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Writer's pictureMathias Hanssen

Foreword

After almost 3 months in this beautiful country, I am finally finding the time and space to write about my journey thus far. And what a wild ride these months have been - for all of us, honestly. A global pandemic was the last thing many of us expected. And now reinvigorated protests for Black Lives Matter and against police brutality sweep the world.


These are certainly tumultuous times, so I have to take a second to recognize my privilege and honest-to-God blind luck. If it weren't for the sacrifices and selflessness of my parents (thank you, Mom and Dad!), I would not have had this opportunity to travel to arguably one of the safest countries in the world right now. And if I had chose literally any other country to travel to, bar maybe Vietnam or South Korea, I would have been screwed.


I certainly did my best to meet my parents halfway by working hard through school, and continuing that work ethic through my first desk job. But many marginalized people work a whole lot fucking harder than I do. Unfortunately, my privilege is not only rooted in my economic class, but also my skin color and heritage. I can't say that I have met many African Americans in my travels through Europe or New Zealand. That's not to say "African Americans do not travel internationally", but from my experiences they are far and few between. As a white male growing up in a middle class family, I never truly had to worry about providing for my family or for my basic needs. Travel is much more accessible when life at home is safe and "easy". Having close and welcoming family in Norway also gave me exposure to travel as a child - an opportunity that not many people get.


One of the reasons I wanted to start a blog is to be able to share my travel stories privately and in-depth with the people I genuinely care about. Originally, I was motivated to do this because of my disdain for the psychology of social media. However, with the resurgence of BLM protests, many people have been using Facebook and Instagram to share helpful resources and stories from/for the protests to further this movement. Helpful resources, I might add, that have enabled me to be involved in this movement even from overseas. Because of this, I feel it would be inappropriate to be sharing my travel stories - in which I am clearly exerting my privilege - on these more public platforms.


At the end of the day, I am not even sure many people will read this, and I take solace in that. This will be like a open journal for me; available to the ones I care about should they want to read and available to me to reminisce about my experiences.



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