Hey, I’m Stuart Coates. I’m from Portland, Oregon which already says a lot about me.
I’ll be out of school soon and don’t know what I want to do with my life. We’re at a day and age that I don’t have to choose to be a doctor or a lawyer and do that for the rest of my existence. I’m not sure I want a career. I just want to try as many things and do as many things as I can.
My current plan is to work a lot in the summer and get enough money. To go somewhere really awesome in the fall. Ideally to volunteer or work in another country for at least a few months.
This won’t be my first time leaving the country though. The day after Christmas 2006, my mom, my sister and I left to work in an orphanage in a rural part of central Vietnam. Yeah. Wow. Keep in mind that this was pretty much the first time I had travelled period. I’d been to Washington and California and knew nothing about the world let alone anything beyond the west coast. What started as a 2 month humanitarian venture, ended up turning into a 7 month long, unforgettable amazing experience. We got to the point that we were looking at houses and figuring out what I was going to do for high school. As great of a place it was, there were things we couldnt just forget about back in the U.S., specifically friends and family.
In the summer of 2009, we were lucky enough to be able to go back and do the same thing we had been doing towards the end of our first trip, which was living in a dorm room while my mom taught English at Hong Duc University in Thanh Hoa, Vietnam (about 85 miles/137 km away from the capitol city Hanoi). In addition to revistiting all of our favorite places and seeing our old friends, we got to see a ton of other new and exciting things. Our 2 week journey back to the states was what I imagined a typical tourist experience to be. We took a plane to Bangkok, Thailand, took a boat to the island of Koh Samui (which was the true Vacation part of this trip) then took a train to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, spent a day there and flew to Tokyo, Japan. In comparison to Vietnam, we had hardly learned anything about any of the countries’ culture or what they really had to offer. It was great to be able to experience Southeast Asian culture outside of Vietnam and I would have loved to stay at each of the locations longer then we had, but we had to get back to school. In fact, we headed back to school a mere 2 days after we got back. The jet lag strangely never set in so it was pretty easy to readjust. The greatest thing about being back actually, was being able to ask my friends “What did you do for the last 2 weeks?”
In conclusion, If all goes according to plan I’ll be doing some travelling on my own this fall. It’s going to be really strange being by myself, but I’ve made so many connections while travelling that it seems no matter where I decide to go, there’s always going to be someone to point me in the right direction. Travelling had done so much for me, so let this be the beginning of something great.
