My parents both loved to travel. My father was a pilot and he taught my mother to fly. She was the first pilot to earn her license by taking the check ride in Sweet Grass County. Prior to her earning of there private pilot’s license, students took their check rides in Billings or Bozeman. In her case an examiner pilot was visiting our home town and she was able to take her flying examination from our home airport. Together they traveled in their own airplanes. They also took a lot of trips on airlines. After my father died, my mother continued to travel, checking her bike as luggage to tour in China, the Philippines, Shri Lanka, New England and other places.

Susan and I share that love of travel. After we had been married for a year, we moved to Chicago. That move involved a three-day road trip in the days of 55 mile-per-hour speed limits. We celebrated our 5th anniversary in Europe, touring with my parents and a sister and her husband. We have had the good fortune to travel with our children to many places over the years, including family vacations in Chicago, Washington, DC, and San Francisco among other places. In 2006 a Lily Endowment grant enabled our entire family to spend time in Australia. Susan and I have had the good fortune to make trips to England and Japan to visit our daughter and son-in-law when they lived in those places. One of our priorities for our retirement is to travel some more.

We may, however, be at or even a bit past the end of the time when travel is easy and convenient. As prices rise and the world begins its turn away from fossil fuels airline travel will continue to become more expensive, less convenient, and less common. International trips may become beyond our financial reach in the coming years. Covid accelerated the replacement of business travel with Internet meetings.

While there are wonderful benefits of living in a time where travel is relatively inexpensive and readily available, our time has also brought out some of the negative effects of globalization. Languages that have been spoken for thousands of years are being lost as new generations learn to speak the languages of large countries. Cultural distinctions begin to fade in favor of global standards and norms.

Today marks the official end of one of the joyful and fun differences in how people in the world count their age. South Korea officially adopts the international standard method of counting a person’s age with legislation that goes into affect today. Korea has two age-counting methods that are different from the international standard. Traditional age-counting methods were also used by other East Asian countries, but South Korea has been slow to abandon those systems. Japan adopted the international standard in 1950. North Korea followed suit in the 1980’s. And now South Korea continues that trend.

Previously the most widely used method to calculate a person’s age in Korea was known as the “Korean age” system. In that system a person turns one at birth, acknowledging the development of a child in their mother’s womb. After birth each person gains a year on new year’s day. That means that a baby born on December 31 is considered to be two years old the next day.

A separate “counting age” system, shared with other Asian countries, considers a person zero at birth and adds a year on 1 January. A baby born on January 1 and a baby born on December 31 of the same year will be considered to be the same age under that system, even though the former is nearly a year older than the latter.

The system caused a lot of confusion over retirement dates, insurance pay-outs, eligibility for government assistance programs, and certain age-based activities such as alcohol consumption and age of consent.

It makes sense that South Korea is making the shift to the international standard. On the other hand, I’m glad I lived in a time when the differences still existed. We have a nephew who married a woman from South Korea and learned of the different age counting systems from her. Having her presence added to the diversity of our family in delightful ways and we learned a bit of her cultural history.

As we become more and more connected, some of the differences between people disappear.

Of course, we have not lost all cultural differences in the giant cultural melting pot of international travel, media, and connections. We will continue to enjoy learning about the differences of our siblings in other parts of the world, dancing with our African family members and picking up our chopsticks to eat the foods our Japanese family introduced to us.

As English continues to increase its spread across the globe as a common language, we persist in speaking it with an ever-widening range of accents. There are more English speakers whose first languages were Cantonese or Mandarin than those who speak English as a first language. Diversity is not disappearing.

In the years to come, however, we may be using our computers to immerse ourselves in other cultures in place of traveling to distant places as often. Of course decreasing travel will happen to us regardless of the world’s response to climate crisis. The natural limitations of aging will hold us closer to home. Travel will become increasingly difficult as we face the limitations of our energy and physical abilities.

For now, however, we still dream and talk of travel. There are a few more big trips we’d love to take. We still have energy for an epic road trip or two. Our grandchildren need to visit some of our wonderful national parks and we are eager to take them. They have passports and we live very close to an International boundary. Adventure is near at hand.

When we do travel, no one will be confused at our ages. We each add one year on the anniversary of our birth and use the same system of counting.