When we visited the Ibsen house on one side of the country and, days later, the Grieg house on the other, mom asked the endearing question, "When you travel, do you always learn this much?"
There's just an awful lot of world out there.
I tend to learn more when there's been a war; something about post-war zones and the attention they garner crystallizes what was most important to that culture and what was lost. I'm thinking of Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall; of Sarajevo and the bridge at Mostar; of Tsfat and the Golan Heights; of the UCA in San Salvador; of General Patton's gravesite in Belgium; of Londonderry, still defiantly called "Derry" by the northern Irish; of the fall of Yugoslavia that gave me a country count of 54 instead of 48; of the Lithuanian partisans who took to the hills for many long years after the West considered the war over; of the Romanian slander campaign that has surely influenced what we can truly know of Vlad the Impaler; of the Soviet execution chamber I stood in in Budapest; of the refugee crisis at the Thai/Cambodian border of Ayutthaya/Poi pet; of Hanoi's general kindness to American travelers.
I read that list and think, "I must get to Cuba, and soon."
I finished "The Lost Executioner" profoundly informed about the Khmer Rouge abuses of the 1970s (and, less widely known, of the 80s and 90s) but ambivalently spoiled by Nic Dunlop for all future nonfiction literature. I'm now reading "The Girl in the Picture," an account of the life and family of the subject of the Vietnam War's most searing photograph. I bought the book on the street in Hanoi but am shy about letting people here see its cover. Hanoi makes no apologies, though: the napalm bomb that severely burned, but did not kill, nine-year-old Kim Phuc was dropped by the South Vietnamese army in a misinformed air strike.
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