, you can deepen your knowledge and understanding of the world and of those who are different from you.

In the same way, contact with diverse cultures can ultimately lead to personal transformation and enable you to realize who you are as a person, what you value and what you have learned from your travel experiences. Generally, traveling is a great and adventurous way to develop skills necessary in all aspects of life as well as to establish connections with people you meet along the journey. Additionally, while spending some time abroad, you're able to put your language skills to the test and see if those years of studying Spanish or French paid off. Hopefully they did, but if not, you can always rely on dictionaries to help you interact on a basic level with the native population. From personal experience, I can attest to the fact that traveling is one of the best ways to be educated about any given country, region, language or culture. I've been to countries such as Slovakia, Croatia and the Czech Republic, and it's not a surprise that learning about these places in the classroom pales in comparison to the lived experience of engaging with the histories and cultures of each country. The great thing is that you're not getting graded for traveling and you are at the liberty to decide where you want to go, want you want to see and what personally interests you.

At this point, I can probably guess what some of you may be thinking about all of this. Obviously, traveling has its perks, but about financing it? It's not like a trip to Europe or Bora Bora is cheap enough to just drop everything and go for it, even though that's what we think about doing at times. Traveling abroad is certainly not cheap, but it's manageable. In order to ensure that funding an international trip is possible, a good amount of planning is required. This involves creating a budget, researching the places you want to visit and seeing what will best accommodate you. Despite its potential expenses, traveling has a lot to offer and is worth every penny that you invest in it. With traveling, you create new memories and fascinating stories to tell, and this makes you a much more interesting person.

So, if you've been thinking about traveling to a specific place of interest but don't really know if you should, I say go for it. It can be an incredibly life-changing experience that you wouldn't want to miss out on.