The World is Getting Smaller

In seventh grade, I had 7th period geography with Mr. McCammon.  On the second day of class, I remember him giving us a lesson on how "the world is getting smaller".  Being a naive seventh-grader, the first thing I thought he meant was that the physical size of planet Earth was shrinking.  Of course, Mr. McCammon meant the size we felt the world was, not its actual size.


500 years ago, the world was getting bigger.  Europeans had discovered a whole other side of the world.  Ever since that doubling of the world, we've worked to make this planet smaller using new technologies from faster ships to telegraphs to planes to the internet.


I'm not sure that I had a truly great understanding of how small our world has become before going on this semester abroad.  Despite being physically over 4000 miles away from home, I wasn't ever more than a computer away from being face-to-face with my mother over Skype.  People used to go years between conversations with their parents.  I rarely went over a week.


Being an American in this small world has its advantages.  While abroad various "comfort" foods were always near-by.  Sure, one has to jump through a few hoops and fight a few dragons in order to find a jar of peanut butter or a bottle of Mountain Dew in southern Germany, but I really could have eaten an "American" meal every single meal abroad.  I didn't, however.


This brings up the disadvantage of being an American in this small world.  With English being a world language and American culture spread over the West and then some, there is the tendency to not fully immerse oneself in other cultures.  I'm guilty of this.  My lack of German knowledge really held me back from wanting to fully jump into German culture.  If I could do this over again, I really would have made more of an effort to learn German.  I fell victim to the often repeated phrase "everyone speaks English over there".  While that is fairly true, that fact shouldn't have been an excuse for me to not learn more of another language.


I think the best example of how small our world is occurred on my flight back to the States.  While waiting for my Air India flight from Frankfurt to Chicago, a man commented on my Purdue shirt.  He asked if I was a student there and various things like that.  When he asked where I was from, I replied "southern Indiana".  Seeming familiar with that area of the Midwest, he asked where in southern Indiana.  When I asked if he knew where Terre Haute was, he replied, "Yea, my father was from Sullivan..."


I'm 4000 miles away, and I find someone whose family is from my town of 4000 people.


"The world is getting smaller."

La Ville-Lumiere

Jason and I went to Paris this weekend to check out what all of the fuss was about.  The City of Light did not disappoint.  Getting there, however, was a bit disappointing.


Friday night a few of us went to see Inception (awesome movie, by the way).  Afterwards, Zach, David and I crashed on the couches of my kitchen since we had all moved out of our rooms.  Being a Friday night in a university dorm, there were a few hindrances to our sleep.  This led to me sleeping through my alarm (though I think someone may have turned it off).  Unluckily, Jason also missed his alarm.  He woke me up and said something to the effect of "You may want to say 'Damn' now."  I, of course, looked at the clock in time for it to hit 7:32, the time our train left.


After unsuccessfully waiting around for a while at the Hbf hoping to just hop on the next train to Paris, we were able to change our tickets with little expense.  Since all of the Saturday trains from Karlsruhe to Paris were sold out (damn tourists), we were forced to go to Paris via Strasbourg.


Finally arriving in Paris in the late afternoon, we scurried to our hotel, ate dinner, left of the Eiffel Tower, went back to the hotel after realizing I left our tower ticket in the room, and then finally reached the Tower.  We made a reservation ahead of time in order to skip the line.  We were there from sunset to nighttime.  The view and pics were great.  I'll post them soon.


Sunday we woke up a bit late and went to Notre Dame first.  The cathedral was nice, though, we did not go inside because we wanted to go to the Louvre.  Here's a little travel tip.  On the first Sunday of the month, the Louvre has free admission.  Here's another travel tip.  If you want to go to the Louvre on the first Sunday of the month, go before 9 a.m.  Showing up at 11:30 a.m. will only leave you at the end of a huuuuuuuuge line and very disappointed.  We decided to forgo the museum and continue our walking of the streets of Paris.


After seeing the Champs-Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, and the Tower again, we went to a bridge a bit further away from the Tower to get some pictures with it and the Seine.  Little did we know that a car commercial was being filmed on the bridge.  It was for a concept car by Renault, the DeZir.  Here's a pic.

Meow (Ecofriend.org)

We then went to see the small Statue of Liberty nearby and went to Sacre-Coeur for the sunset.  It took us a while to find the cathedral and then climb up to it, but it was worth it.  We paid five euro to climb the 300 steps to the top of Sacre-Coeur for a view of all of Paris.  Super worth it.  During the hour or two we were up there, maybe 20 other people came up.  It was nice not being surrounded by a ton of people.  Sadly, we were kicked out before it got really dark, so I don't have any pics of all the Paris (Tour Eiffel included) at night.  Oh well...

Welp, I'm going to eat my last dinner in Germany.  I'll update again when I am Stateside.

Until next time, Alles Gute.