last night I finished watching L'auberge Espanole...it was a movie about a French student going to Barcelona, where he shares an apartment with an erray of people all from different countries.

It is was a very culturally diverse film. It was refreshing to see a movie that showcases the intermixings of cultures...and was even able to show people with different cultural identies being able to live with one another...something that seems missing from the landscape of todays media...most of the news showcases how our difficulties to relate to each other lead to violence and conflict.

Watching this movie...it sort of reawakened the feeling with me, the wanting to travel and live a more diverse life, filled with more possibilities...in some ways joining the army was the start, but it reminds me that I am not finished.

I was thinking back to a some years ago while I was growing up, the world seemed so much more open and on the verge of increased global interaction...or at least it felt that way to me at the time. The world has such a different feeling now. Traveling seems to lack any feeling of security it once held, and is now replaced by looming fear of terrorism and violence and now overshadows the dreams of cultural expansion.

You'd think with the connections created by the internet and continued sharing of medias such as film and music would have torn down these walls, yet oddly enough an invisible Berlin wall seems to still exist in the world. Things aren't all bad, yet somehow I always imagined growing up, that things would change and get better over time.

With the wealth of knowledge now available to us, logically you'd expect a greater understanding. Yet if anything, it has shown how even when more knowledge is available, many people still cling to the basics of what they know. It is almost as if we are unwilling to ever grow and are unwilling to learn.