Tennessee, the Via Diagnolis and why we should pay Americans to travel.

Yesterday, my mom and I stumbled across a befuddled group of Americans from Ohio and Tennessee in Sofia, Bulgaria. They were looking for the “old city,” an impressive array of ancient ruins uncovered when they built the subway (the subway took forever to build because of corruption and also because any time someone dug a hole they found valuable ancient ruins that needed to be preserved).

Anyway, they were heading in precisely the wrong direction. We helped to orient them. They were there for a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention.

We herded the Jehovah’s witnesses, mostly upper middle age and very American (in matters of body shape and friendliness), towards the ruins. At this point, my mother, who is a tour guide by trade couldn’t help herself swung into a history lecture. She told them about the ruins—not just there, but all over the country—left by Romans, Greeks, Thracians, Ottomans (not to forget Soviets). She pointed to a tiny, ancient brick church and explained that during the Ottoman era, a Church couldn’t be built higher than the spire of a Mosque. She suggested they visit Alexander Nevsky, a majestic cathedral with a signature green dome. She brought up the Via Diagnolis, an ancient Roman road from Belgrade to Istanbul. You can walk on it.

They listened, enraptured. “How come no one knows about this place?” one woman whispered. “When we told people we were having the convention in Bulgaria, they all said, ‘What is that?’”

***

Look I’m not religious, I don’t understand religion (fear of death probably) but I love the religious traditions that involve traveling. Mormons are weird, to use the parlance of the moment, but they all have to go abroad. Oh the sweet Mormon kids we met, valiantly butchering their Bulgarian, on a different day on the train.

I know this is just cute, given that we live in a country that doesn’t even want to pay to educate children but, indulge me: I think that there should be state/federal funds that pay for every 18-25-year old in America to travel out of the country. No strings. It could be to do volunteer work in Kenya or get drunk at a resort in the Carrabean. I bet a lot would choose to go to, say, Ireland, or Poland, to connect with family roots.

It’s such a trite but important observation that travel completely changes you and how you relate to other people. And now, even better, technology is such that you can talk with people who don’t know English and keep in touch, through awkward Google translate app misunderstandings, deepening the relationship.

I wrote about this yesterday, the Syrian refugees I’ve met working on a book project, last year and two days ago. They’re standard response to everything is “No problem. No problem” and infectious enthusiasm and jokes. Even though all of them have had family members violently killed.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve been driving my mother crazy all day by freaking out and crying over the video of violent rape in the notorious Sde Teiman Israeli military prison, which is circulating on social media and covered by international press but totally absent from, say, the New York Times. I’m not going to embed, that would be reader abuse. But look it up if you want your day ruined like I ruined my mother’s (“Jesus christ we’re eating breakfast,” — elka).

It makes me literally sick, for reasons of being human, but also because I can see the skinny Arab kids I care about, in that video. Is the victim—who reportedly had to be hospitalized with a ruptured rectum and crushed ribs—even younger than my friends? Is he alive?

You won’t read about it in the New York Times. Someone reputable on Twitter said that a top reporter at a mainstream paper says everyone is waiting for it to go away. There’s the flaw in my travel argument, I guess. I suspect very few people who work in elite media have not been abroad, and are still small-minded, unempathetic ghouls. But normal people not poisoned by narcissistic ambition might have a different takeaway.