Post Archive


Here you can find every post from Jack's Journal, even the ones I've hidden! 

I've travelled around and talked to a lot of people in my two years abroad. Inevitably, at some point in the conversation, I get asked "What's up with your country?" The United States' unique economic, defence, and political position in the world gives us a lot of pull, but it also makes people think about us. Like learning the English language, the more someone tries to learn about the American way of things, the more they get confused.

Prisoners from the front were moved to the Risiera, interrogated, and transported elsewhere for their wartime internment. Not all of them made it, however, as prisoners who died under torture or who were deemed undesirable to Nazi authorities were cremated on site. When the Allies invaded Italy, the Nazis retreated, destroying the crematorium and other parts of the Risiera in the process. Like the death camps, there could be no evidence of their crimes for Allies to find.

"How do you afford it?" The answer is as simple as it is unglamorous: financial discipline. Not hacks, not complicated investment strategies, not collaboration with influencers, just good old fashioned discipline.

Border controls like this one are a fact of life for long-term travellers like me. As Americans, we have an idealised view of what international travel looks like as we take our annual two-week vacation to popular tourism destinations. We are often waived through without serious inspection, our tourism dollars more valuable than customs regulations. I wasn't visiting tourism hotspots; I was visiting countries both on and off the beaten path.

Watching the spectacle before me, I realised it was the first time I had seen something die before me in person. This wasn't a movie, video game, or a thought experiment. Death was real in the ring.