Take Time for Meaningful Gap Year
May 7th, 2009 Posted in Gap Year IdeasWho says gap year is only for taking a time out before plunging yourself into college or when you are burnt out from work. Sometimes gap year can be also a time to heal broken hearts. To pick up the pieces of a broken heart or perhaps broken dreams.
Anybody who wanted to go into gap year should consider a few things before starting into travel. The first thing that a gapper should do before embarking on this activity is planning. Sad to say that most gappers just go through the experience without any thought at all. Some just booked in an expensive gap year travel without thought o the financial responsibility that goes with it. At the end, they found themselves saddled with loans even before they start for college.
If you wanted a meaningful gap year travel, go to a place that does not speak your language or any language that you speak. If you speak English perhaps you go to places like Thailand, China, or some European countries. It is time to go into a society in which they could give a fresh start on your gap year. For once, go somewhere that you could be yourself with out prejudgment on what you can do and not do.
Seek for a gap year that you can have a person to person contact with the locals. In this way you learn directly from them; and I assure you a local can teach you so many things and can open your mind to so many ideas and realities.
For example, go for gap year in a farm land in Thailand or Philippines where you will see first hand the realities of the situation and culture that exist right there. Or visit a native tribe in the middle of a country and try to experience for yourself the culture that exists only there.
A gap year travel should be a journey to penetrating cultures not known to us. Cultures that can not be read in any book but truly exists.