Intrepidity

Welcome to my travel blog where I hope to write about the things I see and think during my trip through Europe. I'll be backpacking through 30 cities over the course of 8 weeks, riding the rails, and staying in hostels the entire way. Why am I doing this? I've just finished a lifetime of education, gotten a graduate degree, and yet I find myself in an awkward position: I know nothing about most of the world. How could this have happened? My head has been filled with theory and obscure knowledge, but without any experience in what is really out there right now. Especially being part of the Daily Show generation, I have a very U.S.-centric view of the world, and paradoxically a California-bred scorn of our government and bureaucracy in general. But if you had asked me two weeks ago to tell you what country Geneva is in, or what is the capital of Austria, or to point out Berlin on a map, I wouldn't have been able to do so.

But what does this matter to people like us, with the knowledge of the world at our fingertips? Mark Twain said it best,

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

See what I did there? I referenced Mark Twain, to make it seem like I am intimately familiar with his works. But I am not. I only read Tom Sawyer because I had to for a book report, and otherwise I would have happily left him in the hands of those passionate for American literature. I don't read Mark Twain because I have little acquaintance, and therefore little respect, with the cultural past. How can I when I can't even keep up with what's going on today?
Well that's what this trip is about: seeing the cultural history of the world--or at least of a large important portion of the world. And meeting new people and eating good food and experiencing the life and all that good stuff too, or course. I want to live more in a day on this trip than I would in a week at home. See you all when I get back.