Andrew Warren : So Much More to Learn - Week 1

I find myself at this stage feeling like an adventurer on the edge of a cliff. Of course, I'm the adventurer. I've always felt that way, always will. There are a lot of problems with cliffs. For one, they're steep and hard to traverse down from. But more importantly, you find yourself gazing down them (careful not to teeter and fall!), squinting at the world that lies below and trying to make sense of the ant-sized world below.  I feel like I'm standing at the Balkans Cliff. I'm extraordinarily far away from the experience, both physically and mentally.  I still don't grasp much of the history, neither the culture nor even the capitals of the nations. I can't pronounce the names of the cities or famous people ( I find myself pronouncing many of the names in a British Accent after watching that BBC documentary).  I'm begun the trail to the ledge and await the leap in May.

A common sort of ASK theme (if I even understand the idea of an ASK theme) that I've been pondering is that of ignorance and more specifically political ignorance. To build on Chandler's ideas, it seems to me that the populations of these Balkan Nations knew very little about the sources of the conflict they were involved in.  In the same way, I find myself coming to terms with the depth of my own ignorance of current events, fulling immersed in the GT Bubble: I'm still out-of-the-loop of the real details of the conflict in Ukraine and apparently there has been political turmoil in Venezuela.

I think it's important to remember that we're not going on this trip just to vacation to another part of the world.  This trip is the opportunity to break out of our norms and dispel our own ignorance, whether it's about a piece of history, a cultural divide that still exists, or even something about ourselves. Let's make this trip about expanding our horizons.