My First Experience Traveling: The Dream. The Passion.

Nine hours of complete misery. That’s how I remember the beginning of my trip. Twelve hours earlier I was in a hospital room getting antibiotics for a flu turned sinus infection. My mother asked me, “Do you still want to go? We can still get a refund.”
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It’s funny how in just a few hours you can be in a completely different place, like stepping through a fairy tale and landing in a different world. At least, that’s how it felt to me. Unreal. Zurich was a fairy tale and I was a sickly princess sitting in Starbucks, or as I like to call it to keep with the charming atmosphere, ‘St. Arbucks.’ As I sipped the most delicious caramel macchiato I had ever had in my life (with fancy designs made with the whipped cream and everything), the students I was traveling with split into groups and looked for a place to go swimming. I sat in the coffee shop calming my throat and watched out the window, noticing the building beside me was a rather cute movie theater. As I left St. Arbucks and looked for my companions I noticed that cute movie theater was playing… porn. I really was in a different world. I walked along the Limmat River that runs through Zurich looking for anyone from my group and ran into all the guys feeding a bunch of swans. As I got close however, I noticed it wasn’t the swans they were looking at but the naked women lying on a deck outside of a bathhouse on the lake. And what did I do? Sit and watch with them of course. I sat, watched, and wondered to myself, ‘what made public nudity acceptable in Europe but not in the U.S.? And what makes women so much more confident about their body in Europe? Cause god knows I would not be able to sit out and bear my unclothed body to the world.’ But most of all I wondered, ‘why do they have porn theaters here and who would go to such a thing?’ I was amazed, confused, and completely addicted.
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My answer, “Hell yes.” No illness or worrisome mother was holding me back from getting on that plane. This was my dream. From a young age I asked myself, ‘How did I end up here?’ Why the U.S instead of France or Russia or even Korea? And where did I belong?
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I was amazed, confused, completely addicted, and ready to explore. Ready to find that European confidence. Ready for new experiences. Ready to find my place in the world… or maybe find myself in every place.