A Life Lesson

Like everything in life, traveling comes with its ups and downs. There is truly no other experience like it in life. Yes, most of the time traveling is exciting and adventurous. At the same time, catching flights, forming plans, and traveling as a group comes with its stressors. I can say that traveling is a learning experience like no other. This week, I had my first interpersonal conflict while abroad. Each person comes into every situation with a different perspective. The same can be said for expectations while abroad. Everyone has their own plans and goals for each trip. This week, I experienced a clash of my goals with the goals of another person I was traveling with. Personal opinions and plans clash all the time. Whether it be with school, work, or social lives, this dilemma affects us on an everyday basis. How we handle those clashes teaches us something about our character. My mindset going into this trip was to keep an open mind and go wherever each adventure takes me. Before coming here, I was advised not to set my expectations to high. Previous travelers told me that if their trip did not meet their expectations, they looked at their experience negatively. I am trying to avoid this and have my time abroad be some of the best time in my life. However, some of my travel companions did not have the same mindset. They set high expectations and expected their trip to live up to these expectations. This differentiation caused a clash and ultimately resulted in our travel group to split up. This whole experience taught me value of compromise. Dilemmas like these are not worth ruining friendships over. We had to learn to compromise our expectations out of respect for one another. This is not a lesson I would have learned in a classroom. This type of learning is learned strictly through experience. The lessons learned though this experience will not only help me while I am studying abroad, but will play a role in work and social environments for the rest of my life.