March 2014. I sat by the baggage check at the airport in the dead of night, my suitcase at my feet. Fear of the unknown had settled in the pit of my stomach, and yet somehow a glimmer of excitement fought its way to the surface. I was about to embark on the trip of a lifetime: a headfirst dive into the country of Costa Rica. Little did I know that this country would latch onto my heart and give me a deep love and respect for the Costa Rican people and the rich culture of Latin America.

When you first travel to a foreign country, you don’t think that it’s going to be a life changing experience. You think that you’re going to go there, ogle at the scenery, eat some good food, maybe meet some interesting people, and then come home and resume your normal life. To some extent, I did all those things in Costa Rica, but it was so much more than that.

While I was there with my group, we got a couple days to just sight see and be tourists, but then we became travelers. We stayed with host families, ate the food that the people there ate on a normal basis, explored the town, and experienced the way that the people lived. It gave us the opportunity to delve into a culture that was so different from our own. When you’re given the opportunity to experience another country in this fashion, you see the differences in culture, but you see them to be beautiful, valid, and well worth appreciating.

But perhaps more important than the differences between cultures is the similarities between the people. No matter where we come from and under what circumstances we live, we are all just people and we are so similar. We all laugh at the same things, cry at the same things, and love each other the same way.

I think that this is what makes travel the ultimate life changer; you find out that our separate cultures but similar values have the power to bring us together and make us all worth loving.