Travelogue: Philadelphia
Over the course of my brief existence, I’ve found that travel energizes me, makes me more aware, and – dare I say it – makes me a better human being. When I go too long without leaving my home base I become more bitter, cynical, and less appreciative of our world and the creatures that populate it. It’s easy to watch TV or read the news and throw out half-informed opinions or come to conclusions that are only partially educated. But nothing compares to getting out there in person. To put it more eloquently:
“Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way” Ralph Crawshaw
Aside from travel, I’ve always wondered if I was more interested in the history of my favorite past times than the actual past times themselves. Take music, for example. Once I got to college I realized I was less interested in becoming a virtuoso than I was in the stories of the composers and the history of the art; hence my decision to take on the second most useless degree in existence: music history. And when it comes to gaming, I can guarantee I spend more time reading about games and discussing them than I do actually playing them.
I don’t have enough interest in American History to refer to myself as “buff”, so let’s just say I’m a casual fan. Yes, I’ve been known to spend entire days watching multi-part series on the History Channel detailing the presidents and the history of each individual state, but I don’t have the Declaration of Independence committed to memory, nor do I know the particulars of each major battle of the Civil War. That being said, I was excited to get the chance to spend a day in Philadelphia; to be able to see historical landmarks that I had been reading about since I was a kid, and to simply spend time in one of America’s great cities. I’ve been to many places around and outside of the United States and have always come back with valuable experiences, but I’m surprised by what I came away with during one solitary day in Philadelphia.
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