The world is both impossibly large and astonishingly small. Large, because traveling across the face of it you cannot help but be awed by the sheer unimaginable size of it: the masses of people on the streets of Delhi, the unceasing string of resorts and bars and revelers along the coast of Mexico, the vast haunted emptiness of the forests of Pripyat.

Small because you can visit all of those places over a long weekend, if you were sufficiently motivated. Technology has been shrinking the world slowly but steadily. Advances in transportation have inexorably reduced the distances between us. It took anywhere from six weeks to three months to sail the Atlantic during the American Revolution. By the mid-1800s that was down to about sixteen days.¹ It can currently be done in four.

But just as important is communication technology. I’m traveling with a MacBook, and every place I stay has WiFi. My mobile phone just works when I step off an airplane and turn it on. I can ask it for a map of the streets wherever I am, or to tell me where the nearest ATM is or how to get to the train station. I can buy train tickets or lookup airline schedules from my bedroom, wherever my bedroom happens to be that day.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t think packing up and traveling the world as a lifestyle choice is as impressive as it used to be. It’s just so much easier. If your life is centered around waking up, typing on your computer for eight hours, then watching some television and falling asleep, there’s virtually no difference. If instead your life is centered on venturing out and seeing what the world has to offer instead, well, there’s just no comparison.

One of the consequences of being so wired in to the world writ large is that you’re not as far away from everything as you used to be. Unless you make a deliberate effort to unplug² you’re not as distant from where you left as you used to be. I was hoping to be a little farther away from American politics than it turns out you can get anymore. I’m grateful to be physically distant from it. But I still wish I were farther away, mentally.

That applies to entertainment, as well. It used to be that different countries had different release dates for blockbuster movies.³ Now they’re all synchronized — the advantages of fitting your film into the release schedule of the local market now outweighed by the advantages of a global marketing push. It turns out, however, that’s not sufficient in all cases. I didn’t think to crosscheck my travel plans for Ukraine with the release date for Avengers: Endgame. I can’t say that I’m all that driven to see it. I wasn’t tracking the release, or making plans to see it opening night. I assumed I’d just pick up a ticket for it some evening after it came out, wherever I happened to be. And sure enough, it’s playing in Lviv. In Ukrainian. And while the English version is scheduled to play here, it doesn’t start until May 9^th.

Sensible people would have waited three weeks, or maybe just read some damn spoilers so they could stop avoiding parts of the Internet and gone on with their lives. Instead, I’m flying to Poland for 24 hours.⁴ This is where the small world and the large world collide. The world is small enough that I feel like I need to see this movie, but it’s large enough that it’s still a pain to do so. I’m not particularly comfortable putting out the money and time and effort,⁵ especially for something so essentially frivolous.

But I’m doing it anyway. It’s not just about the spoilers. There’s a cultural conversation surrounding this movie, certainly amongst my friends, and not seeing it means excluding yourself from that aspect of the conversation. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. People like what they like. But do that too often — skip out of one too many cultural touchstones and shared experiences — and you might start to discover you have less and less in common with your friends. And soon after that, you might find you don’t have as many friends as you used to.

That’s a bit reductive. But I don’t think it’s wrong. Relationships take effort. Bonding with a community over corporate-produced entertainment may seem superficial, but it works just the same. It’s already hard to keep connections alive while traveling as aggressively as I am. And if flying to Warsaw for the day can help mend one stray thread of those connections, well then, witamy w Polsce.

Next: Warsaw (WMI) to Lviv (LWO)
Prev: Vilnius (VNO) to Lviv (LWO)

Footnotes

¹ By wooden paddlewheel ocean liners, no less

² Or you’re forced to, maybe by taking a transatlantic cruise with crappy, expensive WiFi

³ In 1981 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in June in the United States, July in the UK, August in the Netherlands, September in France, and October in Germany.

In 1998, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which I was incredibly looking forward to, was released to theaters just as I was leaving to spend most of the year in Germany and released in Germany just as I was returning to the United States. I still haven’t seen it.

⁴ I literally just looked for cheap round-trip flights from Lviv and found one for $50. Modern air travel is stupid.

⁵ Although I still favor making choices that force me to do interesting things, exhausting though that might be.