Travelogue: Observations on Mediterranean Europe, Initial Observations

My family and I just returned from a 12-day Mediterranean Cruise.  I didn’t have time or access to make online updates during the trip, so over the next several days I intend to take the 3100 photos we took, and make selections to go along with some observational blogs I intend to make about the stops along the trip.

I will also be uploading many more of the pictures into online albums for family and friends to access via Facebook.

But before I get into the daily blogs, I wanted to make an introductory blog.

I commented to Betsy, after doing preliminary color adjustment edits on the 3100 pictures, that we seem to have a lot of pictures of buildings that even right now I don’t know specifically what the pictures are. But what I did notice, was a certain sense about the buildings in the pictures.  Even out of context, and out of chronological sequence, I could still say “this building is in Firenze, while that building is in Roma.”

There is a certain sense of style that seems to unite many of the cities we visited, until you can get a feel where a building belongs.  I’m not so sure that same sense would be true of US cities or not.  Some perhaps, but not a lot of them.

I also want to observe how easy it is to travel and be an American, to speak English and expect to be understood.  I tried to use my daughter’s limited knowledge of high school French at a shop in France, for example, and got a reply in English. This ease can be helpful, but it is also dangerous — it helps foster an unconscious arrogance that can lead to the “ugly American” syndrome.

So, with that, let me get to work on polishing my notes for the first stop along the trip: Barcelona.