'Muricans need to travel abroad...

I think every American needs to be forced to travel abroad immediately upon graduating high school.  See the world. Figure out that we are NOT the center of the universe and there are vastly more beautiful and complex cultures out there. Traveling in my late teens was the best thing I've ever done....it gives you a unique worldview that is absolutely unattainable from watching a video of Rick Steves walking through some Italian village....go through the village yourself.  Ask for a loaf of bread...in Italian.

Try and figure out how to pay for something in lira in Romania.  Spend a day in Switzerland eating nothing but chocolate in various forms. Order a drink, say it wrong, and sheepishly drink it anyway.  Eat a salmon in a restaurant right on a dock in Scotland...where the fish was just caught that day. Oh yeah, when you're in Scotland, don't act like a wuss- eat the haggis...you'll be glad you did. Buy a street kid in a third-world country a pastry from the nearest bakery and watch a tow-headed 8 year old walk away with your heart and a fist full of chocolate croissant crumbs.

Eat with the locals. Eat in their homes. Don't question what it is, just enjoy and be grateful. Attend a wedding, the entire village following an open horse-cart carrying a blushing bride as it winds its way through the small streets. Don't be led by fear...walk with the locals as they tread through a labyrinth of armed soldiers to simply attend church, and then watch as those soldiers slam the door to the church and threaten elderly women with beatings if they don't leave. Take it in. Think of going to church in America. Take it in and think.

Turn a street corner in Zurich and let the Alps unfurl in front of you and positively take the strength from your knees. Wade through the sky-high sunflowers in fields across southern Romania, many planted there, according to locals, as an act of defiance against communism post-revolution.
 Look how happy we are....we've got ten acres of sunflowers.

Walk among the stones of Stonehenge. Stand where Roman gladiators stood. Swim in the Danube River, laughing and playing soccer on the beach with local gypsies, until the men with machine guns come and chase you away. Crawl in caves beside glistening waterfalls. Hike on trails that curve among the highest mountains and end in the clouds.

Pray in a Greek Orthodox church. Pray in a Jewish temple. Pray in a mosque. Pray in the biggest cathedrals in the world and pray at small roadside stops for monks.  Pray as you walk down dusty roads that used to be herding trails for shepherds. Pray as you see orphaned children living in the ruins of bombed out buildings, and when your fever breaks 104 and you're shuddering deliriously in the cheap, mismatched sheets of a motel in a place called Turnu Margurele and a local priest presses his withered hands on your stomach and prays aloud in a language you don't realize, in your fevered, painful stupor, is Latin...and then you awake, fever broken....pray the most fervent prayer of gratitude and humility.

[Don't drink the water abroad unless you're positive you can.]

Talk with locals. Let them play their music for you...it will be one of the best moments of your life. Watch them dance, and join in.  If you are invited for dinner, and as you walk up and see a large wooden table set up outside with various lanterns and torches set up, flowers strung up in the trees, you stop, take a moment to pause and remember this, because it will be forever etched into the soul of who you are.  You'll be there until the wee hours of the morning, eating, drinking, dancing, singing, laughing, and you will never forget it. Make sure of it.

Learn. Listen to stories of war. Listen to jokes. Tell them your stories and your jokes. Contribute to the cross-pollination of culture.

Do all of this, and then come back to America and TRY to have the same mindset you had before.  You can't.