yougruesomehare

i loved traveling i learned so much, i didn't go to school until 7th grade, but when i did i tested into advanced math, and held my own in my other classes (except for science, but as soon as i got a laptop and discovered bill nye and carl sagan that was remedied).

I feel like grade school is more for learning social skills than academic ones, and that i did have a problem with when i returned to a typical american school. I had grown accustomed to only talking to backpackers around 18-28 and local kids, so it was hard for me to get used to american kids my age. While traveling i met refugee kids, street kids from every country, one 9 year old Tibetan kid who's mom died giving birth to his little brother while they escaped China and was fucking raising his brother with the help of his older brother. And yet, i never met any kids as unhappy, insecure, and straight mean as American public school kids. It was hard getting used to them. But by the time highschool came along i had found my stride and have had a pretty successful time of it. Just got into my top two college choices with nice fat merit scholarships (a lot of which is due to the fact i traveled so much).

So do i wish i had experienced a more typical american childhood? Noooooope :)

edit: added some juice

i never went without a meal, i always had a mattress to sleep on, i got to experience the world, those are pretty good living conditions for most of the world.

As a clarifier for that story, it was a very fancy restaurant. My mom and I were both really excited about the idea of eating fancy western food again, i mean the food in asia was amazing, we had the money to go buy a brautwurst on the corner but we had a terrible craving for fancy food, so we figured: why not give it a shot?

and the only time i had self esteem issues was dealing with public school kids in America. I met refugee kids, street kids from every country, one 9 year old Tibetan kid who's mom died giving birth to his little brother while they escaped China and was fucking raising his brother with the help of his older brother. And i never met any kids as unhappy and straight mean as American public school kids.

who say's he doesn't already?

made my night.

oooh boy!

it was a magical place:

We were in Laos, taking a busses from town to town, when late at night we arrived at this town that kind of looked like it would fit in in an old western movie. I was exhausted so i fell asleep the second we got into our hotel. When i woke up i walked downstairs and the first thing i saw was this: everyone was eating pizza, the television was playing "friends". It turned out that there were ten "pizza cafe's" all playing different seasons of friends 24/7 and serving exclusively pizza!

To top it off there was a body of water that sort of circled the town, so you could get in a tube and float around, take a nap, whatever and not worry about getting lost. On the shore there were all these contraptions for jumping, and swinging, and zip-lining into the water, and there was always a party going on full of awesome people i could just get out of the water and talk to, they taught me how to hacky sack, play volley ball, ping pong, and the words to a lot of snoop dog songs.

We were only supposed to stay there for a night, but we ended up staying for a week. Holy fuck i watched so much Friends.