TIGTM #6: Globetrotting

Perhaps one of the greatest privileges I have come to know as a result of living and working in Doha is the extent to which I have been able to travel to far and distant lands I never imagined I would be visiting in my lifetime (or at least as a young adult fresh out of college). Before coming moving here, I'd done a good bit of traveling in Europe, some on my own some with family and friends, but I had never traveled farther East than Prague and had never been in the Southern Hemisphere. That quickly changed as my first Eid break trip (middle of October after having lived here for only a few months) was to India. Looking back at that trip is somewhat entertaining for me for several reasons. India was my first introduction to the developing world and anybody who has spent time in India will tell you it's a pretty hard slap to the face. It threw me into culture shock pretty quickly and I was definitely ready to leave the place a week later. On the other hand, everything else I've experienced since India has seemed like a breeze in comparison. So while India was difficult for me to deal with as my first non-Western country to visit (other than Qatar of course), it prepared me quite well to experience pretty much every other place I visited thereafter.

And since moving here, I've added no less than 19 countries to my "been there" list, bringing the grand total to exactly 30 (a complete list is in the right column of this blog). I've added 24 extra pages in my passport, only 6 of which now remain without some sort of stamp or sticker. Most of those pages are littered with stamps from the UAE (I have been there about 2 dozen times as a result of playing rugby tournaments there 5 times per season) and Qatar (from going in and out). The back of my passport has an enormous sticker on it that was used to put it through the Qatar Foundation/CMUQ immigration process and it also has staple marks from having to attach my Exit Permit (literally a little piece of paper that says I'm allowed to leave the country). And it's been abused to say the least.

But all that's going to change. In a few short weeks I'm going to be a poor, US-inhabiting graduate student and my hopes and dreams of continuing this type of globetrotting lifestyle are going to come crashing to a hault. There are still plenty of countries on my list of places I want to visit, but I'll just have to suffice to visit them when I have the time and money to travel again. Hey... who know? Maybe I'll need to do some research next summer in one of them :)