Learning, Valuing, and Appreciating Travel: The Process of Discovery in The Turkish Embassy Letters Anonymous College

Whether from one city to the next, one country to the next, or one continent to the next, travel is essential in allowing people to form new ideas about the world around them. Travel allows a person to step outside of the bubble of comfort that surrounds the familiar. It pushes a person to see the world in a way that they never would have without it. In The Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu learns just how essential travel can be as she and her husband journey from London to Constantinople. As seen through her personal letters, Lady Mary’s travels abroad teach her that a multitude of things can be learned, appreciated, and valued from other cultures even when they are vastly different from the one that she calls her own.

Lady Mary first begins to realize that other cultures can be appreciated when she takes the time to think about how much she would enjoy having their creature comforts in her life. Her appreciation is rooted in how outside inventions could make her life in England, and the life of others, so much easier than it is at the moment. She notes how the people of Blankenburg are able to create an extended growing season for their greenhouses by utilizing specially made indoor stoves that heat their...