Thanks for getting to know me better!
I’m Jess, your Cultural Immersion Coach ready to help you go from tourist to traveler.
Cultural connections are the most important thing about traveling, and I’m here to help you remove any barriers between you and the culture of your destination.
We all crave that which is different from us, even if we don’t know it.
Growing up, I lived in a community that was not diverse, but that promoted diversity, cultural acceptance, and humanity above all.
At an early age, I was already seeking out the diversity that was lacking in my daily life.
Language was the most accessible cultural difference at the time. I spent nights in my room belting out Gloria Estefan and Selena songs in Spanish and Celine Dion songs in French, even though I didn’t know what they were saying, yet.
I somehow felt more connected to these bilingual singers than anyone else in my life.
To have two languages is to have two souls
Charlemagne said. And that’s what I wanted, too.
In middle and high school, I began my bilingual journey, studying French and Italian. Language was the only thing I liked. It was the only class I didn’t skip and the only one I always did all my homework for. I was a very introverted teen with low self esteem and no social life.
It was odd, then, that I elected to participate in a six-week exchange program where I would live with a family in Paris. This was the first extra curricular activity I’d ever done, and also the first time I’d ever be away from home.
After the French exchange, I repeated the experience in Florence, Italy, and made true friends and family.
The desire to travel can never be fully satiated, as we are always thinking of the next destination, the next adventure, the next cultural code we can crack.
I chased the dragon for years, returning to Italy multiple times and living there for a year in college.
When you have this type of experience, never look back.
Let it change you. Let it rip down everything you thought was true, and rebuild your views through new eyes.
Post-grad, I landed an Italian teacher job and began mimicking my cultural immersion experiences in the classroom. It was hard. Really freaking hard. Impossible, actually. So, I started to take my students abroad on tours.
The ah-ha moment: We were in Rome, at our umpteenth tourist attraction. My students were being shuffled around like game board pieces, and we were visiting so many cities that we weren’t really getting any opportunities for cultural connections. It was just too fast.
Ah-ha! Fast travel is not real travel. It is not eye opening, it is not profound, it is not humanitarian. It was time to make a huge change in the way I shuffled my students around countries. It was time to make an exchange program.
Success! Eyes were opened, profound experiences were made, and humanity was connected. My students made life-long friends and slow-traveled their way through cultural immersion. Instead of visiting three countries and ten cities in ten days, we stayed in the same place for two weeks.
After a decade of teaching and only being able to have one culturally immersive experience per year as a public school teacher, I decided that all I wanted to do was help people culturally immerse themselves through slow travel and love themselves through wander.
The Wander Word was born.
Here you can find all the tools you need to be able to connect with the culture of your destination and live like a local.
Travel is about your ability to create authentic experiences with natives as well as for locals to trust you enough to share those experiences with you.
