The Role Of Travelling In My Cultural Awareness Improvement

My cultural awareness shifts and improves every time when I meet new people. The best way to improve cultural awareness and intelligence is for me to travel and explore. During session 3, I understood that culture can be defined as behavior, thus human behavior can be changed and adapt.

My cultural awareness has being changing over time passes. Since when we were kids, my family always used to look forward to travel every time when we had the chance to explore and my father always used to say to us traveling is not about just seeing new things and staying at fancy hotels. It is about learning different cultures and how people think, work and live together but also to get out of your comfort zone. Thanks to my family I’ve traveled 11 different countries and explored more than 20 major cities. There was a many times when I was in a cultural shock, but the more I traveled the more I understood each cultures. I believe traveling opened my eyes to appreciate what I have right now, instead of wishing something different. For example, when I came to British Columbia during the rainy seasons for the first time, I started to appreciate the sunny days back in my country. Even it is cold and snowy we always had the clear blue sky. In other words, I became more grateful of what I have right now in my life.

My cultural awareness stands on two points, which is about being patient and respectful. In my opinion being patient comes first and being respectful comes second. Patience is the most important practice towards different cultures. Patience comes first when you encounter different people with diverse cultures and then being respectful comes second. Because if we don’t have the patience, then trying to understand and respect someone can easily become a conflict if you don’t have enough patience. Therefore traveling and exploring is my biggest goal to sharpen my knowledge on cultural intelligence and awareness.

Another important factor for cultural awareness is now definitely influenced through technology. As for example, according to the Cultural Intelligence: Living and Working text book, with the age of information and technology we are being globalized rapidly and it is one of the main forces of globalization. We know what is happening in the other countries instantly just in a seconds with the help of technology and that makes us more open and aware. Since Mongolia is democratic country we were open to any news Medias but also social Medias like Facebook or Instagram. Those tools helped me to understand learn new cultures without even traveling there. With the help of technology, our global village has the ability to make a global communication.