I used to watch "Orel i Reshka", memorizing cities, hotels, airports and trying to imagine what it would be like to one day end up there myself. Back then, most of these places existed for me much like movie sets: interesting to watch, but located somewhere in a completely different reality.
Later, I started watching episodes by Anton Ptushkin, one of the former hosts of that show. In one of his short videos about why one should travel at all, there was a phrase I remembered well:
Our Earth is a big communal apartment, where you need to get to know all the tenants.
At the time, it just sounded beautiful. Now, I think I have started to understand exactly what he meant.
Previously, the world seemed huge. America existed somewhere very far away, Europe was imagined as a set of beautiful cities, and many countries were just names on a map.
Now, distances feel different. A place on the other side of the ocean stops seeming so far away when you know what a regular morning looks like there, how much groceries cost and which bus takes you to the center.
Cities gradually turn from dots on a map into personal memories. Somewhere you remember a specific street, somewhere - a random conversation, and somewhere - peacocks calmly walking through someone else's yard.
In this sense, travel really does make the world smaller.
You realize that people living outside the borders are not some completely different beings. Everyone wants roughly the same things: to live normally, earn money, spend time with loved ones and not worry constantly about the future.
Languages, habits and rules change, but the people themselves do not differ from each other as much as it might seem from afar.
Only this big "communal apartment" has one more effect.
Getting to know the neighbors, you start to notice how differently life can be organized.
In one place, public transport works better. In another - the service. Somewhere there are more career opportunities, but it is almost impossible to live without a car. Somewhere cities are more convenient and peaceful, but prospects are noticeably fewer.
And then the world becomes bigger again.
As long as you know only one place, its rules seem natural. You can complain as much as you want about transport, bureaucracy or education, but somewhere deep down you still think: probably, it just cannot be any other way.
Travel destroys this illusion quite quickly.
You see that many things can indeed be organized differently. But at the same time, you notice that the ideal place does not exist. In every "room", there is its own renovation, and its own mess.
Over time, you start to mentally assemble your own ideal country: take transport from one place, service - from another, salaries - from a third, urban environment - from a fourth, and keep the people and the feeling of home from a fifth.
The only problem is that there is no such country on the map.
Perhaps that is why travel does not always provide answers. Sometimes, on the contrary, it complicates the choice. After traveling, it is harder to say where it is unequivocally better, but it is much easier to understand what exactly is important to you personally.
A strange paradox emerges.
When I watched "Orel i Reshka", the world seemed huge, but quite simple: there is your home and many distant places where you would like to go one day.
When you start traveling yourself, everything flips. The world seems to shrink around you, but your inner world expands significantly at the same time. Because dozens of options of how one can live at all appear before you.
And the phrase from a video I once watched no longer seems like just a beautiful ending to a travel vlog:
Travel. It is worth it.