Following Your Dreams

           Ever since I was a little kid I’ve always been fascinated by different people and where they come from.  I can remember sitting on my grandfather’s deck and watching the airplanes land at McGee Tyson Airport.  Watching them fly down and then disappear behind the Smoky Mountains held some mystical questions for me: Where are they going, what are they seeing and what makes them go there in the first place?  

When I was about 6 my grandfather retired and decided to go and travel the world one trip at a time.  It was always exciting for him to come home and give my cousins and I the money that he had acquired throughout his trips.  Holding those tangible metals answered the question of where people are going when they fly but it brought a new desire to use the money! I wondered what it was like to speak the language so you could use the currency and interact with the people there.

 So of course I talked about that to my family and my grandmother would bring out her National Geographic’s for me to read.  Reading the stories of people discovering new animals, lost cultures and the history of where they had visited was fascinating to me.  It also answered the question of what people were seeing when they traveled.  So I too couldn’t wait to go out and discover something new and different and tell the world.

As I got older my father and I had spent countless hours talking about ancient cultures, the peoples that created them and the literature that inspired them.  I studied history in college simply because I enjoyed going to class so much but it wasn’t enough.  And it wasn’t because even though I could tell you many different things about a culture’s history or its people I couldn’t tell you what it smelled like in their cities. Or how their food tasted.  Or what the night sky looked like there. 

Now I knew what the answer to the last question I had as a kid was.   Either go and follow your dream or don’t look in the mirror for the rest of your life.  So I swallowed my pride, came back home, went back to serving and started to plan how to move abroad.  It took a year but I finally got everything in order and am now living in South Korea, teaching English to young kids.  I am extremely excited about this and have decided to share the sights, smells and experiences I have here.  I also look forward to your comments and emails about improving the blog and sharing your own experiences living and traveling abroad!