Travel

During the spring quarter of my second year of law school, I participated in the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic. I did some work on the government response to the Occupy Movement, armed conflict in India, and disappearances in Turkey. But most of my time was spent working on a report about the effectiveness of agencies tasked with monitoring working conditions in Cambodian garment factories. Compared to other garment-producing nations, Cambodia actually has relatively good protections for worker rights.

Timor-Leste is a tiny half-island nation at the southeastern tip of Indonesia, about 400 miles northwest of Darwin, Australia. In 1975, Timor-Leste declared independence from Portugal in 1975. Within eight days, Indonesia, which controls the western half of the island, invaded. Thus began a brutal quarter-century occupation and constant violent resistance that resulted in the deaths of at least 100,000 people before Timor-Leste was finally granted autonomy from Indonesia in 1999.

In the early summer of 2011, I traveled to Sedona for a brief vacation before starting my summer job. The town of Sedona itself is nestled in the red rock country of central Arizona. It’s surrounded by beautiful rock formations, deserts, and mountains. We spent the first few days relaxing and hiking in the area around the town. On one particularly memorable day, we explored Native American ruins near Sedona. We visited a nearby state park with some small cliff dwellings and painted caves.

I flew into Lima in the early hours of December 14. A desert city on the Peru’s western coast, Lima is known for its depressing weather, and sure enough, it greeted us with oppressive clouds and fog. A taxi took Kate and me to a hostel in Lima’s Miraflores district. I didn’t really know what to expect, having never been to South America, but Miraflores was unlike anything I would have anticipated.

After leaving Florence on my journey to Italy in June of 2008, my family and I drove to a small town in Umbria called Lerchi. About a 20 minute drive into the hills above Lerchi is an old farmhouse christened “La Dogana.” Nestled in the hills among the farms and forests of Umbria, La Dogana lies beneath the fortified town of Monte Santa Maria Tiberina. Monte Santa Maria dominates the horizon, its imposing silhouette overlooking the countryside in all directions.

I flew into Florence on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-June. Wrestling with jet lag, I went to bed early the first night after a delicious dinner at an osteria a few blocks north of the Arno River with my family. The next day, we strolled through the city and visited Santa Maria del Fiore, known as Il Duomo. We visited the baptistery outside the cathedral, and then walked into the church itself.

My flight landed in Cancun, Mexico a little before nine PM. A shuttle took my family to our hotel in Playa del Carmen, a beach town about 40 minutes south of Cancun. Perhaps slightly less blatantly commercial than Cancun or Cozumel, Playa del Carmen is still highly Americanized, and its main drag, “La Quinta Avenida”, has certainly inherited some of the materialism of its namesake. For the most part, though, we enjoyed our beach resort, the Shangri-La Caribe, and the ocean waters consistently warmer than seventy degrees.

Landlocked in central Europe, Switzerland is an eclectic mix of cultures. In the north, it is predominantly German-speaking, in the west, French. Parts of southeastern Switzerland are indistinguishable from Italy—they speak Italian, eat Italian food, and everything from the architecture to the landscape seems Italian. On my tour of Switzerland in the summer of 2006, I managed to see all three areas. Each had its uniquely unforgettable moments. We flew into Bern.

The town of Skagway is nestled on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in southwestern Alaska. It is situated at the northern end of Alaska’s Inside Passage, a busy shipping lane dotted with tiny, often uninhabited isles and rimmed by countless blue-white glaciers. In 1897, gold was discovered in the Klondike region, and soon thousands of prospectors flocked to Skagway. It became a bustling mining town, complete with its own railway, port, and brand of Old West lawlessness.

The summer after my freshman year of high school, I spent three weeks at the Cambridge College Program, an opportunity for high school students around the globe to live at Cambridge University and take classes from Cambridge professors. I took two courses, one in astrophysics and one in debate. The courses were fascinating, and both of my professors were extremely knowledgeable, gifted teachers. But in addition to taking these classes, I was looking forward to the opportunity to explore Europe, a continent I had never seen before.