I mentioned last week how my buddy Kaitlyn and I took a massive adventure over our winter break. The grand journey began in Vilnius; we were staying with some family friends.
If you had asked me the capitol city of Lithuania before this trip, I certainly wouldn't have been able to tell you. That's one of the biggest things I took away from traveling this time around: there's so much I don't know. The top of that list is languages. I have found that being an English speaker allows you pretty wide freedom while traveling (in Europe especially), because most people speak it, but think about what that means. In Belgium, almost everyone I met spoke at least French, Dutch, and English. That's insane, coming from a place where it's not expected that you know more than one language. I'm about to graduate from college, and most of the Spanish I've learned is already faded, having been sacrificed for other pursuits. Traveling is such an eye-opener to priorities in different parts of the world, and how different those priorities can be from the ones we assume at home.
