Where will your next vacation be?

I was planning to give you guys a post today on how we can create new jobs and fix the economy, however, I haven't *quite* reached my conclusion yet... maybe next week!

In the meantime, let's talk about vacations. I think my next vacation will be to Spain - my one uncle turned 60 last year, and the other one will turn 60 this year, so we are getting together for a big family celebration. We all live in different countries, and Spain is roughly in the middle, so we're going there!

You'll notice that I have a little "progress meter" in the sidebar, and that one of my goals is saving up $2,000 to go to Spain. My uncle will pay for accommodations, so I figured I'd just need enough to buy my plane ticket, and then some spending money. Now, it's looking like I'll need all of my savings just to get there.

I always thought that when I had a full-time job, I'd be able to travel each year, but building it into a budget is tricky. I feel like I see a lot of other people traveling a ton. I think the key may be to just accept that if I want to travel, a significant percent of my monthly budget will need to go to saving up for various trips.

So where will I go? I speak some Spanish, so I would love to go to South America - especially Argentina. In Europe, I have already been to Italy once, but I would return every year if I could.

Sometimes countries advertise to get you to want to visit their countries. Like these ads for India:

Of course, a lot of countries have tourism as a major industry, so it's no surprise when their tourist attractions, or sometimes even the government, run ads to attract tourists from places like Atlanta. We have an "Incredible India" billboard that I drive by on my way to work each day.

What may surprise you is that a lot of countries put a lot of work into attracting immigrants to their countries (while we are building a wall to keep them out??). For example, many wealthy, educated, white South Africans were emigrating in the early 1990's. The government was changing in South Africa, and it was becoming a more expensive and dangerous place for those people. (That's one of many reasons people moved.)

Countries like New Zealand, which is not very populous, made it very clear to these people that they (and their skills) would be welcomed in New Zealand. (It's very small and rainy. But looks beautiful in Lord of the Rings. I want to go there too!!)

When I was living in Mexico, I met a Korean family, recently moved to the city from Korea. They spoke English, but told me that they were honestly surprised that they needed Spanish in Mexico. Apparently in Korea, they received a lot of advertising from the German government or perhaps private language schools, that made them think that German was quite widely spoken outside of Korea. Since no one was marketing Spanish classes to them, they figured that most people learned English like they did in Korea, and that Spanish wasn't really used much. It amazes me that they thought German was much more commonly spoken than Spanish, when of course, even in the U.S. where English is the official language, Spanish is very widely spoken.

Lesson 1: Advertising is a huge influence on us, and alters our perception of the world. It's good to be aware that your mental image of a place you have never visited is based on media, TV shows, etc, and could be very different from reality.

Lesson 2: Traveling also alters your perception of the world, hopefully towards a more realistic perception. You probably still won't perceive truly what a foreign country is like, since I've noticed a lot of people living in a new country tend to take their own experiences and generalize it to the whole country. (A language teacher I had kept insisting "You Americans have such huge houses!" - which is somewhat true, but seemed to blind her to the fact that just because SHE lives in a 5 bedroom house now that she lives here, everyone in the class she was teaching were students living in smaller, shared spaces.)

Where are you planning to travel in the next 5 years? Do you take annual trips? Small trips? Or do you save up to take a whole month to visit somewhere every few years? What is your favorite place you have visited on a holiday so far?