Well, reading back over all of those old e-mails from my undergraduate days certainly was enlightening, in a bizarre way. What struck me the most as I typed them all in to this blog was just how young and immature I really was, and I didn't even realize it. So much of my writing was about how much I partied and how many times I went out on the town, with apparently very little cultural insight or appreciation of all the travel I was so unbelievably fortunate to undertake. I noticed that by the second time I studied abroad, during my semester in Hong Kong, I had already begun to pay more attention to cultural differences and the really fascinating things about traveling, but I was still quite the party animal and that definitely continued to dominate the narrative. It wasn't until my sojourn to South Africa that it seems I really grasped the idea that travel was about more than just drinking and going out. There are valuable things to be learned and experienced everywhere we go. It can probably be attributed more to the fact that my South Africa journals were meant to be read by my professor (as opposed to the earlier e-mails sent to friends back in the US) rather than to some sudden leap in maturity. Still though, it's interesting.
