A BYUH professor, alumna and student share how traveling and experiencing different cultures contribute to their identity
Traveling makes you more of who you already are... It’s imprinted on me in a way that it became a part of who I am.” - Rand Blimes
“You can’t really get to know the culture unless you are in the culture.” - Antoniette Yee-Liwanag
BYU–Hawaii ohana members shared tips about traveling the world and exploring new cultures, explaining it requires wisdom, patience, humility and respect.
Antoniette Yee-Liwanag, a BYUH alumna from the Philippines, said the culture she brought home with her from her travels is the culture she was able to develop within herself. “I learned to be open and flexible to changes and be more spontaneous, which makes traveling even more fun,” she shared. Yee-Liwanag said it is important to understand other people’s cultures, respect them and be patient because traveling is not easy. Traveling has a lot of twists and turns despite having well-planned activities, she added.
Jaime Liwanag, a senior majoring in social work from the Philippines and Yee-Liwanag’s husband, said he took parts of Brazilian culture to heart after his travels there. “People from Brazil are not scared to talk to anybody. If they want to talk to you, they will talk to you. They will ask you anything they are curious about,” he said.
Brazilians are not people pleasers, Liwanag continued, and if they are angry, they are angry.
Liwanag shared, “I saw it as a strength to be able to communicate with other people.” It was in Brazil he said he was able to develop an ease of communicating with others. “Brazilians are jolly people. Their vibe feels like they would start dancing anytime,” he added.
Dr. Rand Blimes, an associate professor in the Faculty of Business & Government, said he served his mission in northern Japan. As a missionary in his early 20s, he said Japanese culture was engraved on him in ways he was unaware of. He explained he and his wife have had miscommunications because he said something indirectly, which was how he would say it in Japanese. “It’s imprinted on me in a way that it became a part of who I am,” he continued.
Travel principles
Blimes said their family has two sayings they keep in mind when they are traveling. “Rule No. 1: Don’t do anything stupid. Assuming you follow that rule, then the second saying is everything always works out.” He continued as long as you use some judgment and be reasonable everything will always work out. “It’s an important skill to be able to forge ahead when you’re not 100 percent sure of what’s going on. That’s a skill that has helped me in a lot of things I’ve done in my life,” he shared.
“There’s a lot of skills you gain from traveling, especially [when visiting] places that are very different from where you are from,” said Blimes. Traveling is a long series of problem-solving exercises, he said, like how to get to a specific place, how to order a meal or how to bargain for a cheaper price. “It gets you really used to functioning under conditions of uncertainty. You never quite know what’s happening,” he added.
Blimes said he and his wife visited a city in Peru called Iquitos last summer. He said they wanted to visit a rehabilitation center for monkeys that were legally kept as pets, which was located in the Amazon River. “There was a dock where the boats left from. We went there, but it was chaotic,” said Blimes.
They asked around for help but some people did not know what they were talking about and some people “said things that were too much Spanish and I didn’t understand,” he continued.
Eventually, Blimes said a person walking by heard what they were looking for and signaled them to come with him. “We followed them and they pointed to a boat,” he said. “We got on the boat, and we waited for half an hour until people filled up all the way.” Although they weren’t 100 percent sure the boat was going where they were hoping to, it did, he continued.
Liwanag said he and his wife have now focused their travels on immersing themselves in the culture as if they were a part of the community. “Traveling does not have to be expensive,” said Yee-Liwanag. She said most of their travels were low-cost. “It’s not fancy, it’s not expensive because we travel smart,” she added. Liwanag explained instead of booking hotels and eating at restaurants, they stay at hostels, eat in local eateries and take public transportation.
Yee-Liwanag said people should not wait for their retirement to start traveling. She explained she and her husband might not have accomplished the hike to Machu Picchu if they had gone later when they were older.
Blimes said students should explore the world if they want to. He said the best advice he could give to someone who wants to see the world but is scared is to “just do it and start somewhere easy.”
Yee-Liwanag agreed, sharing, “Be open to opportunities for you to travel and explore the world because there’s more out there. The world is so wide. There’s a lot of cultures that we can adopt.” Traveling deepened their relationship as a married couple, she said. Liwanag said they learned from the lives of those they interacted with, especially their challenges.
“Traveling also taught us how to be understanding and humble,” said Liwanag. He said no matter how a person looks, what they eat or their state of living, people must respect them and understand them.
After Liwanag’s graduation, he said he plans to create social media content focusing on how to travel in an affordable way. “It is a way for us to explore and experience the different cultures around the world and share it with others,” he continued.
The beauty of exploring
Liwanag said his passion to travel and explore the world started when he was 16 years old. He said he was part of a non-profit organization based in Hawaii called iHELP. This organization sends media photographers and videographers to visit different places in the Philippines, he explained.
Liwanag said a volunteer named James Astle, who is also a BYUH alumnus, got sent to his country, the Philippines, to do humanitarian work with him. Liwanag said he and Astle would visit remote places where they stayed at the homes of iHELP volunteers. “We would eat the food they offer, wear the clothes we are given and do anything they asked us to do,” he continued.
Liwanag said the experiences he had with iHELP and the exposure to the culture of the places they visited helped him decide what kind of traveling he wanted to do in the future. “It was not like the traditional way where the hotel is booked, a car is rented and all the activities are planned,” he explained.
Blimes’ passion for travel began when he was 10 years old, he said. As a child, he said he sat down with encyclopedias, some travel magazines and a globe. “I started making a list of all the places that I wanted to travel to. After about two hours, I just quit because I realized I was making a list of everywhere,” he shared. Blimes said he is still working to find the true reason behind his love for traveling.
Before she got married, Yee-Liwanag said she didn’t like traveling because she wasn’t into adventures and thought it was too expensive. But once her husband introduced her to traveling, “That’s when it all started,” she said. Yee-Liwanag said being immersed in the country’s culture is what she loves most about traveling. “You can’t really get to know the culture unless you are in the culture,” she added.
More than traveling
Blimes said when you are traveling, you interact with people who are different from you in many ways and learn about their history, culture and food. He said, “What comes up time and time again is that the ways they’re different are actually pretty superficial. We’re really kind of the same.”
Blimes said the more he travels, the more he feels connected to others. He said we have connections within our community and with the people in our own culture, but traveling helps people see the bigger picture.“I’m part of something really big. I feel the human connection as a whole rather than just people who are around me,” he explained.
People tend to think traveling opens them up, breaks down their biases and makes them more accepting of cultures different from their own, said Blimes. However, if they look at research about traveling, Blimes said they will discover that is not necessarily true. “Traveling doesn’t fundamentally change who you are. Traveling makes you more of who you already are,” said Blimes.