The Exotic and The Foreign.

Chapter III in The Art of Travel is dedicated to the exotic of the unfamiliar. De Botton goes to Amsterdam and sees that the simplest things are exotic. I understand where he gets this, I've been traveling a lot by train and I have seen that this is my favorite mode of transportation. Not because of the De Botton way of thinking that you just zone out and think of things that you'll never think of, but because of the unfamiliarity of a train ride.

In the States we don't hop on a train to get to another state, we drive a car or fly a plane. But train rides are the most foreign to me, the most exotic. Every aspect of them I love; people coming and going, the arrival of a destination and looking out the window to see what town we've happened upon, constantly seeing a new landscape. It's something that I can get use to and something that when I'm back in the States I may have to hop on the Amtrak and see where it can take me.

Jessica Fitzgerald