It must be something in the water. Not one but two of my blogging buddies now have daughters off traveling the world AND blogging about it at the same time.
First, there’s Iris, whom you and I have known for so many years as “Beta” on her father’s blog that I’d almost convinced myself that was her real name. (Which reminds me of the time Mig sent me to a cello-maker’s house to scout a carbon-fiber cello for him and I learned his real name from that guy’s wife…another story, but your secret is safe with me as long as you keep the payments regular, “Mig”) Annnnnnyway, Beta has been spending the last few weeks tramping around India with what seems to be a somewhat variable group of young people. The blog is called “meinasia”, which was supposed to be a sort of bilingual word-play being both “me in asia” for the English-speakers and “mein asia” for the German-speakers (The Family Von Mig lives in Austria, where they make dirndl skirts and sell watery beer to gullible American tourists). Apparently, though, the German part of it doesn’t really work. Whatev. The blog reads like a behind-the-scenes look at an episode of “The Amazing Race”, with train stations, airports, weird border crossings, and scary encounters with pushy souvenir peddlers. Because the trip is only six weeks long, the posting won’t last much longer, so be sure to have a look before it ends.
Meanwhile, my old friend Tony‘s oldest daughter, Lindsay (who, to the best of my knowledge has never had a cool Internet secret name) got on an airplane during the middle of Hurricane Irene and headed off for an entire semester in Uganda. Pretty ballsy, I think. She also fired up a blog as she was on her way. It’s called “Lindsay Leaves Home”, which doesn’t leave a lot of mystery, but at least there aren’t a bunch of people in Austria scratching their heads over some possible double entendre. When most of us think about a semester abroad, we tend to think about kicking around Paris or Rome, learning how to drink too much wine, smoke nasty cigarettes, and hookup with oversexed Eurotrash. There’s not a lot of glamour and romance in Uganda, I’m afraid, but not many Americans have even the slightest comprehension about life in a Third World nation, so the learning opportunity seems a bit more valuable than the typical 16-week European holiday semester. Lindsay is a pretty intense person anyway, so that’s fair. She’s only been in-country for a couple of days, so the stories haven’t had time to go too far yet. I hope she sticks with it for the whole time.
The thing that’s fascinating about blogs like these is that you get to learn about the authors as they are learning about themselves. Old geezers like me and Mig and Tony, we are fully-formed creatures for the most part, and if our blogs are revelatory, it’s usually because we carefully choose what we want people to see. Soon enough these young women will be vastly different people than they are right now, and the journeys they have set upon will be the agents of a great deal of that change.
I don’t know if anyone will be blogging at all another decade from now, when Charlotte is old enough to set out on such an adventure. And I genuinely despair that the world will not offer itself up so readily for her then. But even if she doesn’t get to see some exotic far-off place, I know she will find other agents of change that will shape her life, and I hope I get to see it through her eyes just like this.
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