Day 1 - November 2, 2022
Made it to Finland in one piece! What a long but great day. We spent the day checking into our hotel, meeting our Fulbright Finland hosts, and getting to know the other members of our cohort. I was able to squeeze in a walk and a cappuccino before dinner. Tomorrow we begin really digging into why we are here: understanding and getting to know the Finnish education system.
While I have very few educational takeaways from today, I was struck by two things as our plane moved over Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The first is just how absurdly simple it was to hop on a plane and make it halfway around the globe in roughly 10 hours. While many people might complain about the long flight, lines, and paperwork, I was reminded as I watched the flight map in front of me of how long it took Danish and Norse explorers to make that reverse trek. Years upon years upon years it took, across the North Atlantic to find lands completely unknown. Us, on the other hand, we sit back and wait. It was almost too easy in the grand reflection time of history.
And yet, this ease does have its own consequences. In his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green writes about the cave paintings of prehistoric humans found in France during the 1940s. These paintings were so popular to tourists, yet so delicate that French authorities eventually had to close those caves, as the simple act of looking at these paintings brought about their deterioration from the human breath and debris brought into the caves. As I sit on this flight, I am reminded that the ease of travel does bring its own cost. Plane travel emits extreme amounts of carbon into our atmosphere, leading to the continual warming of our planet. I ask myself, as much as travel is important and enriching, does this desire to see the world also bring about its simultaneous deterioration? To be sure, there are larger and more complex reasons for global warming. But, like John Green's cave paintings, are we slowly part of the destruction of something that we so long to marvel at? Big thoughts for the first day. BUT, I think this kind of thought may one day drive us to admire and protect those things that we hold most dear.