"The world", she thought, "is certainly full of beautiful things..."
An Introduction
The world, she thought, is certainly full of beautiful things…
-A Room with a A View
One of my favorite books when I was young was Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace. In it, Betsy Ray - an aspiring writer, spends a year traveling Europe so that she will eventually be able to write with first-hand knowledge of the places she visited. She writes multi-page letters home detailing every bit of her travels, starting on her ocean-liner trip over and ending at the outbreak of World War I…handwritten and so stuffed full of stories that they barely fit into their envelopes.
We communicate so differently now.
Like Betsy, I’ve spent much of the past two years slow-traveling through Europe, staying in cities for weeks or months at a time. I’ve seen so many beautiful things, and I have so many stories to tell.
And so my goal is to chronicle my journeys in a series of letters - letters like Betsy sent: filled with stories, photographs, and details about art, books, history, and food. If you like these things, too, we might just be good friends.
We’ll be like pen pals, except you don’t have to write me back…
I won’t claim to know everything. No lists of the top five restaurants in any city. No expert guide to a town I only visited for 24 hours. But I promise to tell you about some of the things that filled me with awe - and to try and show you, too. I took over 11,000 photos, after all.
My hope is that you’ll feel like you’re traveling with me.
To paraphrase Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of one of my other favorite books, the world really is full of so many beautiful things.
Pay attention. Be astonished. And tell about it. The world didn’t have to be beautiful. We can and should think about that beauty and be grateful.
-Mary Oliver
