Upon completing Gifting Travel 002 in April 2019, the GT team was in search of their next candidate for GT 003. We really wanted to include The Collective in Gifting Travel so we developed a process where members of the Collective could nominate people for future GT trips. As soon as we announced a call for candidate nominations, we started receiving your emails!
In May, we received an email nomination from Collective member Julieth, a young woman from Bogota, Colombia who was nominating her friend Andres. Julieth explained that of all the people she’d met in her life, Andres was the most passionate about travelling. He is “always talking about travelling and making plans to travel but due to the money, it is not possible.” What made Julieth’s nomination so interesting was her description of Andres’ passion for learning new languages. We wanted to find out more so we got in touch with Andres to learn about his love of languages and find out where he’s always wanted to travel.
Andres was born in the coastal Colombian region of Planeta Rica. From a young age he was inspired to learn more about different cultures around the world. This interest brought him to Colombia’s capital city, Bogota, where he enrolled in University to study Modern Languages. During his studies, he successfully learned Portuguese, English, and French. However, living in a large South American city never provided Andres a single opportunity to practice speaking French with a native speaker. He dreamed of the day he could sit in a Parisian café and spark up a conversation with a local.
When we Skyped Andres, we asked what it was about language that inspired him so much. He told us that understanding any language is the key to unlocking everything about a new culture: the food, the history, and the art. Helping Andres practice his French language skills was something that we really wanted to support!
TC team members Graham and Veronica took off from Vancouver to pick up Andres in Bogota and take him to Paris for a week in October 2019!