You know you’re on the World Race when…
1. You wake up in the morning and question what country you’re in
2. You refuse to leave your “home” without toilet paper, a water bottle full of clean water, and your bible
(because you always end up stuck waiting for something)
3. You go days without showering and no one around you finds that odd
4. You recognize people by their clothes and get confused when someone buys something new
5. You get excited when someone tells you that you have dandruff because that means the itching isn’t
lice
6. You’re so used to cramming an obscene amount of people in every vehicle that you think you’re missing
someone when you end up with your own seat
7. You speak Spanish in Romania and Russian in Mozambique
8. You say something like “look here comes the man who lives in our kitchen!”
9. You walk in a bathroom and excitedly yell “they have actual toilets!”
10. You go an entire month without going inside a building or opening an actual door (we slept in tents,
worked outside, and our bathrooms had curtains for doors)
11. You hitchhike with 12 other people in the bed of a very small truck and don’t think a thing of it
12. You step foot on 4 different countries in under 48 hours
13. You have the same amount of money to eat in a day as the people in America pay for one gallon of
gas
14. Riding a bus for 12 hours is considered a really short travel day
15. You are so used to people taking your picture that you automatically smile when someone points a
camera at you regardless of if you’ve ever seen them before or not
16. You use words/phrases like “feedback,” “prefer,” “walking in freedom,” “sons and daughters” on a
ridiculously regular basis
17. Someone says something clever and you all yell “ooo, blog title!”
18. Going to McDonalds or KFC is considered a special treat because it tastes like America
19. You don’t even realize when there’s hot water in a shower because you’re so used to not having it,
you don’t even turn the other knob
20. You are a pro at using a squatty potty
21. You French braid your hair and leave it in for multiple days because you think it looks less dirty that
way
22. You always throw away your toilet paper
23. It’s normal to brush your teeth with water from your water bottle
24. You cook, wash dirty dishes, do your laundry AND eat out of the same buckets
25. You get excited for airplane food
26. You’re at church and the translator says “take your shield of faith and use it like a roof so you can be
protected from angry birds.” I’m hoping that one was lost in translation
27. You start a conversation with “when are we going to start working?” and it ends with you learning
the Creole word for giraffe
28. You are so used to barking dogs and car alarms that you automatically drown them out
29. You hop in a car with someone you’ve never met before, who doesn’t speak any English all because
your contact who you met the day before tells you to and you don’t think anything of it
30. You get really good at refilling your mini toothpaste because it’s the only one you can bring on the
airplane with you
31. You start referring to the US currency as USD
32. You refer to the United States and the States and talk about them like they are from a distant memory
33. You tend to hoard toilet paper and can tell what country each tp is from because they’re all different
colors
34. You smell better going a week without showering than you would bucket showering because the only
water smells like sulfur (aka rotten eggs)
35. You see a mouse run between your feet at a café and you don’t scream or even flinch because ‘it’s
just normal”
36. You go at least seven months without ever seeing a dryer
37. All shopping decisions are made solely on how much more you can shove in your pack
38. You watch foreign soap operas with or without subtitles
39. You own a headlamp and know where it is at all times because you never know when the power will go
out
40. You see ants crawling on your food and you just brush them off and continue eating like nothing was
ever there
41. You automatically give certain foods to certain people without asking because you know what they like
42. You drink more coke in 11 months than you have in your entire life
43. You forget what it’s like to be truly alone
44. You spend 6 hours straight in a fast food restaurant just so you can use their internet
45. You learn to order food by walking around the restaurant and pointing at what you want
46. You refer to the months of the year by what country you were in
47. A 36 hour train ride seems like no big deal
48. You’re so used to people not speaking English that you perfect the art of charades
49. You go 11 months without ever knowing what the next day holds or even the next hour
50. You live in the same room as 17 other people, sharing one bathroom and after living there for 30 days
the bar of soap sitting next to the sink is the same one that was there the day you arrived
