Column:

Next travel stop: Columbia, Missouri

By John Hendel

Published April 17, 2007

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Grey buildings loom ominously. People shuffle about avoiding eye contact. The sky flickers as if the sun itself cannot reach beyond the land's primordial din. Eastern Europe.

Well, that's what some think, at least, including the producers of the classic film "EuroTrip." That movie depicted the bleakest of desperations in the post-Communism Slovakian capital, Bratislava. It's a rather naive stereotype commonly held about anything resembling Eastern Europe. In any case, I'm sure a pilgrimage to Bratislava will be in my future someday. Quite by accident, I've ended up visiting every place featured in "EuroTrip" except that one. At least I made it to Prague. I believe it was a member of parliament who said the nightlife was as equally pulsing as Bratislava's.

Traveling has become scarily constant in the past month or so. The endless planes, trains and trams jar a person. I wake up some days not sure if I'm in Amsterdam, Brussels or East Berlin. I'm dizzy with my traveling priorities: the culture, the food and the nightlife. It's glorious.

This alone should compel people to study abroad. I won't write an entire back-patting, pro-study abroad column, but I will give you a paragraph of it. Thus: study abroad. I've done it twice and have zero regrets. Hell, I'll probably do it again. The whole experience also comes off as quite cool and earns you major culture points.

All right, I'm more or less done back-patting there, though I do whole-heartedly encourage anyone to study abroad and even encourage anyone to ask me if they have any questions or are vaguely considering it. Right now, I'm more worried myself about reverse culture shock. I return to the states in about two weeks, compadres, and that's frankly a bit depressing.

Sure, it'll be great to see everyone at MU and my family and all that. I'll be crashing Columbia for finals week and already am enthused about seeing Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at The Blue Note when I'm back. And honestly, I look forward to summer in Columbia, too. It'll be a swell, relaxing time after this semester.

But I already see myself falling into a trap, perhaps for the best. I'm constantly trying to think of the Next Big Thing now, so to speak, focused on the next escape from the mundane. The mentality abroad compels people to diversify their experiences and seek out vibrant new options, which can manifest in a trip to Florence, Italy, or to a bar sculpted from ice imported from Sweden.

This will be harder to do in Columbia. Yet the depressing part isn't so much the lack of Florence or an ice bar, it's the lack of being saturated in a foreign culture that's intriguing, absurd and rich in detail.

The news of London alone tends to be far more entertaining and something I'll dearly miss. I was reading The (London) Times and the London Lite on the way to Prague, for instance, when I happened upon two amazing stories. The first involved a reality show that will be entitled "Fat Teens Can't Hunt," which forces overweight British teenagers to fend for their own food with Aborigine tribes. The second article was entitled "Restaurant Fined After Fiery Sausage Explodes at the Table: Woman was Left with Horrific Burns." I'll miss reading these stories and realizing that restaurant's in my borough.

The world ultimately has too much out there to ever put your self in a box. See you in two weeks.