The Travel Part of Traveling

            In this past week, I’ve traveled to both London and Prague.  While both were fantastic experiences, both were also extremely stressful. In, “The Art of Travel,” De Botton seems to romanticize the actual act of traveling quite a bit.  He talks about how train journeys can cause a great deal of introspectiveness into one’s self, according to him, “Journeys are the midwifes of thought.”  This didn’t exactly match with my experiences—I was too busy trying to get comfortable, go to sleep, and ignore the obnoxious snores of others on the train to both doing some intensive thinking.

                However, this doesn’t mean that my travel experiences didn’t teach me anything.  They were just quite different from what De Botton was describing in one particular section. When it comes to the actual “traveling” part of being a tourist, you have to accept that you’re going to get lost. You have to accept that things will be delayed and maybe not going according to plan. Whenever I traveled before, I was always super stressed about the whole process. However, over the past week, the constant travel has forced me to become a calmer person about the situation. Yes, thing won’t always go smoothly and according to plan, but eventually, everything will get sorted out. You’re going to get on the wrong tram, and eventually, you’ll get lost enough times that you will understand the city you’re traveling in. And since getting lost is the best way to learn a city, it’s almost necessary for the travel experience. If you want to know a place, you’re going to have to wander around a bit.