Recently I've had the fun of helping a friend plan a trip to Greece and Italy. If it's been many years since you've been or have never gone, there are a few tricks to traveling these days, and I love sharing them. I recommend going to one place and staying there or using it as a home base. Trying to see everything, you may not see much, and you will miss looking beyond the tourist layer. Greece and Italy especially, depend heavily on tourism and those in the business are happy to keep your experience detached from their daily lives. They will let you keep your romantic illusions that their life experiences are radically different than yours and that their country is mainly simple, quaint and colorful. This may appeal to you, but I want to know what I have in common with people, how individuals live and think about life, what they believe, how they view our country and its history, and what their dreams are. Of course there are cultural differences, and that makes the experience of meeting new people even better. One of the reasons I love Greece was vividly illustrated once at 3 am on an especially warm evening as I sat with friends in a taverna by the water. We were talking philosophy, as usual. My friend placed a glass of water, a glass of retsina, and a salt shaker in front of us on the table. "The salt is the past, the wine is the present, and the water is the future. How would you line them up?" "That's easy, I said, throwing the salt over my right shoulder. "That's the past ... it's behind me. This wine, the present, is right in front of me. The water is there, on the far edge of the table, always in front of me, always lurking in the shadows. How else could it be?" He said, "For me, the past and the present are in front of me ... I can see them. The future, however, is behind me ... out of my sight ... and I can have no idea what it holds." And that, my friends, is a very enlightened clue to the question: How then, shall we live?I would love to help you plan a trip to Europe. The country I am most familiar with is Greece, but I know a little about travel in Italy and Switzerland, as well. I won't be traveling this year, so it would be a treat for me. E-mail and let me help. Thea
| ||||||
