HI's Youth Exchange Program: Spend two weeks in France, all costs paid!

Want to spend two weeks in France, all expenses paid, with a group of fun people from around the world?? Read on...

A lot of people ask me how I started my crazy world traveling. The truth is that I grew up very sheltered like a lot of other people. I had very open-minded parents and that helped a lot. But they didn't know a lot about these types of things. The opportunities were things that I just jumped on, and lucked out with the rest of it.

One of the opportunities that started it all off was my youth hostelling experience at 22. I was a young, inexperienced traveler; all my life, I'd read and been very taken with British literature (I come from an ex-colonial country and it still has significant remnants of colonialism). So my sister and I went to England for a month, with our bookbags as our backpacks, newspaper articles as our guides, and a couple hundred dollars in our pockets. We stayed at youth hostels, particularly the ones run by Hostelling International (HI). They opened my world up. I met people from all over and exchanged stories. I got traveling tips, made friends, and became a travel addict. It all started there.

A year later, I got a wind of their wonderful exchange programs and did one to France. I'm still in touch with the people I met then. I've visited them, they've visited me. We're all family. It was wonderful, and just bolstered my travel itch.

Now I want you to have that experience too. HI's France exchange program just opened up. APPLY, APPLY, APPLY! Spend two weeks in France, ALL costs paid. Just FYI, you must be between 18-23 years of age. So spread the word...