Lessons Learned from 40 Days and 40 Nights Abroad

Stump’s Travel Log — Farewell Edition

Today is the fortieth day of my big trip. Tonight will be the fortieth night. Forty days and forty nights sounds biblical, and I’ve taken the opportunity to reflect a bit. Here are a few things I’ve learned:

1. I wish I had included a bed sheet in my travel pack. Europeans have a curious fascination with the duvet, which would be very cozy if it were cold at night. But for most of the trip it was still quite warm (and I didn’t stay in many places with air conditioning). That cozy blanket wrapped in a sheet turns out to be quite warm, so I’d slough it off… and then get too cold. The duvet is a binary covering, and I find I need more subtle gradations. On quite a few occasions at about three in the morning I ended up taking the puffy part out and just sleeping with the double sheet that is left. I’m not sure the personnel at my hotels appreciated that.

2. I should have purchased the eSim card for my phone from the mobile company itself, rather than from a third-party site. After reading quite a few reviews, I decided to go with an eSim rather than paying my US mobile company for international service. It was way cheaper, and had the promise of much faster and reliable service. But then I should have gone to the Orange Mobile site itself instead of the link from the review I was reading. My traveling companions for the first week did the former and had no problems at all. I could only get coverage about ¼ of the time in the UK and Gibraltar with my eSim that came from somewhere in China. In Spain and France it was better (probably ¾ of the time), and in Malta about half the time. I suppose that’s not entirely bad, as part of the point of a trip like this was to disconnect. But having reliable access to Google Maps was a pretty important consideration for the trip I was on. I ended up downloading sections of that for where I was, so I’d have access when I wasn’t online. The only really tricky thing was here in Malta when I rented a scooter a couple of times, and then I couldn’t turn it off because I didn’t have any internet data on my phone. So I had to ride around until I found a free WiFi network, then connect my phone and end my scooter session.

3. I may have maxed out my foreign language learning abilities. I’ve always had a desire to be fluent in a foreign language. I passed tests in graduate school that certified I had sufficient reading ability in several other languages, but that is very different from being fluent when you’re in another country and attempting to communicate with a shop owner or hotel clerk. I’ve relayed in these pages some of my misadventures trying to communicate, and I thought it was kind of fun to try. But I also felt really stupid sometimes, and felt guilty for the corresponding feelings I’ve had during encounters with non-English speakers. Several times when someone was trying to explain something very simple (in their minds) to me and looking at me like I was an imbecile, I wanted to pull out my PhD diploma and show them that I really am a reasonably intelligent guy (no, I didn’t really bring my diploma with me). But these other languages just have different words for everything (!), and my aging brain may be past being able to cope with that.

4. There are a lot of people in the world. Of course I knew this at an abstract level. And I’ve been stuck by the fact at different times in big cities seeing a bunch of strangers. But somehow it was impressed on me more deeply by being in a lot of small towns, and interacting personally with a lot of different people. You get a glimpse into their actual lives, and it is really, really mind-blowing to me to think about all these individuals living their lives every day. 

5. I have experienced the world from a place of privilege. It was remarkable to me how obvious it was to most people that I am an American. It’s not like I was wearing a Stars and Stripes shirt or a MAGA hat, but most of the time — without even talking — people knew. And they treated me differently. Yes, in France the “differently” was not so good. But about everywhere else it meant that people were very deferential to me and treated me with respect. Sometimes that was because they wanted my money, but many other times it felt like people were treating me like I’m in a higher class or caste than they are. And that is very uncomfortable to me. One fairly significant exception to that was on public buses and subways. I always try to use these, and maybe part of the reason is that I feel like I’m one of the masses, rather than a part of a privileged class. It’s hard to give off a superior vibe when you’re packed in with people taking public transportation. But the reality is that I am part of a privileged class.

Being a white male from America is nothing that I chose or worked for, but it comes with certain privileges. But then beyond that, I have a PhD in philosophy and a job that allows me to take a sabbatical. Those are things that I did choose and work for, but I’m keenly aware that such choices are not open to everyone. I keep writing about this trip and how wonderful it has been, and recommend to others that they do something similar. But the fact is that most people can’t take 40 days to traipse around Europe.

I remember as a younger person during graduate school reading some of the books about spiritual disciplines by Richard Foster and Dallas Willard. I really liked these and thought it was largely correct that we would all benefit from taking the time for extended periods of solitude and retreat, or even devoting significant time to other disciplines like study and service. But I was at a time in my life when there weren’t the margins for doing these things. I remember thinking that the people writing such books had very different lives and would do well to spend some time living like the rest of us. Simone Weil (whose gravesite I visited in an earlier episode of Stump’s Travel Log) did just that — quitting her academic job to work in a factory in France to identify with the working class. She had hoped to demonstrate to them how they might improve their lives by reading good books after work. But instead she found that after working 12 or 14 hours in difficult circumstances, she herself didn’t want to read any books either. I experienced some of this myself during grad school years when I had to work factory jobs during the summer to keep food on the table. When I was done with a day of work, I didn’t have the energy to do much besides sit on the couch and watch TV.

All that to say, this trip of mine has been a privilege. I wish everyone could have a sabbatical and have the means (both economically and socially) to spend 40 days doing something very different and enriching. But I know that’s not the way things are, and I hope that my writing about my trip as I have done was not seen as flaunting my privilege.

Early tomorrow morning the long journey home begins. If all goes well, it will end sometime very early Saturday morning. Then the rest of the sabbatical begins, which has as its goal to take the experiences and insights I have had the last six weeks and incorporate them into the book I’m trying to write. Perhaps I’ll write some updates here occasionally, but I expect those to be much less frequent. So, to those of you who have read this far, thank you for your interest.