Day 0 "The one where he leaves"

True to my style and despite promises to myself, I am writing this at midnight, 6 hours before my final departure. The idea of this blog has been bouncing around inside my head and I have already visualized many future posts throughout the summer. Let me tell you that if I can follow through with my radical vision for this blog it will be spectacular. Like National Geographic worthy.

Before writing, any author must first think about who his audience is. I also had this thought and came to the realization that I have no idea who my audience is. You may be family, friends, the President, enemies (hello enemies) or even strangers somehow. Because you (the reader) could be just about anyone, I have decided to write to myself, even though I address "you" a lot it's pretty much just me talking to myself, which I do all the time. Do not however take this as a raw glimpse into my subconscious as that is way more disorganized and illegible. Yet this blog may reveal sides to me that you may be unfamiliar with and that's ok. If you decided (remember) to follow these ramblings then your view of me may change (hopefully for the better but who knows really) and I want to assure you as the reader that this change is ok. If your view of someone is not morphing and changing (even if you know them as well as anyone could) I would say that you are not expanding your relationship with this person to the fullest. (I know the continuation of this expansion would be impossible to keep up forever but if your view of a person hasn't changed in a while I would challenge you to be more intentional with that person). But let's try and not be too controversial or confrontational on the first blog shall we.

Let's go back to something that I touched on earlier and that's you following this blog. As I previously stated, I am not writing this blog for you (sorry), but that does not mean that I would not enjoy you reading this. In fact I probably place too much importance on you reading this but I promise I will try and care less ;). In order to keep you reading I wanted this introduction to be like a movie trailer. I want to give you a glimpse but not the whole show so that you will still fork over $10 to go see my creation. I tried to make some hype videos for this but couldn't get YouTube to come film them. So I'm stuck with this introduction. But I want to make this at least a little interactive so if there are "European things" that you want me to try like food, places, traditions, etc. you can post them on here or on the GoodBook (FaceBook) and I will try to fulfill them and post about it.

Other things that I hope to do on this blog are: take a lot of photographs (Most will be on instagram which I will post a link to), reflect on things that are occurring to me (no promises of anything revelational), funny stories obviously as well as the "darker" side of travel. I don't want to create this mirage of everything is great blah blah blah nonsense. If I hate something you will know, if I get depressed you will probably figure it out, if I get a tattoo... you will have no idea mom. I initially wanted to do an entire film project on the "darker side of travel" but that will have to wait till later.

That's about it for tonight. I'm learning with you and as this blog goes along I'm sure I will figure out some of the bells and whistles and really impress you. Just wait you'll be sooo impressed with me.

Not being but becoming,
Chris Costenbader