I didn’t really start to travel abroad until my 20s when I decided to travel the world and see all the countries I had endlessly seen and read in magazines and TV programs. My time spent traveling gave me experiences I never even expected to have – I met new friends, skydived in New Zealand, traveled on the Trans-Siberian train through Russia, taught English in China and not to mention all the weird and wonderful sites, food and amazing sunsets and sunrises from all points of the world.
Then came an opportunity to move to Norway – the small, cold, beautiful Scandinavian country with a population of around 5 million people. Despite traveling to many different countries, up until this point, doing so was always temporary – a feeling of enjoying the present moment because at some point it will end and I’ll be home and back to normal life.
You Are Exposed To A New Lifestyle
Moving anywhere away from your home creates a mixture of excitement and fear. My past traveling experiences gave me some confidence about what to expect but I was surprised and challenged in ways I never even thought about.
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When you live in the comfort of your home country, living around the people you’ve known all your life, you can sometimes be stuck and never really realize it. Moving away showed me just how stuck in life I was and opened my eyes to a bigger picture. Adapting to a new lifestyle showed me a different side to life. For example, Norwegian life revolves around the cold winters and it was nothing I had ever really experienced before. It took a while to get used to the -20 degree temperatures but experiencing extremes like that and making them part of my everyday life taught me to adapt to something outside of my comfort zone. I will never complain about the cold again – in fact I’ve learned to embrace and make the most of it!
The culture can be very different from your own even if it doesn’t seem like it from the outside. TheNorwegian culture is deep-rooted in nature, its language and its mindset. When I moved to this country full of beautiful fjords, mountains and lakes, with the opportunity to see the amazing Northern Lights whenever I stepped out of my front door, it wasn’t just the sheer natural wonder of the country but the way in which Norwegians embrace it and make it an intrinsic part of their lives.
Taking in a new culture adds a different dimension to you, it allows you to be more open and accepting of how other people do things and it lets you see a different side to life. I spent more time in nature than I ever had before, I ate food I’d never heard of and I took on their customs, their manners and their language. It’s not until you live in a new country that your ideas, ways of doing things and perspectives can really change.
