Those at Viator who voted in the 2012 election showing off the stickers

Today was my last day at Viator, Inc. It’s a travel company that helps people research and purchase tours & activities in hundreds of travel destinations all over the world for the lowest price, guaranteed. I worked there for a year and a half and thought I’d go over some of the highlights of my time there:

The opportunity to get to learn so much more about the world we live in has been incredible. I’ve always been interested in travel and learning about other cultures, but I cannot imagine that I would have ever learned half the things I did about other places in the world if I hadn’t worked there. My knowledge of geography has increased exponentially. Being an overachiever, I had to map out the entire world when I was 12, but it only included all the countries, states/provinces, and their capitals. I’m now familiar with regions of countries, and non-capital cities of countries, and what the climate is like in those regions, what kinds of things people do there, what the popular attractions are, etc. My head is bursting with this knowledge about our world, and I love that.

I’ve also now seen thousands of pictures of places, people, food, animals, etc from all over the world and it’s given me a greater appreciation of just how much beauty you can find wherever you travel. A “downside” of this is that it’s also increased the list of places that I’d like to see in person to a overwhelming amount. The list of other countries that I wanted to travel to used to be only 2 or 3. It’s now gotten so long that I have had to make priority, secondary, and tertiary lists.

I’ve also gotten to meet many new people from other countries and be around so many different languages on a daily basis. Again, I loved that. One of my French coworkers would Skype me in French, and occasionally talk to me in French, because she knew that I wanted to brush up on the language. I regularly made a fool of myself to my Asian coworkers demonstrating the Japanese I know from watching so much anime when I was younger, but they seemed to get a big kick out of it. My coworkers were constantly traveling for both business and pleasure and everyone would always bring back some kind of treat from the place they visited. I now have an addiction to tim-tams, which come from Australia.

More of a perk than a bonus, a highlight was getting to experience things in San Francisco with Viator on company outings that I normally wouldn’t have otherwise. Some of our trips included: wine tasting tour through Napa Valley, cruising around the bay during Fleet Week, and going on a hop-on/hop-off bus through part of the city while getting the “real” commentary since we are locals.

And last, another highlight was the company’s official colors being bright orange and bright blue. It might be silly, but I couldn’t help but smile on a regular basis at the orange and blue walls in the Viator’s San Francisco office. I will miss those walls.