Mike
travelinghomebody
Mike
I'm 29 years old. Used to be a home body but just caught the travel fever because my new hobby is language learning and learning other people’s culture.
Got inspired by a friend of mine who moved to Japan and got married. He was coming into town with his new wife and her parents who speaks no English and I had about 20 days to learn Japanese some Japanese so we could communicate. So I surfed online and found this awesome website www.mangolanguages.com. They have 100 Japanese lessons for Free. I couldn’t believe it. I tried the Rosetta Stone one at the library but this thing was like 100 times better. Anyhow, I could only get through about 20 of them before they came. I did OK on the language part for conversation, but I realized my culture part was a bit off when I went to give his mother in law a hug.
They just don't do that in Japan. I learned the hard way. I embarrassed her and myself cause she looked at me like I was crazy. Mango Languages has a bunch of other courses so I started doing Spanish, Greek, and German as well.
I know I’m getting ambitious. But that experience really got me thinking there are so many cultures in the world. So many different societies that function very different from our own. Yet there is the common thread that holds us all together as humans. I figure the best way to grow as a human being is to understand these cultures. So now I haven't found a single site that I love for learning about culture, but I'm looking here and there. I wonder if anyone could help me in that arena.
I am saving up all my money to go traveling next year. I am still planning out all my destinations. I will hopefully be able to spend 2 months traveling that is the plan now. I definitely want to go to South America and Europe.