Daily Dose from a Busybody

Among the things that I love the most about my country's national hero, Dr. Jose P. Rizal, is the fact that he was a very well traveled man. Many of my professors from college would say that much of his being a genius come from his many travels. I have only been outside of my own country once. It was to attend forum on children's development in Beijing, China. I was just 16 years old. And the idea of traveling with just a chaperon excited me so much. But what I got from that trip was something more than I totally expected. More than the friends I made, the food I got to taste, the lessons I learned from the people in and out of the forum, the tourist spots I visited and the sounds I heard through my ears, it was the very idea that so many beautiful things happened to me in a country that is not my own. I made friends from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, China, Hongkong and India. Having the chance to have interacted with kids my age from these many countries was an experience I have carried with me for the next seven years of my life. Not a single day goes by that I am not thankful for that chance. I learned about the different countries represented in the forum, both the good and the bad. And it was then that I realized that the big world that we know of, could actually be quite small and what some of us would call a small world could actually be so big! The irony, right? But the truth behind these words is larger than this irony. It was during that moment seven years ago that I told myself that there is so much to see out there and that the more one goes out into the world, the closer he shall be to his own home. The more stories I heard about my friend's respective countries, the more I thought about my own. I learned more about their countries and the more I learned, the more I wanted to go home. And when I got home, I wanted to go out again. Those conflicting emotions were like a fire within me that just told myself that I should go and come home many times over.