In essence, this quote is true.
Applied to reality though, in our day and age your results may vary. It is completely possible to travel and learn nothing that would open people’s minds especially when the traveling keeps itself within tourist zones and resorts designed to just give you a change of landscape and an illusion of cultural flavor.
You need to purposefully step away from that sort of thing and actually engage with the culture to get the benefits of the quote.
I wonder if it was more effective in his era, late 19th century? Leisure travel wasn’t as much of a thing then, especially to other countries/continents, and the tourism industry didn’t exist nearly as much
Definitely, when the traveling time alone is anywhere from a week to a month or more, with lots of required stops, then it makes sense to spend a long time in a place.
Looks like it took Bertrand Russell 6 weeks to get from England to Shanghai in 1920.
Meanwhile all tourist-facing workers in every non-Anglo country have heard “I’M AMERICAN! SPEAK ENGLISH TO ME!!!” at least once.
I saw a tiktok of a Brit talking about this with the upcoming ban in the US, and he made an interesting point. The Americans who can afford to travel and take time off work, are more often the ones who have lived privileged lives, and as a result act more entitled than the average American. He commented how interacting with regular Americans on tiktok changed his perception of what they are like, because only interacting with the tourists makes it seem like there’s a higher percentage of entitled a-holes.
I don’t travel. Is it common for the locals servicing tourists to not know at least enough English to get by?
Yeah, just think of all those famously unprejudiced travelers of history like Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes or Robert Clive…
Having read Mark Twain’s autobiographical travel log, I love that he himself is a bit of bigot - stereotyping quite a few of those peoples he meets on the way.
Albeit in a fairly human way and with a bit of irony about it. Great writer interesting human.
Lol. Lmao.
yankee tourists put the lie to that immediatelyi always wondered what would happen if twain met kant considering this quote from twain and the fact that kant never went further than 25 miles of his home; yet both are respected figures.
I used to think this. Then some girl in Poland asked me “so are you like, illegal?” When I told her I was Mexican. I’ve ran into other assholes while traveling but I still remember her.
Depends. Plenty of travelers end up dead due to malice or greed (among other things such as personal stupidity). I’m pretty sure they would have developed plenty of prejudice had they lived to share their tales.
