The Historic First Post

Hello Friends!

I began this blog with the thought that this would be the most efficient way to keep anyone who may be remotely interested in what I'm doing informed about where exactly I am doing that something. So thanks for reading!

Tomorrow at 9:30 am I leave good ol' Minneapolis to undertake a Polish adventure. I will be spending the next year at a university in Krakow basically getting paid to soak up Polish culture. Hopefully I will have many stories and photos to share here, so keep checking back.

I know that this post is falling prey to the over-exuberance and long-windedness that I am sure many first-time bloggers go through, but I just have a few thoughts that I feel reflect where I am in my opinions on travel. And of course, like the good lit student that I am, I refer now to some inspiring reading.

First is a passage from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:
Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square in Venice where he gamboled as a child.
At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: "You advance always with your head turned back?" or "Is what you see always behind you?" or rather, "Does your journey take place only in the past?"
All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Yes, this selection is also listed on my Facebook page, but I can't help repeating to as many people as will read it. I think that this eloquently captures what the travel experience means. Calvino is a genius! Read him! A lot!

The other reading that made me reflect on what it means to travel comes from the venerable Don Quixote. (Speaking of geniuses, the newest translation by Edith Grossman so wonderfully renders the glory that is Cervantes' prose.) This book is the pure essence of finding one's purpose in life and following it until the very end. Yeah yeah, so Don Quixote dies in the end freed from his delusions, but for the remaining 935 pages, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza believe so confidently in their dreams –no matter how crazy or unreachable– that I think they can teach us many valuable lessons about courage, friendship, and adventure.

I am I...
My destiny calls and I go,
And the wild winds of fortune
Will carry me onward,
Oh whithersoever they blow.
Whithersoever they blow,
Onward to glory I go!

Onward to Krakow!