Sea : My Reading Journey

If we talk about travel guide-books, I guess some of you might think of a book with information of a specific place, maybe a country or city. Actually, there are more details such as the place's background, culture, sightseeing, restaurants and activities. Travel guide-books usually present pictures along with the content. As I am a person who does not get used to reading the entire page filled with text and imagining what the text has described, the travel guide fits me and can keep my attention during my free time.

When I was in high school, my best friend told me about her trip in Tokyo along with showing the pictures from the travel guide-book. I was attracted to the story when she talked about Tokyo Disney Sea, the theme park Disney created only for Tokyo. As a big fan of Disney cartoons, I slowly turned the pages, looked at the pictures closely and imagined along. Later on, my friend let me borrow the book. It was the first time that I got to know the travel guide-book.

Being a single child and the only kid in the family, my family does not travel a lot during the year. We commonly went to the beach once a year when my cousins came to visit. Other than that, I just stayed at home. Reading the travel guide-book made me feel like I had been to many places around the world and wondered if I could visit there in the future. After finishing high school, I entered university,  choosing an architecture major. Studying in the architecture field has changed my view of architecture. I learn more about aesthetics in architecture and details that people normally might not be able to notice. I have also found new friends who love to travel. My new chapter of life began there.  I used the travel guide books to plan a trip with my friends. We took trips around Thailand. We hopped on a bus after class to visit temples around Bangkok. Until this day, we usually take a trip together every year in October.

Today, since I finished college, I have worked as a site architect, an architect who works on construction sites. I have to work six days a week, so my free time is quite short. I feel that I cannot manage my time that much. I am always losing my time with social networks, scrolling through posts. Surprisingly the posts that I normally stop by and read are the posts about places, sometimes architecture, cities or restaurants. Besides reading the posts, I search for videos on YouTube. I like to watch the walk and talk vlogging style of video which makes it hard for me to get out of it.

Through the period of time, I have changed the tools for reading travel guides. The thing that stays the same is that I like to travel and explore new places. But with the stress from work and a lot of tasks to finish, I can leave from work for just a short period of time, about two to three days. I can rarely arrange my time to travel abroad. I hope that in the future new technologies might take me around to experience the world with my body in my room and still be able to go to work the next day.