The result, as Leonard points out, is the rise of an old-fashioned gift culture made possible by today’s Internet.Īs someone whose family immigrated to the United States from Russia while he was still in elementary school, our second European traveler, Rafael Khachaturian, has always been fascinated by Eastern Europe. Their reward is the reciprocity of hosts who provide free lodging for them. Leonard’s hosts never charge Leonard for giving her a place to sleep.
Instead, she spends her nights in the homes of those who are part of the social networking website Couch-Surfing. Sarah Leonard’s cities of choice are Istanbul, Bucharest, and Budapest, and in each of these cities, she avoids staying in a hotel or youth hostel.
The traditional European destinations of London and Paris never even figure in our writers’ travel plans. Whether they went abroad in the role of visitor, soldier, reporter, or Peace Corps volunteer, they did everything they could to avoid being viewed as Ugly Americans who respect neither the language nor the culture of the country they are in. Our seven did not arrive on foreign shores carrying unearned confidence. In this third installment in our Dissent series “Party of the Future: Voices from the Millennial Generation,” seven authors offer essays on their time abroad that break with the vision Twain and so many novelists have put forward of naïve Americans getting life lessons from worldly Europeans. “None of us had ever been any where before we all hailed from the interior travel was a wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance with the natural instincts that were in us,” Twain tells his readers before sardonically observing of himself and his fellow innocents that “we pitied the ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot of our importance.” When Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad in 1869, he had in mind entertaining his readers with a travel book about a group of naïve Americans who make a pleasure trip to Europe and the Middle East aboard the steamship Quaker City. Introduction: Not-So-Innocents Abroad Nicolaus Mills ▪ Summer 2011
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