Two Different Worlds

Two Different Worlds

People learn to know the value of a place when you move away from it, learn to distinguish different types of life and choose to be in the place that best suits them. Every time I travel, I get to see the world in all its aspects. Now that I have traveled many times between Peru and the United States, I can see the differences with the two countries. For a traveler, you may find it easier to differentiate between a life in a South American country as Peru and a life in the United States of America. Someone who has been in these two countries may realize that they have so many differences that make each other interesting. We know that United States is a world power while Peru is a third world country that is not as modern as the USA or has its employment rate as high as the USA. Even though, life in these two countries are different realities, since my first trip out of Peru to the United States, I realized that the two are very different yet beautiful countries to know and live. They shaped my personality and the person who I am today.

When I was in Peru, I was in a private school. My mother had a very good job that allowed her to pay two hundred soles per month, which is like eighty dollars per month for a school education. I was in a very small school with a maximum of three hundred students, I almost knew every student at my school. I had a lot of friends and the classes were easy. I could understand every class because it was in my first language, Spanish, and I was taking English as a foreign language class. I was a very famous student with the teachers; almost all of them knew my name, recognized my face and knew how good student I was. They knew me so well that if my grades were going down, they would be concerned and they would be talking to me about that. I was a friendly and happy student of which the school life wasn't causing any stress at all.

Strangely, my school life started to stress me when I started high school in United States. I went to a huge high school with more than five hundred students, where I barely knew anyone and where making friends wasn't easy because I was another ESOL student whose conversations weren't interesting at all for American people. The classes were harder because of the language. It is always difficult to take classes in a different language than your own, you will always miss something that the teacher said or you may not understand some important details. I couldn't say that the teachers didn't know me; they did because it was easy to remember me for being the shortest person in the class but they didn't remember me for being a good student until the semester ended and they could realize that my grades improved. Although I was a friendly person, it wasn't noticed in my American high school. I was a very shy person who had just five or six friends. I was concerned about my grades more than ever so I decided to get a good GPA prior to graduating. Sometimes I wanted to go back to Peru and finish high school there, but in the end I finished my high school in the United States, even though it gave me more stress than ever but it was worth it.

While I was living in Peru, having a car never was a necessity. In Lima, which is the capital of Peru, is very easy to go from one place to another. I could walk for hours and never get tired of it. If I needed something I could just walk to the store or to the mall because everything is so close that nobody really needs a car. Besides, having a car sometimes may be dangerous, not all houses in Peru have garages; therefore people park their cars in the streets making it easy for the thieves to steal. Lima is a very big city so busses and taxies are everywhere, causing all the pollution that Peruvian citizens face every day. However, it was easier for me to take a taxi than to drive myself. It was easier to go to an event and take a taxi to go home instead of driving home during late night hours with the concern that the police may pull me over. In fact, the freedom to do things in my way was one reason that I loved Lima.

I was very shocked once I realized that I couldn't just walk to go anywhere in Atlanta. I felt like a handicapped person who couldn't use her own legs to go somewhere. I was fifteen years old and I wasn't old enough to get a permit to drive. If I wanted to go to the movies, mall or just to the store, I needed my mother or someone else to take me there. Not going somewhere by my own means made me feel frustrated. I am the kind of person who can't be in a place for too long because I get bored easily. After some months I tried to allow myself to live in that way so that I was