About a year ago, my sister and I decided to take a spur of the moment trip to Costa Rica. The conversation went a little like this:
me: 'Hey tickets to Costa Rica are like $200. Wanna go?'
my sister: 'Ya for sure'...
me: ‘Wait...you for real?'
my sister: 'Yes! Let's go!'
Next thing you know, 10 days later my sister and I are boarding a plane to San Jacinto, Costa Rica. No real plan in mind other than to do everything that we possibly could in the time that we had. So, we jumped in our rental car and started to drive through the twisty curvy highways of a stormy unfamiliar Costa Rica. Every thing was so different. My sister and I had both served missions in South America, so we were semi-familiar with their culture, language and foods, but imagine if we hadn't. Culture shock would have knocked us both down. Hard.
Imagine the culture shock that Christopher Columbus must of felt when he saw 'India' for the first time.
A place no one had ever seen before; no Google images, no friends telling you 'Dude you have to go, no TravelAdvisor not even a Rick Steve's travel guide to read on your voyage. Even better, imagine ending up in a place you didn't even intend to end up in! Picture going to a place where you've heard rumors from the native peoples that there's a group who’s ‘reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle or their breasts, and that a long train of hair growth backward between their shoulders’ (Raleigh, Excerpt 3).
This concept of exploring a new place where no one had ever been before was considered the Age of Discovery. A time where new foods, peoples, cultures were introduced and exploited to help build a more global economy. All of the global exploration in this period has allowed us to be able to take those trips we've always dreamed of, to taste the foods that look so good on Insta or Google, and explore this beautiful vast world around us. Though many other things that stemmed from the Age of Discovery have not held with time, one main thing has: the travel bug.
Please enjoy some pictures from my sister and I's trip!
Works Cited
Raleigh, Sir Walter. Discovery of Guiana: and the Journal of the Second Voyage Thereto (Classic Reprint). FORGOTTEN Books, 2016.
I appreciated the Christopher Columbus/Siri meme! Sometimes I feel like Siri is also trying to take me to a "Brave New World," or at least a world I did not intend on going to! I admire you and your sister's spontaneity and the connection you were able to make to the things we've discussed about the Renaissance.
ReplyDeleteThanks to the internet, I have the ability to research all sorts of interesting things about our world. Even though I have never traveled to Costa Rica, I can do a simple web search to learn more about it. I'm sure the travelers back then were so shocked to see what the rest of the world had to offer.
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