reflections on the trip

I can’t believe how much I saw in five weeks. It was the trip of a lifetime. Nine countries: Spain, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Italy. Eight languages: Spanish, German, Czech, Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian and Catalan. Overnight stays in 16 cities: Madrid, Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Lyon, Bern, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Barcelona. Counting day trips and brief stopovers, I visited over 20 cities. I traveled on two planes, a few of Venice’s public boats, one long bus ride, three high-speed trains and countless other trains, streetcars, public buses and subways and walked countless miles. I took almost 1800 pictures, collected 83 postcards and 15 beer coasters, and came home with a few blisters on my feet.

It is hard to take in everything that I did. In one trip I saw some of the world’s greatest works of art: Picasso’s Guernica, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David; and some of the most iconic buildings and monuments in the world: the Berlin Wall, the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Notre Dame Cathedral, St. Mark’s Square, the Charles Bridge, and St. Peter’s Basilica. There were countless unique sights and experiences: the beer gardens in Munich, catching up with Pau and his parents, taking in an opera in Vienna, strolling the grand boulevards of Paris, a boat ride down Venice’s Grand Canal, scaling the Eiffel Tower, seeing a symphony in Prague, exploring Roman ruins in Italy, watching the snow-covered Alps go by on a train, joking around and hanging out with Charlie, celebrating New Years with Germans, seeing Amsterdam’s bustling red light district, touring royal palaces in Vienna and Prague, witnessing two bears mate in Switzerland, browsing new cars at an auto show in Brussels, meeting the whole Pavanini family, seeing millions of human bones up close, watching kids sled down hills and a shepherd herding sheep in southern Germany, seeing Barcelona for the fifth time, and sampling the different beers, espressos, waffles, cookies, fruit, pastries, snack foods, cheeses, and cheap meals in every country. I visited museums ranging from a sex museum and a beer museum in Amsterdam to Dalí’s wacked-out museum in Figueres to the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart and several world-renowned science, history and art museums.

I did it. I saw Europe. I finally satisfied my desire to see almost everything that I had wanted to see in Western Europe. With that out of my system, I feel like I can stay in one place now and just enjoy Sevilla for four more months. It left me with a weird feeling though, Europe no longer seems so foreign and faraway. It was sort of a loss of innocence experience – after seeing it all in person it’s no longer as appealing as it once was. Throughout the trip I kept thinking, “I bet the next time I am back here again, I will be traveling with my wife and kids.” I know I’ll be back sometime but I couldn’t help thinking that next the experience will be very different. It definitely left me wanting to see the rest of the world. And I realized that my trip wasn’t that ambitious or difficult, I never left the western world, I never left the bubble of large, developed cities with extensive English-speaking tourist infrastructures. I was more a tourist than a traveler and I always fit in everywhere I went. So now that I’ve exhausted Europe, I think Latin America is next. Before I go home, there are two places on my list to see this semester that I haven’t been to yet -- the UK and northern Spain.