Celebrating Two Stellar Years Of LTA

by

Mackenzie Patel

Hello world travelers! This is going to be a special post and one that makes me incredibly happy and proud to whip up for you. I won’t be expounding upon the merits of 16^th century Dutch art, the pedagogic writing style of Tolstoy, or the achingly beautiful composition that is Scheherazade. I will abandon all pretense of culture and simply write about LearnTravelArt, the website that has morphed into my obsession for the past two years.  Today marks the two year anniversary of LTA for I posted my first article, a rather pathetic and Wikipedia-like one about the history of Italy, on October 24^th, 2013. Although I laugh at the underdeveloped, robotic, and lackluster writing style, everything I have accomplished thus far stems from this 800 word collection of unoriginal facts from the internet. My love for LearnTravelArt is unending, like a complicated calculus series that diverges to infinity. And to think this whole project came into thought when my mother and I were on one of our nightly neighborhood walks!

My website started out as a forum for teen travel stories, but after quickly realizing few teens were reading my site, I branched out into art history videos (and we’ve ALL made embarrassing YouTube videos), personal travel stories, and picture/word of the day. My love affair with writing began during my sophomore year of high school; my AP English teacher was incredible and instilled in me a drive to push the creative boundaries of language. Although the class was challenging, and I barely scraped an A each semester, the fascinating woman scrubbed and polished my writing style, transforming something rudimentary and lifeless into a grammatically correct force to be reckoned with. Also, the amusing doctrine of Mark Twain reminds me perfectly of her: “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”  My first posts were rougher than stiff industrial carpet from Home Depot, but two years later, churning out an 1,000 word article takes 45 minutes and a short story mere days.

LearnTravelArt has also shrunk the limits of the reachable world for me—I have “met” many international writers, written for their websites, and contacted authors whose works I have adored. The internet is such a beautiful, strange place, for it has connected me with famous French authors and seedy students living in Paris alike. I was thrilled when Russell Gold, author of The Boom (a history of fracking), responded to my email about my book review and even sent me images to post! Through his connection, my work was posted on Simon&Schuster’s cluttered Twitter account. Although the tweet and link to my site were buried within minutes, I know that somewhere in the murky limits of cyberspace, my website is swimming in the famous publisher’s sea of words. I also wrote a review of The Red Notebook, an enchanting novel about a French bookseller and his quest to discover the owner of a mauve handbag. Antoine Laurain, the suave, devil-may-care author, answered my email as well and said, “I’m also very proud to have a reader so youg but so brillant!” His misspellings and throatily sexy French accent I can only imagine made the correspondence so much sweeter. And of course, I can’t neglect Patrick, my writer friend based in Barcelona (whom I secretly call Patricio because he is in Spain after all). I have penned a few travel articles for his snazzy website EverythingBarcelona.net—find one here. Along that garbled strain, it is because of LearnTravelArt that I have been able to guest write for various travel websites. Teen Travel Talk, Huffington Post, Digging Art, WANTNEWSFORTEENS…once I tasted the triumphant feeling of literary victory with Cush Travel, my throat was parched with desire and so I wrote and wrote and wrote.

Besides connecting with international authors and Wall Street Journal journalists, my website has reached out to clothing companies, University Library personnel, used bookstore owners, and family members/friends living abroad in England and Germany. One of my favorite articles to date was one involving RAD clothing, a grunge chic company based in the UK. Their shameless marriage of snarky pop culture and refined art history is hilarious, especially in their shirts that proclaim the words of Kanye West on famous paintings by Botticelli. Also, I sent the recent mash up of an invective against Barnes&Noble/praise of a local bookstore to the owner of the bookstore in question (the fascinating man whose “silver hairdo drips with knowledge”). Jim replied, “Thanks for the review and the kind words! It’s nice to be appreciated in world that’s rapidly giving up reading real books in lieu of the instant gratification of the internet and gaming and 300+ television channels…And I agree wholeheartedly on the soullessness feel of crisp new books, which, to some degree, mirrors the shallowness of the content.” And to think this deeper friendship was forged by some well-chosen words noodling around the internet is amazing…

Finally, LearnTravelArt has exponentially increased my interest and appreciation of music, literature, art history, and traveling. Dabbling into other realms other than traveling/history was never my original intent, but like so many things in the past two years, everything has changed. I write about my loves and obsessions, my unique experiences and perspective, my thoughts and ponderings. Everything from The Sun Also Rises and Petrushka to the Swiss Alps and Andy Warhol Converse has been written about, but thick volumes about everything worthwhile and beautiful are still to come. LearnTravelArt is my public travel journal, for I fully intend to continue spinning tales of European adventure in the years (and summers) to come. I interviewed a survivor of Dunkirk. I posted results of a statistical experiment I contrived in junior year of high school. I’ve written about the gaudy anachronisms of Caesar’s Palace for goodness sakes! LTA has been through it all, and this state of continuity has kept me sane during the whirlwind of angsty adolescence, emotional months of senior year, and finally the unpredictable train wreck that is college.

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone who has supported my interest in LearnTravelArt and encouraged me to keep writing, discovering, learning, and improving. My mother is chiefly the editor of my articles, and I thank her to no end for every grammatical error, misplaced punctuation mark, and awkward word placement she has corrected me on. I love that my grandfather, an eighty three year old with a computer running on molasses and wasted seconds, reads my work, sends it to family in Germany, and even saves it to his favorites tab! Although my father doesn’t read much, I am convinced his interesting familial background sparked my infinite curiosity about traveling and the wider world. Also, I heap piles of congratulations and respect on my friends that read the LTA articles I spam Facebook with—I love that you guys take the time to look at my words of unnecessary culture! Whether you’ve been reading my site for a while like the talented Miss Martinez or just stumbled across it a few weeks ago (shout out to Jeff, Aaron, Allen, and Tyler!), I hold you all in the highest regard—so thank-you!

Two years of life and content have slipped away, but at least LearnTravelArt has saved me from the unmemorable slush of high school. It has given me the thrill of Sylvia Plath, Switzerland, Rimsky-Korsakov, Banksy, Walt Disney World, A Clockwork Orange, plate tectonics, and Ancient Rome. And Ernest Hemingway, who so dryly stated, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”