Spaces & Exchanges: What drives people to leave their country to go and live in another country ?

Spaces and exchanges

Intro :

        I’m going to talk about « spaces and exchanges » so I would like to define this notion. Spaces means continents, countries, cities, districts any places in the world. Exchanges refers to immigration, people, trade, information and travel. We will focus on the travel’s aspect of Spaces and Exchanges. So we can ask the following question ; What drives people to leave their country to go and live in another country ? In my first part i’m going to talk about the searching different reasons why people go and in my second part I will try to proove that the travel is not only the fact of physically leaving a country.

        On the one hand, we all know that travel is a big part of everybody’s life. Travel means such a lot of things that we couldn’t give a real and precise definition of this therm. May travel mean escape of our country. A lot of facts come into play in the idea of going away of a country. Maybe we only want to leave for a little time, take the time to meet ourselves again or to recharge batteries but it can also represents the fact of chuking it all overnight to begin again everything. It can also be a missing in our lives, as a missing of recognition than a missing of selfconfidence that push us to take our bagages to live the life far away. We don’t necessarily need a goal because the search for reconstruction is much higher. If we take the control of our lives and if we take all the chances we have we can make everything possible. The travel can be a realization of a dream.

But sometimes, what drives us to leave and say goodbye to life without looking back isn’t a realization of a dream because we just want to escape from everyday life. To support this vision of the travel, I will focus on an extract of the movie« Into the wild » by Sean Penn directed in 2007.  The main character in this movie is Christopher McCandless.  Tired of the material consumer society, the domestic violence at his home and after a diner with his family which turns out badly, he decided to go away, without looking back, even burning dollar bills to prove that he will not need that. To start his new life, he even decided to change his name to « Alexander SuperTramp ». He started his trip by hitchhinking to proove he will be on his own. We know that Christopher McCandless doesn’t know too much where to begin and he quickly get lost, but we are sure that he wants to join Alaska. In the case of Christopher, his reasons to go out of his country are vasts and unfortunate. But Christopher is an example of the fact of not giving up our ideas.

The second document I will focus on is an extract of « Eat, pray, love » by Elizabeth gilbert to prove that the search for a destination isn’t required to accomplish what we want to do in life. Elizabet Gilbert, a journalist and short story writer, had just turned thirty when she went through a very difficult divorce that led to a debilitating depression. In her case, the reasons as disastrous as Christopher in into the wild because we know that her reasons are only to return to mental and physical health. Even if she travels a lot to get back in the saddle we realize through her book that she doesn’t pay any attention in a real destination because she wants to visit every country without any restraint. She really enjoyed travelling in Roma, Italy or India to discover new cultures, new people and new specialities but through these discoveries, she discovered a new part of herself. She says that she first wants to discover herself before discover any corner of the world. The self-seeking must pass before the research of a country. Meet people, make friends, build relationships and rebuild bad sides of the life are more important than the fact of travel. That’s what drives people to leave.

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