Paris, Nice, and Saint-Paul were beautiful. My time in France was life-altering and unfogettable.
The world looks different after you travel to Europe; for one, Europe stops being a fantasy/dream/pictaresque paradise, and starts being a real place with real people living lives. And you are bombarded by this enormous sense of a past, of culture, of intentional beauty, of people using their time on earth to really live and accomplish things. And then you come back to the USA and you feel really disturbed by how much consumerism and TV are the only "culture" we have, how everyone only speaks one language, and how sheltered and
disconnected we are from the world. We see Europe as faraway, but that's only because we are such a large country floating alone in the middle of the ocean, and we don't have the world as a direct neighbor. And it really makes everyone else in the world seem like some fiction or something. And our culture, as a result, is completely ignorant and self-focused.
It sounds extreme, but it is how I felt when I came home. It was like pulling the plug on reality,
on the world, and climbing into a tiny box filled with shopping malls.
You don't understand how artificial life is in America until you visit the rest of the world.
