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Erik Michielsen: What have you found most rewarding about traveling to new places?
Audrey Parker: I find that traveling to new places and experiencing new things just reminds
us all that we can have new eyes when we look at things, a new perspective. And for the
6 weeks abroad that my husband and I enjoyed last fall, just really having the freshness
of perspective to see that people's lives are lived in all different ways, in all different
languages, in all different cultures, and it helps free up any of the, you know, everyone
does it this way, I have to do it this way kind of things that just run in the background
of our minds that we don't necessarily pay attention to. It's just like, well, this is
how everybody does it, and when I -- when we got the opportunity to travel and look
around and see not everybody does this like this, not everybody eats like this or goes
to work with the same attitude or for the same purposes or lives the same lifestyle,
there's just -- there are so many new things to see and travelling is just an opportunity
to have perspective on our own lives and learn anything and everything that we didn't even
know is out there to learn. You can go to a new place and before you know it, you're
learning things about that place that make it special and unique, and it has you realize
the special and unique things where you live, where -- it was amazing just to come home.
We started seeing our home -- our hometown, Austin, Texas with new eyes. And really comparing
it to other cities and countries and just saying, "We really have a new appreciation
for where we live." Seeing the quirks and the culture and the flavor and the things
that for us are like home for us, and yet they are very different to other cultures.
Other people of other places would come here and point out all sorts of things that they
thought were different or interesting and to us it's life -- it feels home, so it brought
an expanded perspective to us of how other people live and a new appreciation for how
we live here and just the fact that we love where we live and we love the culture and
the people, and it really could be -- all those things could be very, very different.