When I look back on the amount of travel I’ve done over the years, I realize that the majority of my globe trotting was done in developing countries. I’ve done most of South East Asia, I’ve done some of greater Asia, and I’ve done a significant chunk of Southern Africa. Though all of these places have very little similarities in the their culture, they all share some very similar struggles. Many of them don’t have access to clean drinking water, or proper health care, a decent education, or even the means to come and go from their place of birth. These are all things, that as a Canadian, I’ve never had to experience. I live in a fairly upper-middle class city, with one of the top colleges in the country just a few minutes away, I can drink the water from most lakes and rivers here, and my healthcare system is pretty topnotch, even when compared to other industrial nations in the world. And when I travel to these less developed places, it truly does make me appreciate what I have even more, and admire those individuals that survive on so much less.

That sense of humbleness and gratefulness is not something that the Europeans know very much about, at least, it seems that way. I don’t want this to be a total bash-fest on European travelers, but I’ve now seen enough that I feel like I can make some pretty accurate observations, and come to some pretty disturbing conclusions!

For the last ten days, I’ve been traveling throughout Spain. It has been one of the most fascinating trips I’ve ever taken, but it has also been one of the most difficult. I’ve never really spent much time in Europe, because it’s incredibly expensive, and I’ve always opted to travel somewhere where I could experience entirely different cultures. It’s August here in Europe, and it’s tourist season. Most European countries are on their summer or school holidays, and like us North Americans, that’s when they like to grab the family and go on a trip. First of all, let me discourage you from even considering to travel to Europe in August, because it’s pure chaos, and European tourists, from what I can see, are really quite grumpy!

They manage to complain about a number of things that, as a Canadian, I couldn’t imagine complaining about. They complain when there isn’t enough ashtrays around on the patio tables (oh yes, did I mention that Europe has a love affair with smoking? Still!), they complain about the food, they complain about their accommodation, they complain when their luggage doesn’t come out fast enough. And then, they strut around the city in what seems to be the most vile of moods! For what reason, I have no idea, but in my head I’m thinking, why can’t we all just be grateful?

Spain is a developed country. It has clean drinking water in most parts. It has an incredible infrastructure, and a system of roads and highways that rival what we have back home. There are some places in the world where the main road is nothing more than a dirt strip! What’s more, the Spanish speak multiple languages, so for a European, it’s a much easier place to travel than say, China, where you might find hints of English here and there, but certainly not fluently. So there we have it. A country with all of the amenities needed in life, yet we still find reasons to complain about it!

Hey everyone, welcome back to First World Problems! Now that you’ve had a chance to get a feel for what this blog is all about, and you’ve probably read my first post, did you spend anytime wondering what sort of issues come up in your own life that might make you laugh at yourself for making such a big deal of it? No? Well that’s okay, because I came up with several, but there is one particular issue that seems to keep rearing it’s big ugly head over and over again.

June is the beginning of wedding season for me. No, I’m not a wedding planner, and no, I’m not getting married myself, but it seems to be the month that all of my friends choose to get married in. I don’t know what it is. It’s almost as if they all call each other up say, ‘hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we all planned our weddings in the same two week window?’ Very funny guys, just for that, I’m going to plan my wedding during Christmas! Anyway, there is really nothing fundamentally wrong with the month of June, it’s a lovely month. The weather begins to improve, people start taking their summer vacations, it’s great. But the problem that I run into is not having anything to wear.

Now, if you’re a guy reading this, you’re probably rolling your eyes right at this very moment. How many times in your life have you heard the women in your life moan and groan about not having something to wear? It’s probably more times you can count right? And realistically, is all the moaning and groaning justified? Unless you are a Ju’hoansi bush woman, living in the deserts of Namibia, of course it isn’t true. Most North American women have more clothing than they know what to do with, and then some. Yet, we will point blank, walk up to our bursting closets, flip a few hangers (many of which probably still have the tags on them), and the words will actually fall out of our mouths; I have nothing to wear.

The question than becomes, how much clothing do we really need? I mean, most of us work a nine to five right? There are tons of exceptions of course, like someone like me who works pretty much whatever hours of the day that I want, being a freelance writer has those kinds of advantages. But if you’re going to work five days a week, ultimately, all you really need is five different outfits, at most, right? And if you travel to underdeveloped parts of the world, some people only have one or two outfits to wear for most of their life. And the only time they might add an outfit to their repertoire is if someone is getting married, or there is a funeral, and in that case, people will often borrow clothing from their friends or family if it’s possible. So why is it in the developed world, we need twenty-seven different outfit options in a one week period?

Well the answer is we don’t, but clothing and fashion is a way of self-expression. You may be someone who has an accounting degree and works in a pretty sterile environment, but if you can rock up to work in a psychedelic tie or a different pair of shoes every week for a year, somehow, you feel a little less bland. And honestly, there is nothing wrong with wanting to look and feel different, but standing in front of a closet that has most likely cost you what a down payment on a house would be, you really don’t get to stand there and complain that you have nothing to wear!

This is a bit of a quirky blog, and it was inspired by a recent trip I took with a very close girlfriend of mine. We’ve been friends for over seventeen years, and though we’d been through thick and thin with each other, we’d never actually travelled together. So after what has felt like the most harrowing year so far, we decided to pack it in, throw caution to the wind, abandon our responsibilities and take off to the sun and surf. Cuba baby! We had a wonderful, adventure-filled trip. We spent our days lazing around on sugary sand beaches, and our nights drinking rum and dancing until the sun came up. It was my girlfriend’s first time to the island, so I made sure we got out of the resort to see some of the beautiful sites the island had to offer, and when we finally touched down at home, before our plane had even taxied to the gate, she looked at me and exclaimed, “So, when are we going back?”. I laughed, relieved and elated that she loved it so much. And while our trip was seamless, little did we know that there was trouble on the horizon.

We both went to our respective homes that evening, and like I always do, I practically tore the memory card out of my fancy camera and started uploading the hundreds of photos I had snapped. I shrieked with delight as photo after photo came into view. They were perfect, and it would seem that my six week long photography course had paid off, whew! I sat there for hours, reliving all of our crazy moments. But I was still missing all of the photos from my girlfriend’s camera, and like clockwork, she arrived later on in the evening and handed me her drive so I could download all of her photos. After a little less than twenty minutes, the two of us were looking at each other as if we’d seen a ghost. I looked at her and finally said, “Ummm, we’re missing like 150 photos!” We were actually missing photos from an entire city that we had spent a day wandering through, and what was worse, is that because I hadn’t goaded anyone into taking photos of me with my own camera, I had but a handful of photographs of myself. I was devastated, but no more than my poor girlfriend. She went home in tears that night, and spent the better part of an evening searching her memory card, her laptop, and her desktop computer to see if she had downloaded them in the wrong place, but it was to no avail.

After feeling understandably bummed out for a couple of days, she sent me a text message: “You know what, it’s awful, but it’s really just another one of those first world problems”. In that moment, I had a bright epiphany. She was so right. I just had the privilege of sightseeing around a country where most people don’t even have cameras. And the only photos that they have of themselves is their government issued identification. They have children, but unlike North Americans who have entire libraries of their children’s photos, these people don’t have a single photo. Things were quickly brought into perspective. My girlfriend could afford to go back and visit, even on my menial writer’s wage and her administrative assistant salary, salaries that were 25 times that of the average Cuban. We didn’t need photos, we had our wonderful memories. And though photos are a lovely memento, they can never replace the real experience. Losing photos on a card is just another first world problem!