With all those great global strangers, we won’t feel disappointed, we are not alone in the fresh places, we appreciate the bigger, better world.
In recent months, I traveled overseas to participate in book fairs and open-minded trade shows, met numerous great strangers who helped me out, from showing directions to lifting luggage to providing local “treats & tricks.” We all belong to the global society, no matter where we live, who we are, and what we do, people enjoy helping others, that is humanity.
The majority of cities I visited are world famous metropolitan areas in which people are nice, polite, well educated, and make global tourists like myself feel warm and welcomed in varying places. Those global strangers are diverse and dynamic, same and different, we barely know their name, who they are, what they do, but they all offer some help which make my world trip more enjoyable and impressive.
Help to point out directions: Nowadays, the world is so hyper-connected and interdependent, digital technology brings unprecedented convenience to how we work and live. Although my smartphone maps can navigate some directions for me, quite a lot of details are not so clear. So I have to ask, and I enjoy asking those global strangers. Almost all of them do their best to help out. I try to recognize local residents through “anthropological sense.” Many of them take out their smartphones. navigate through and show me the directions. They take such efforts very seriously, and they also seem to feel happy about doing so.
As I barely know the phone area code in many regions, lady strangers help me call the hotels, ask further about directions, and gentleman strangers are also warm-hearted, helping to show the way. Sometimes, on the road, if the person I asked couldn’t figure out immediately, other strangers overheard the conversation, participated in conversations and helped further, or followed up, ensuring I am heading in the right direction, taking the right bus/train, or getting to the right entrance. A few of them even drove me to the hotels or train stations.
Help to lift luggage: There are complex and advanced subway systems in the regions I visited in Asia and Europe. In smaller stations, there are only stairs, no elevators. People offer help for lifting my luggage, that would also help a lot, make the trip more easy-going, make me light-hearted, and appreciate the new places.
When you immerse yourselves into the dynamic and diverse crowd here and there, you feel you are part of an advanced global society, you are not alone, you are moving forward, opening your mind, exploring the surroundings, to feel the pulse of a modern world with all those great strangers.
Provide local “Treat & Tricks”: Not all information you fetched from the internet is accurate, quite lots of them are outdated. That’s why you have to ask if things are not going smoothly. Great global strangers provide you their local “treat”, avoid “tricks,” warm you up.
From introducing a good restaurant to recommending a beautiful place to visit, sometimes it goes beyond your expectation, you feel more like a local person, and make your trip more fulfilling.
The world has become much more complex and smaller all at once. A global trip is an adventure, opening our eyes to a spectrum of things with so many different shades and colors of the same world; expanding our vision of society, cultural diversity, and people dynamism. With all those great global strangers, we won’t feel disappointed, we are not alone in the fresh places, we appreciate the bigger, better world. We gain confidence about the human society as a whole, we are advancing humanity progressively.
