While seniors plan to leave Lake Zurich as the school year comes to a close, one girl plans to not only leave LZ, but leave the country.

Imagine a calm and relaxing place with unique islands and beaches. Rocks come out of the water, not even looking real. The cool water is so blue and the temperature reaches over 100 degrees.

This relaxing place is Thailand, and along with Bali and Japan, Sydney Mathis, senior, has been able to travel to these places and more with her family by her side. Experiencing events like island hopping, seeing orangutans in Borneo (an island in Asia), visiting huge temples, or swimming with baby elephants, Mathis has learned a lot from her world travels.

“If [my family and I] go that far away, we do not just like to stay in a hotel,”  Mathis said. “ For Thailand we stayed in Bangkok, which is a big city because we like to see how the city is different there. Then we stayed a couple nights in the mountains and we got to see temples and monks and that was just really interesting, We try to learn about the places we go to. It is not just ‘take the picture,’ we try to talk to people and meet new people.”

To learn more about the places she goes, Mathis visits unique and well-known landmarks, like the temples in Thailand.

“Thailand were big on these temples; there are around 40,000 temples in Thailand alone and they are just absolutely gorgeous. They are a Buddhist country so they have these huge temples with these giant statues of Buddha in them,” Mathis said.  “You have to take your shoes off anywhere you go; you are not allowed to wear shorts; you are not allowed to wear tank tops and you have to wear these wraps. It is just very cool and totally different. Everything is gold too, so it is just beautiful.  Everything just shines in Thailand.”

Although Mathis has traveled to places like London, Belgium, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Singapore, and Tanzania, her favorite place was Thailand, and not just because of the temples.

“In Thailand we got to swim with elephants, which was pretty cool. That was probably my favorite [activity]. They were baby elephants and they were rescued,” Mathis said. “The place we went to takes in elephants that have been trained in circuses and that is a really bad place for them to live, so they take them in and take care of them. We got to swim with them in this little pond, it was like a little pool. They literally acted like dogs, it was the funniest thing ever. They just rolled around in the water and it was so cute.”

Along with experiencing new adventures like swimming with elephants, Mathis has tried a variety of exotic cuisine.

“I’ll always try the food where we go, but I really hate the food in Japan. It was nasty, I tried everything, but I can not do raw fish,” Mathis said. “Everything kind of smells like fish even if it is not fish. It is just not my thing, but Thai food I would try everything because it was just so good. I recommend Thai food [because] the food in Thailand is amazing. It is like Pad Thai [stir fry noodle dish] and spicy food like that. There’s always different coconut food and these sweet [dishes made] with coconut. Everything is always homemade.”

Not only has traveling helped Mathis gain new insights, experiences, and cultures, but it also allowed her to determine what she wants to do in the future.

“I definitely want to work internationally [in] international medicine,” Mathis said. “I’m going into pre-med at University of Miami. They have a lot of programs where they will take pre-med students to work in Chile or work in Ecuador and I would work in clinics and help me learn Spanish more. I think because of traveling I figured out what I want to do.”

Mathis plans to work with Doctors Without Borders, a program for doctors that provide aid in around 60 countries. Mathis’ decision to travel the world while helping others comes as no surprise to Paige Savarese, senior and long time friend of Mathis, because Savarese knows how travel has affected her throughout her life.

“Obviously [travelling] makes her more socially aware because she has seen so many different cultures,” Savarese said, “but also this has been a good aspect of determining what she wants to do with the rest of her life. She had that fire lit under her butt really early, but she’s always been that way.”

But if she does settle down, Mathis says it will not be in the U.S.

“I never been to South America,” Mathis said. “I would like to go to Brazil, like Rio is pretty high on my list, if I can get out there. We were trying to go to Rio instead of Thailand, but people were getting sick with that Zika virus and I was like, ‘No thank you!’. But we have some friends who live in Rio so I would like to go visit them.”

While Mathis has used her worldly travels to benefit herself by indulging into new and different foods, cultures, and experiences, she has along the way discovered her true calling for travel.
“I hope I will live internationally. I definitely want to spend at least a year in a different country,” Mathis said. “I will probably live in Europe because I love it there, but I could even live in a city in Thailand, or even like Bali or someplace cool. I will just be like ‘See ya’. I could see it.”