Mistakes While Traveling

As I look back at my experience abroad almost a month after, I cannot help but laugh at some of my own cultural mess-ups I made. As a human it is impossible to not make mistakes, however, going abroad certainly makes the chances of certain mistakes more probable. Despite all my learning it is quite easy to mess up, even if it is something small.

I would say the biggest “mistake” I made was inside a little souvenir shop in Cambridge. While wandering about, looking at the various sweaters and college merchandise, I spotted a bicycle bell. It was a different design that I had never seen before and curiosity quickly took hold of me. I wanted to figure out how it worked compared to the one I had as a kid. So without thinking I reached over and rang it. It was much louder than I expected and I quickly hit it, to make the ringing stop. However a man peacefully shopping looked over at me angrily and shook his head. Of course, this experience wasn’t a damper on my day or something that was extremely detrimental. My friend and I walked out of the shop giggling and it was a funny memory; but I could tell I had definitely broken some sort of social expectation in that shop, and I was not going to do it again.

Another silly mistake was when I rode the buses with my friend. The really cool, red, double-decker ones. On our first day we wanted to sit up at the top, what tourist doesn't? However, both of us were concerned about missing our stop. When a bus reached a location it only stopped for what felt like a few seconds, and would start moving as soon as everyone was done loading/unloading. So we decided to go down the stairs as soon as the bus doors shut on the stop before ours. Very quickly we realized we had a while to go still until our stop, but the bus driver noticed we were standing at the base of the stairs and assumed we wanted off. He stopped the bus and shooed us out. The driver did not speak very good English so we were struggling to communicate with him as he was ushering us off. Luckily the walk was not too much longer, but boy was it awkward to walk down the street directly next to the bus for a couple blocks! After that experience we learned to get up from our seats only once our bus stop was in view.

These are of course only some of the mistakes I made. There were multiple times I messed things up, just little things done wrong; and there were probably even more times I made a mistake that I didn’t even realize was one! At the end of the day one thing I certainly learned is mistakes are great learning experiences, and there is nothing wrong with making them! Mistakes were probably one of the main ways I learned about the local culture of an area, other than my classes taught by a British professor.

If you take away anything from this blog let it be this: mistakes are how you learn and experience the culture around you. So put yourself into the slightly nerve wracking or uncomfortable situations, the worst thing that can happen is you learn something!