Guatemala: Before

My first international trip was to Antigua, Guatemala my sophomore year of high school. Although I'd traveled before, those travels were all road trips to different states in the US. As interesting and culturally revealing as those in-country trips were, I was really looking forward to this particular trip because it was my first trip abroad. Even before I landed in Guatemala City, I experienced many differences between this trip and the traveling I had previously done. One of the first things that I experienced was simply the different atmosphere of the trip. I had always traveled with family members or friends on trips that weren't thousands of miles away. Furthermore, I had simply never traveled that far from home before. Those two aspects when combined with the more academic nature of this trip set a very different tone for me. This tone affected me because it felt a lot more serious than trips in the past. This seriousness was reflected in the differences in packing (with a passport carrier stowed on my person), the precautions we received about the country (not to drink out of the faucets), and the academic nature of this trip (we took Spanish lessons every morning at a local school). Despite these differences, I was still excited to go because it simply was an opportunity to see a different part of the world and to see just how little I knew about the world. With all of these things on my mind, I boarded the airplane with loads of excitement and mild trepidation, hoping for the best yet only having an inkling of how much this trip would change me. It was my first step outside the US, but more importantly it was my first major step into the the world of international travel and cross-cultural understanding. =^. .^=