(Robin is fighting a cold, so she’s asked me to fill in for tonight’s post. She’ll be posting tomorrow from Heathrow, in between our two flights.)

Prime Minister Imre Nagy, keeping a watchful eye on Parliament

The bags are packed, the last of the “funny money” has been spent, and we’re in from our last European excursion. In too few hours we’ll be getting up and heading for the airport, to begin the long journey home. It’s been an amazing trip and I don’t think I would change much about it, but in some sense I also think we’re ready to come home. I told Robin earlier that I’m starting to understand why people take pictures. You see people that look at their whole trip through their point-and-shoot’s LCD screen, and they miss the beauty all around them. I tried diligently to not take too many pictures, but rather to be in the moment; now I hope that I’ve taken enough, not just to share, but to help us remember all that we’ve seen and experienced. Right now the past three weeks feels much like a dream — hazy and a little incoherent, but punctuated by some crystal clear moments. I think it will be a few weeks more before we can really say what we think of the whole experience, and the pictures will help with that.

In a couple more days I’ll be back at work, and of course everyone is going to ask about my trip. Right now I don’t know what I’m going to tell them. Even those of you who have been keeping up with this blog are only getting little snippets and our initial impressions of our experiences. How do I summarize the past three weeks into a few sentences short enough to be appropriate for casual conversation? I want people to know that they need to do this: go to other countries, talk with their people, get a different perspective, and learn about the world beyond our shores. We’ve learned so much culture and history on this trip, that I dont know know we would have learned any other way. For example, tomorrow Robin’s going to talk about who was the catalyst for the fall of the Berlin Wall (spoiler: it wasn’t the Americans).

We live in a world where the availability of information necessitates a lot of filtering before it reaches us. There’s nothing wrong with that — there’s simply too much information to assimilate without any filtering. However, there’s also benefit to sometimes trying out someone else’s filters, and the best way to do that is travel. See the places where historical events occurred. Talk with people who have a passionate opinion on what happened, maybe even because they lived through it, or at least have lived with the effects.

I hope that every one takes the opportunity to travel abroad. It’s an eye opening and sometimes humbling experience, and I think I’m a better person for having done this.

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