ICYMI: What Does it Mean to Travel “Home?”
ICYMI: What Does it Mean to Travel “Home?”
S5E85: How it feels to finally visit your “heritage” country.
Almost half of people living in Toronto are immigrants.
This means that many people in this city have roots in another country, and another culture. And as Canada continues to grow, this will be the case for many folks across the country.
For immigrants, and the generations that follow them, traveling “home” can be a special experience. I know from my own experience that traveling to a country that is part of your heritage can be incredibly exciting.
When I went to the Netherlands, the country my Oma and Opa immigrated from in the 1950s, I was overwhelmed with a feeling that I haven’t felt traveling anywhere else.
There was a sense of familiarity because of the environment my parents fostered at home. In the Netherlands, Dutch words were familiar, the foods were familiar, the traditions were familiar. And of course, I was welcomed by many relatives who knew me, my mom, my Oma and Opa, and they were able to share with me stories about my family.
Traveling back to The Netherlands is always an idyllic experience for me. But for others, there’s a range of emotion, learning, and conflicted feelings when traveling back to a place that their parents, grandparents, or generations even further behind fled, or left by choice.
When I became an adult and started realizing that I missed out on a lot of my Filipino culture growing up, there's no one to blame for it. Like my mom literally came from the Philippines was trying to like survive and provide for a family.
Leah, LA in Flight // Ticket 2 Anywhere
On a recent episode, we unpacked what it means to travel home with Leah from the Ticket 2 Anywhere podcast. Leah is a slow traveler who has lived, worked, and taught throughout South American & Australia and visited the Philippines for the first time in March 2020.
She helped us answer questions like:
How does a connection to another country influence your life growing up in the US?
How does it feel to finally visit your “heritage” country?
Does your American identity change when you finally go to your motherland?
Listen now:
Find the transcript here.
Don’t miss these resources:
For Black Americans, a Heritage Trip to West Africa Can Be Life-changing:
What it’s like for Black American’s to travel ancestral homelands like Benin, Ghana, and Togo. Read it.
Generation status: Canadian-born children of immigrants:
The 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) provides data that allow the analysis of the Canadian population on the basis of generation status. Read it.
More from Ticket 2 Anywhere: Should You Tag That Location?
Do we have a responsibility as humans to protect places? Do we have a responsibility as travel creators to share the wealth? Can you do both at the same time? Watch it.
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Let’s all alpaca our bags safely and soon,
Erin & Kattie
