Why I love travel, even if it hurts my spelling

It was early, but that didn't keep my phone from ringing.

"Oui, âllo?" I replied.

*incomprehensible*

"Oui, âllo?" I repeated.

*incomprehensible*

I just couldn't understand, so I hung up, with the consolation of a "Désolée."

My phone rang again.

"It's your brother!" came the exasperated voice. Ah! English. What a novel thought.

I'm amazed at how adaptable human beings are. After a few weeks making errors on my AZERTY French keyboard, which I have grown to despise, I decided to break out my laptop. The warm, comforting womb of the keyboard I have to come to know and love?

Hardly. Muddling through the AZERTY world of Abidjan has slowly and quietly retrained my fingers' instincts. As a result, the QWERTY keyboard has become to be quite the winding qwze, if you will.

Both these experiences remind me of the timeless French film l'Auberge Espagnole (if you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it). After spending a few months in Barcelona, the Frenchman dreams that he has lost his mother tongue and can only speak Spanish.

This is a common experience when you're in a new place. You want to take in and learn about this new culture and you gradually adapt to the speed of life, the gestures, the habits, the language.

But, whether you like it or not you are still different. For one, you identify with where you came from and you don't want to lose that part of yourself. Soccer's great and I'm loving getting my ass kicked and making a fool out of myself with the neighborhood kid but boy do I miss going to baseball games. You better believe my patriotism comes out, especially when Wednesday's game against Algeria comes along. You should've heard me waxing poetic about the resilience of American when we came back to tie and almost beat Slovenia after falling behind 2-0.

Second, even if you take up their language, you're still different because you have access to luxuries and safety nets that set you apart While I'm riding in a the shared taxis, if we get into an accident, my health insurance will evacuate me. The passenger next to me will most likely have to stand in line at an overcrowded hospital, if they can even afford it.

Still, what I love most about travelling is not the process dividing the world into the quaint things that are different than known universe I will return to. Think AZERTY vs. QWERTY, language or the transportation network of your destination.

Instead, it's experiencing the different answers to universal human questions that keeps me coming. What do we value? What are our priorities? How to we treat money? How do we treat the people we know? What about strangers? And perhaps most importantly, we're hungry, what culinary solution do we find?

The diverse world we live in has produced a lot of different answers to these questions, and I know, set aside the World Cup jingoism for a second, that we can learn a lot from each other.

I'm proud that people in the US apologize for being 5 minutes late, especially when there's important stuff to do. But, there is something to taking the time for the people around you, even if it means you'll show up elsewhere late. I can't count the number of times I've been running late for a class and crossed paths with a good friend I'd been wanting to sees for a long time. A smile, a handshake and a quick look at my watch and I was on my way. I'm not sure how proud I am of that and if that, and whether that really represents what I value.

Being out of my comfort zone in a place where time, keyboards and relationships are treated differently helps me question and reassess the home I think I know. One of my favorite quotes puts it better than I ever could:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot

Exploring this world isn't just a matter of learning about others. It's about learning about ourselves.