Thank you Saint Wenceslas

We had a long weekend on behalf of Saint Wenceslas, and I took full advantage of it. At the moment, I'm worrying about a broken computer, lost camera, and unplanned fall break, but the memories of this past weekend are keeping me smiling. It was wonderful.

Crazy as this sounds, the weekend sort-of started on Wednesday. My literature and place professor got us tickets to a jazz concert at the Polish embassy. Piotr Wylezol was playing with his trio. Since I have friends in both that class and the Polish class that also went, I ended up enjoying the concert with wonderful friends, buying the CD after, and (thanks to Byron) getting the musicians to autograph it.

We actually went out for pizza after the show and then had classes the next day, but the weekend-esque feeling continued because I went with some of the same friends to Wylezol's show that night at the Jazz dock. I was much more relaxed for this concert (because I hadn't just sprinted from another class or discovered that I was underdressed) and again really enjoyed the music. While we were there, however, one of my RAs was leading a club tour that some of my friends were on. Sooooo when the jazz was finished we went to meet up with the club tour group for the last stretch of their night. I always worry about going to such things; I just don't find drunk people to be much fun. I shouldn't have worried though. We found the small group in a Hawaiian bar dancing to 80s and 90s pop songs. The RA who was leading everything is such a fun person, and by that point in the night the people who were left were all people I'm friends with who were there to go dance with him. Even though the music wasn't quite as good as that from the beginning of the night, we still had a good time.

In case I haven't explained before, NYU organizes weekend trips for students at their abroad sites. Initially we are only allowed to sign up for two each, but there are waitlists for most trips and so far I've had a pretty easy time getting onto the ones I want. Including the Cesky Krumlov trip this past Friday and Saturday. Early the morning after the concert and club tour, we got on a bus and slept the whole way to the town. We woke up refreshed in beautiful Cesky Krumlov, ready for food and adventure. The school had organized a castle tour with a guide who took us into the old theater space, the hall of masks (check out the pictures), and the royal gardens. She was a very interesting guide because she shared her personal research and philosophies with us as well as explaining the history of each place.

NYU paid for dinner, which was nice, and then let us go explore for the night. We found our way into a gypsy bar (to be more politically correct, it was a bar with bands playing Roma folk music) where we enjoyed the music and local Eggenberg beer for a while. We strolled around for a bit after that, but I ended the night watching a friend skip stones across a stream before returning to the cute bright yellow room that Becca and I shared at our hostel.

Saturday we had a morning tour of the Eggenberg brewery and then took a few hours to explore. From the castle the day before, I had seen a building on a hill that looked intriguing. It turns out that it's this (the Chapel on the Mountain of the Cross). The chapel wasn't open, but the building, the view from the hill, and the joy of taking a walk with a friend outside of a city space all left me completely elated. The walk wasn't as long as it had originally looked, either, so we had time to return to town and spend time there too. We watched children folk dance and sing folk songs to celebrate the holiday. We ate sausage and drank Burcak, since it's still in season. We even met up with another friend and walked through the torture museum. That sort of thing isn't usually my cup of tea, but this one was so touristy enough to almost be humorous. And of course, all things are improved by the presence of good friends.

After that we got on the bus back to Prague, where we stayed just long enough to cook some pasta and do a load of laundry before heading back out. Brianna, Becca, Byron, Sam and I met at the train station and boarded a night train to Slovakia. Yup. As the rest of our program headed off for one and two day trips to Oktoberfest in Munich, we set out for the Lower Tatras at the suggestion of an RA friend who has family there. Her cousin's husband owns Penzion Baltazar in Liptovska Luzna and she suggested we stay there. The trip involved a restless sleep on a night train, some down time in Ruzomberok, and then a bus to the hostel itself. The weather was pretty bad so we didn't do too much our first night there. We had a home-cooked dinner with local ingredients, walked around the town, explored the church and cemetery, listened to the sheep's bells, and warmed up from the cold rainy day in a sauna. I have to confess, I fell asleep around 8 or 9 pm, exhausted but happy.

We got up pretty early the next day, had a breakfast that included home-made jam!!!!, and set out to hike the trail that our incredibly helpful host suggested. We climbed through fields, evergreen forests, and up the rocky trail to the top of a mountain. Even with the fog and rain, the views were stunning. Hopefully I'll be able to put pictures up soon. We returned to the Penzion for another warm dinner and an early night. The following day was the journey home and a celebration vegetarian dinner together, and suddenly I'm back on campus taking a German quiz and wondering where my architecture class is meeting today. What an adventure!

Mittwoch

This morning smelled of weed, construction dust, and a sickly sweet floral perfume...

The first is an inevitable consequence of filling out the room-mate preference form based on what I can tolerate living with rather than what I would ideally live with. Next semester, I'm putting that I have zero tolerance for smokers and for dirty kitchens. Learn from my mistakes...this is an important lesson if you're allowing your school to assign you room-mates.

The second smell has been a constant (and probably will continue to be) since we moved in here because the sidewalk outside our dorm building is in the process of being torn up. They're going about it very slowly...I hope they intend to put down a new one at some point.

The third smell overpowered my morning. In all of the "Czech survival phrase" lists I've read, I've never come across the phrase for "call an ambulance," nor have I come across the number that one would call in the case of an emergency. The phrase one would need is "Zavolejte ambulanci" and the emergency numbers are 112 for a general emergency or 155 for a medical emergency. Now you know.

This came up as I was talking to a friend and waiting for the morning tram to campus. As we were standing there, a girl fell to the ground between us. At first we thought she had just tripped, but then she started convulsing. We both knelt down, but she was having a seizure... I tried to keep her head off the concrete, and my friend yelled "Pomoc!" ('help'). We remembered that the number to call is 112, but we were worried that we wouldn't be able to do anything once we called because we don't speak Czech. Luckily, some other commuters waiting for the tram came up and were able to call. The ambulance came and we got on our tram, but the feeling of utter helplessness and the smell of that girl's perfume stuck to my ribs for hours after.

The day did get better. For my Literature and Place class we went to the Havel library to see an exhibit about his life and writings. The exhibit was small but comprehensive and well organized, run by the Havel Library. One funny typo was a tag on the robe Havel wore when receiving his honorary degree from NYU: it said that the robe and degree had both come from Long Island University. Not quite what you want to tell a bunch of NYU kids...

A rather amusing incident occurred at Tesco after class: the British kids in line behind us tried to take more plastic bags than the cashier allocated them. She gave them a death-glare and started rebuking them in Czech. Maybe I'd have felt bad if they hadn't been so obnoxious...but it's funny to remember figuring out the cultural nuances of grocery shopping (including the bring-your-own-bags thing) just a few weeks ago.

Back at the dorm, Becca decided we should have a Jewish-inspired dinner of latkes and applesauce. Yummm. Then Sam and I went to the basement to play with the television. Czech children's programs? Yes please!

On Being a Freshman

As if my college experience isn’t unusual enough, I’m also going to have two years of being a freshman. Sort of. Last year, I had to adapt to life in New York City. This semester, I’m starting over in a new place with new people and a completely different language. Next semester, I’ll be switching again. If being a freshman means being in a new situation and adapting to a new culture, I’ll be a freshman for two whole years before returning to NYC as a junior. At least that’s how I see it.

Here’s the thing: I’m learning that I can’t really tell people that thought. As soon as I say that I was a freshman last year, I get cut off. The other person usually makes some comment about my being a young’un or a baby or something of the sort. From then on, in all conversations following, any point that I make can be discredited with the simple phrase “You’ll see. You ARE just a freshman.” Are? Theoretically, yes, but theoretically so is everyone else here. Technically, no. I’m no longer a freshman academically.

In some ways, I hate freshmen. I lived in the largest freshmen dorm in the US for the entirety of last year, and it was terrible. Generally speaking (and very generally, of course) freshmen are crazy. They’re loud because they’re insecure. They drink too much, smoke too much, party too much…they’re crazy and irresponsible because they don’t know who or what they are. They’re adjusting to not having a curfew but having to do their own laundry, and they just don’t know what to do with themselves. Self-control and self-respect seem to disappear without parents and teachers around to impose standards externally; who could imagine setting standards for one’s self? Freshmen pull fire alarms at 3am because they realize they can. They date other people who live on their dorm floor and they throw up in the stairways. And they think they are entitled to be as rude as they want because they’re in college with the big kids at last.

Harsh, yes? Probably too harsh. That dorm last year just was not a good time…and those are some of my more general observations.

The thing is, in other ways I feel as if I want to perpetually be a freshman. I want to experience new places, struggle to figure out the unspoken social norms of new cultures, embarrass myself attempting to communicate in languages that I haven’t yet mastered. When you’re a freshman—in high school, college, grad school, the business world, anywhere—you feel the newness of miniscule details that others easily take for granted. Freshmen are the ones who are grateful for access to a real academic library, free lectures through the school, no bed-time, stories of bad ID photos. They mark the first time someone asks them for directions on the street, and they rejoice the first time they can give accurate directions confidently in response. Freshmen notice that having the WC and shower in separate rooms is a great idea when 5 people share a living space, that dogs run around without leashes, that 7am jackhammers outside your window are not cool, and that good friends are invaluable. The freshman that I am right now is delighted because an old man turned to me today because he saw the face I made when some obscenely drunk teenagers roared past us on the way to the metro. He started speaking to me in Czech; he reached out, having mistaken me for a reserved Czech like himself, so that we could be disapproving together. I wish so much that I spoke his language, but I’m so glad he gave me that moment and affirmed that I am slowly learning his culture.

Freshmen have nothing, so they reach out toward everything. It’s a child-like way to live. I read once (in “The Tao of Pooh” I think) that the goal of growing up is to become the wise child. To develop mature reasoning and sense of self without losing the ability to find joy in the nooks and crannies of the world. Tired of being discounted and patronized, I throw off the standard definition of the freshman (and really if we’re sticking to traditional terms I don’t fit that definition anyway). Shall I be a sophomore now? A “wise fool”? No. I’ll still be a freshman, but I’m doing it my way. And I’m totally at peace with that decision.

On Gratitude

“I hate these seats. They f—in’ suck. Now everyone is going to be staring at us the whole time.”

“Mom, did you really think I wouldn’t go shopping? Did you really think I wouldn’t travel? I’m spending MY money and budgeting. Why do you have to be so difficult?”

These are quotes from the only two times I’ve been disgusted since coming to Prague. I’ve been disturbed many times reading history texts and watching films…but I’ve been disgusted by the lack of gratitude boasted by some of my peers. And boasted loudly.

The first quote is from the student who sat behind me at the philharmonic. The school got us tickets to see the closing concert of the season (which was wonderful and which I’ll write about elsewhere) so we got to go for free. Our seats were behind the orchestra, so the view wasn’t the best if you wanted to see the musicians’ faces, but it was wonderful if you wanted to see the conductor’s face (which I did because I have never been in an orchestra and so never been in such a position before). Also, the music was wonderful no matter where you were sitting, and I feel like that is the reason one goes to an orchestra performance, after all. To be blunt, I couldn’t believe this individual was complaining about free tickets to a good performance…If she wanted better seats she should have bought her own ticket. On a side note, how arrogant do you have to be to think that everyone in the concert hall is going to be staring at you just because you’re behind the musicians? Ridiculous.

The second quote comes from a screaming match that a fellow student had with her mom over the phone. She was in another room, but we could hear her loud and clear. She’d gone on a shopping spree—using her mom’s credit card—and then booked her fall break trip—on her mom’s credit card—and now couldn’t understand why her mother was upset and calling her. She spent the summer traveling around Europe instead of working, is now studying in Prague, was entrusted with her mom’s credit card to use for necessary purchases… and couldn’t have called to say ‘Hey, thanks for sending me to Prague and letting me travel all summer. I’m planning a trip that will cost xxx dollars and was thinking of putting it on the card. Would that be ok?” How hard would that have been? Really? I know what it’s like to disagree with a parent, but no one deserves that much disrespect. It should be less ok to scream at someone who’s a family member, not more ok just because they’re stuck with you. If you’re going to be financially irresponsibly, then do it with your own money. And really your own money, not just the money you think is yours.

How could anyone in this program be anything but grateful? Grateful to have the opportunity to be here, grateful to their peers for their (English-speaking) company, grateful to their teachers for their time, grateful to their parents (or other family members) for supporting their choice to come…I’m grateful for my family, friends, and education. Sure there are times when life doesn’t go quite as planned, but what good does whining ever do? And honestly, I hope this is the only post in which I’ll have something to whine about.

First week of classes

Here's the rundown of my classes:
-Introduction to German Language
-Literature and Place of Central Europe
-History of Czech Architecture
-European Union and Central Europe in Transition
-The Art of Travel

The last one is my blogging class, so it doesn't have a meeting day. Which is really nice. My German language class is going to be interesting, and I really hope that it helps me prepare for Berlin. The Literature and Place class is absolutely amazing. My professor is amazing and I've been really enjoying the readings so far. My History of Architecture professor tends to jog around the city while lecturing so I have to run and listen very closely to keep up. But he knows everything. And my European Union and Central Europe class is an international relations class...I know nothing about anything related to it, but that's all the more reason to take it. Again, my professor is as knowledgeable as he is friendly. It's intense, and I'm grateful.

Of course, since we're still new to the city we're exploring. The school organized a Jam Session on Wednesday since all the music students are in the same dorm and there are many of them. I met up with friends there and got to hear Vladimir sing. An eerie thought: we were a room of Czech and American students singing Beatles music in a painted basement. 20 years ago, we could have all been arrested.

After the Jam Session we went to a music bar called Cross Club to admire their industrial-style decorations. Light fixtures made out of strawberry pots? I approve. Then Friday we found a place that made and served blueberry beer. We wandered all around Minor Town exploring and decided to come back the next day.

So we did. Saturday we visited the monastic library in Charles Castle. I paid the extra $2 for photo permission and the pictures are here. We also explored some gardens, found wild lavender, ate yummy Asian food... Then we wandered back to Old Town. Sam had been away on a trip so we met up with him at Aloha for dancing and catching up. Meeting in one place was actually somewhat difficult because there was a huge race going on and many of the streets had been closed to pedestrian traffic as a result. We did finally get together though.

After the bar, we went home but weren't sleepy yet so Sam and I decided to watch a movie. We watched "The Firemen's Ball."To be honest, we watched it twice through. It's a great example of how dark Czech satire can be. That isn't to say that it wasn't funny. It was really funny. It was just very dark.

And of course I got up early the next morning. Byron had suggested going to Sunday mass at St.Vitus...so we did. The service was half in Latin and half in Czech. I didn't understand a word. I'm so glad we went though. Knowing that the cathedral is still in use and hearing the organ music echo made me smile. Beautiful buildings are beautiful, of course, but it's always better to be in them when they come alive.

After mass, we went back to the monastery that had the library. They were having a bonsai exhibit that we had been interested in the day before but hadn't gone to because we were in a big group and people had wanted to do other things. I actually learned a lot. Thanks to Waterloo, I could identify most of the smaller plants and some of the trees, but I really don't know much about bonsai. Byron explained some of the techniques that bonsai artists use. The whole experience made me miss having plants around. Maybe I'll start a bonsai when I get home. Dave had suggested a ficus or rosemary to start...

From there we met up with Brianna for vegetarian food at Gopal, a Hare Krishna restaurant where they have an all-you-can-eat option. And then I went back to the dorm to do some homework. Even my homework is interesting at this point. As I hoped it would be.

Weekend

Whenever I start to feel too much at home in Prague, I go grocery shopping. Nothing reminds me of my linguistic incompetence like trying to differentiate types of flour, trying to order sliced cheese, or trying to find vanilla extract in Tesco. That said, the grocery store is also a great place to meet other temporary-East-Central-Europeans. Ex-pats and students from other study abroad programs hear English and come over right away, eager to say hello and have someone to communicate with. It's a wonderful and strange thing. The desire to communicate is so strong that people leap at the opportunity to be near someone who understands their language.

For the first weeks here, NYU gave out tickets to culture events in the city. My ticket originally was for the opera, but they had extras for the Czech Philharmonic, so I got to go to that. The seats were behind the stage, and some people complained but I personally really liked the seats. I have more to say on that, but I'll do so in a separate post. I have the program from the concert somewhere, but can't find it at the moment.

After the concert, I went out with some friends. Our group of five dwindled down to just two of us...but we had a great time. We discovered a bar run by some Australians where they play beer pong. Totally not my scene, but it's funny to discover that such a place exists in Prague's Old Town. We didn't stay long though. We actually went to a Hawaiian bar called Aloha because we were craving Brazilian caipirinhas and 90s music. As ridiculous as a Hawaiian bar in the Czech Republic may sound, the music and atmosphere were really refreshing. The place was really chill and shockingly was quiet enough to converse in...a plus when trying to get to know new friends.

After that we went to the 5 story club under the Charles bridge. It couldn't have been more different from Aloha, but I had just as much fun. Each floor had a different style of music so we just headed for the stairs whenever we needed a break. I never went clubbing in New York because a)the clubs are very expensive and b)the boys are too pushy. This was fun because it was $6 (expensive for Prague but cheap compared to New York) and very 'no pressure.' Maybe because it's in Prague. Maybe because I was there with a guy. Who knows. But it was really nice to just enjoy the music, the lights, and the people. People watching might be my favorite past-time ever.

Sunday the school had organized a boat cruise on the Vltava. I was expecting something corny and awkward, but was pleasantly surprised. There was a jazz band on board playing really good music. The lunch they provided was delicious (and vegetarian friendly). The weather was cooperating. The views were lovely. And most importantly, I realized that I've met some really wonderful people. I'm looking forward to getting to know them better and just have a feeling that I'm going to leave here having made some great friends.

Later that night I ended the weekend with the opera that Mozart wrote for Prague: Don Giovanni. The inside of the opera house was as beautiful as the outside. I probably should have looked up the storyline before going to the show, but I was able to follow along pretty well. The lyrics were in Italian, and there were subtitles in English and Czech. You can read about the plot here. All I'll say is that the statue outside the opera house makes much more sense having seen the show.

Soon the school year starts for real... I can't wait.

Art of Travel assignment

I was assigned, for my blogging class, to read this article and be inspired by it in telling a travel story. That's my next writing piece, but first I want to share some thoughts on the article itself:

Saturday, Mar 18, 2000 11:00 ET

Why we travel

It whirls you around, turns you upside down and stands everything you took for granted on its head.

By Pico Iyer

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.

We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. Note that he says here "will" accommodate rather than "can" accommodate.

We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. I wonder what young fools who travel become?

The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what." For the millionth time in my student career, I find that a reading points me to another reading, which I'm sure will point me to a few others. There is just not enough time!

I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral" since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail," and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship -- both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion -- of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind. I was following pretty well until that last line. Not feeling is uncaring and not seeing is blind? What original sentiments! I saw a play once called "Dinner" (by Moira Buffini) in which one of the characters talks about going through life "collecting experiences." His wife tells him that collecting experiences without learning from them and collecting acquaintances without caring about them hardly counts as living a life. She predicts that she will die and leave behind breaths gasped in wonder and moments fulfilled; she also predicts that he will die and leave piles of waste made up of all the opportunities to care that he willfully rejected. If I were to re-write the line, I would say that seeing without noticing is wasteful, caring without loving is impossible, and pretending to care without understanding is foolish.

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. Again, I'm going to be particular about his wording. If you leave your beliefs or certainties at home, then who is this person who is traveling? Who are you without your beliefs? And how can you grow without your certainties as a frame of reference? What should be left at home are self-righteousness, pride, prejudice, and willful ignorance. Yes you are seeing things in a different light, but who says the new angle is the crooked one?

In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of "Wild Orchids" (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week's wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis. They love KFC here and it confuses me to no end.

If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald's would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator -- or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home," while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo -- or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same.

But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. I like this, but I'm bristling at the point where he attempts to speak for me. Personally, the first thing I learned on the road this trip was that the coffee machine in the Frankfurt has drinks (Mokka) but that if the button you press doesn't fill your cup it might be the creamer button (Tee Milch). The author's constant 'you's and 'we's make me defensive...even though I know I do the same thing frequently.

When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you've landed on a different planet -- and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they're being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel). *shudder* 1984 anyone?

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology. Really really like that last line (thought I could take issue with the first). He mentions headlines--mass media--again, and I wonder also if traveling is a way to save our own humanity as well. In going to a place, one has the opportunity to then turn to the news channel or paper headline and declare that it is biased, false, or incomplete. The experience can be a reminder to question our history textbooks and media sources. In my case, seeing how some European college students view American women and college students--thanks to the popular culture and mass media exported from the states--has been embarrassing and frustrating. Embarrassing because I'm not "like that" and frustrating because Miley Cyress, Ke$ha, and Ali Fedotowsky (with her 25 white bachelors) keep insisting that I am.

And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon -- an anti-Federal Express, if you like -- in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.

But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import -- and export -- dreams with tenderness. I guess he brought his beliefs after all. Seriously though, I was worried in the above paragraph about how much he focused on importing/exporting paraphernalia. I can see needing Tylenol, but Michael Jordon posters? Then his tone shifts to practical necessities and finally emotional ones. THEN he writes this paragraph. Dobrý. Konečně.

By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more -- not least by seeing it through a distant admirer's eyes -- they help you bring newly appreciative -- distant -- eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. I'm not sure if this is more arrogant or more true. It sounds true, but it makes me uncomfortable to think that I'm have anything to give. I'm not shrinking away from such responsibility--in fact I feel like living with the mindset that I am representing other people who share facets of my identities is best in most if not all situations--but I typically travel with the intention of learning. Hopefully I'm an okay teacher too.

This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new "traditional" dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second -- and perhaps more important -- thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit. Part of the reason I didn't want to go to an English-speaking country.

On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity -- and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlour," and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home). Are we free of caste and job and standing? One of the phrases I use most frequently here is "Jsem studentka." "I'm a student." Many times, I don't have to say it at all. That defines how people interact with me, along with my being female/white/young/etc. and the fact that I have a job at home means I can travel more while here than I could otherwise. That said, I read a blog today written by another study abroad student. She said that she's been struggling because she longs for that anonymity but can't seem to find it. She feels trapped by the bubble of her school program. For me, the first few days were anonymous because I didn't know too many people. Since then, I've found myself empathizing with the blog author. I get to be anonymous only when I'm alone in the grocery or book shop.

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious -- to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves -- and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, "A man never goes so far as when he doesn't know where he is going." Study abroad is a strange mix of these things. Insomnia may be dictated by bar-hopping but also by doing homework. Impulse is tempered because one has responsibilities. We are wide open, if we dare. Thoughts of past and future help determine courses chosen and workloads assumed. I really feel that one can't live without a past, anyway. Maybe we get to be mysterious. And getting lost is enlightening but should only be done once classes are finished for the day.

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year -- or at least 45 hours -- and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I'm not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I'm simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense. I feel like a child most when leafing through children's books written in Czech. And in moments like this one.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can "place" me -- no one can fix me in my risumi --I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.

This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families -- to become better Buddhists -- I have to question my own too-ready judgments. "The ideal travel book," Christopher Isherwood once said, "should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you're in search of something." And it's the best kind of something, I would add, if it's one that you can never quite find. In response to the Thailand comment, 'judgment' implies that the speaker thinks his or herself better than the one that is being judged. Judgment of individuals withheld, practices should and may be judged. Which brings up the question of when something should be written off as a cultural difference and when something violates human rights enough that outsiders can push for a change.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning -- from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament -- and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.

That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you've abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity. Must there be only these two choices? What if I just am honest about the tiny corner of the United States that I'm from, and I'm up front about the fact that I don't know all of the rest of it quite yet?

That whole complex interaction -- not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) -- is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire. Could Jack Kerouac be on this list?

All, in that sense, believed in "being moved" as one of the points of taking trips, and "being transported" by private as well as public means; all saw that "ecstasy" ("ex-stasis") tells us that our highest moments come when we're not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he'd ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. "To write well about a thing," he said, "I've got to like it!"

At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O'Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It's not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.

In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. So true!

Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald's outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And -- most crucial of all -- the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas -- and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald's outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.

The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic -- the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million -- it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)

Besides, even those who don't move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you're traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you're often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room -- through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing -- not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.

All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville's colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he'd never visited, it's an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.

In Mary Morris's "House Arrest," a thinly disguised account of Castro's Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, "All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author's imagination." On Page 172, however, we read, "La isla, of course, does exist. Don't let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn't. But it does." No wonder the travel-writer narrator -- a fictional construct (or not)? -- confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. "Erewhon," after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler's great travel novel, is just "nowhere" rearranged.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really there and what's only in him. Tim O'Brien anyone?

Thus Bruce Chatwin's books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul's recent book, "A Way in the World," was published as a non-fictional "series" in England and a "novel" in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux's half-invented memoir, "My Other Life," were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as "Fact and Fiction."

And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that "traveling is a fool's paradise," and the other who "traveled a good deal in Concord"). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us."

So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also -- Emerson and Thoreau remind us -- have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.

And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen's great "The Snow Leopard"), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack's "Island of the Color-Blind," which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, "There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor." Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.