The Brown & White

A family vacation, for many children, is the perfect opportunity to start a collection - a different doll from each destination, personalized souvenir key chains or colorful bumper stickers to adorn a fourth-grade Trapper Keeper.

My childhood road trips were spent collecting friends. My mother still keeps my flimsy notebook, now buried in an upstairs closet, as a memento of my eccentric travel hobby.

Each page is scrawled with the names, ages and hometowns of kids I met at Mark Twain's childhood home, on the beach at Cape Cod or at the Burger King next to the Grand Canyon. It is unclear whether I was just that socially awkward or simply eager to stretch my limited grasp of the world and the fascinating people in it, but I like to believe it was the latter. Thirteen years and two months of European travels later, I keep stretching, and I've come to realize that the web of collected friends and connections we all weave is more elaborate than my eight-year-old self could have ever imagined.

The thought of spending a semester on another continent and living a 10-hour flight away from friends, family and all things familiar, was slightly intimidating. My journey into the unfamiliar was just that - unfamiliar. But it didn't take long to discover that no matter how foreign the destination and its inhabitants may appear, finding common ground or even common friends is surprisingly simple. The world, as it turns out, is much smaller than it seems.

While hiking a volcano on the Greek island of Santorini, I came across a fellow traveler who grew up living next door to my sorority sister. My host dad spent 45 minutes on the phone catching up with old friends who live beside my real dad's law school campus. The guy who slept in the bunk next to me in a Barcelona hostel graduated from the high school where my brother teaches. One of my traveling companions struck up a conversation with a group of girls who had attended the same summer camp she had. The man who stamped my passport at the Dublin airport visits his family in the Chicago suburb next to my own every year. I ran into a junior high classmate in a Roman piazza. The connections are endless.

The friends we collect at various points of our lives overlap with the friend collections of our families, co-workers, classmates and cousin's neighbor's ex-girlfriends, until those ties inevitably tangle, even in the most unlikely of places.

The world is brimming with people of every color, disposition and walk of life, and the handful of relationships we each create includes only a miniscule proportion of those.

Although it's unlikely the passenger beside you in a French subway car has met your mother, maybe his college roommate once went on a business trip where he shared a table with someone who briefly dated her hairdresser. Maybe we are all more connected than we think.

To quote one of my all-time favorite movies, "It's a Wonderful Life," "Each man's life touches so many other lives." And Clarence's words have never rung clearer than during this wonderful life I've been leading abroad.

Today, friend-collecting tools like Facebook offer anyone a chance to participate in my childhood travel pastime from the comfort of their own computer chair. But I still prefer the old-fashioned method.

I may no longer write down the names, ages and hometowns of the friends I've been collecting during my adventures on the other side of the world this semester, but if I happen to run into the girl I met at the Burger King next to the Grand Canyon, I would not be at all surprised.