You Shall Know Our Velocity

I think that the most symbolic thing that I get from You Shall Know Our Velocity isn’t just one specific moment. It is the whole idea of just picking up everything and going on a spur of the moment trip with a best friend. As long as I can remember this has been a dream of mine. At the beginning of the semester when I heard that the theme for our class was travel I was very excited because I really do love to travel and am very lucky for some of the traveling opportunities that I have had. I have been all over the United States from New York to Los Angeles. I have been to Mexico on several occasions. I have also been lucky enough to go overseas to England, Poland, and Israel. The trips that I have been on help me relate to some of the things that Hand and Will experienced on their trip. Many times in this book they have had a very hard time communicating because of the language barrier. They have been misunderstood and it does make getting around and getting things done a lot harder. This is probably a very common problem for a lot of travelers who visit foreign speaking countries including me. There has been a couple times when I just chose something off a foreign menu at a restaurant not sure what I might get just like Will and Hand did. Traveling can also mess with you fatigue and when you need to sleep. It seems like there were several occasions in this book when both Will and Hand wanted to get more things done in the day but were so tired that they were forced to sleep. When I visited Poland we left during the day and landed during the day so I went quiet a lot of time without sleep. I am very envious though of the opportunity that Will was given, because of the money he received, to take an adventure like this. Even though his reason was to give it all the money away this is a great way to do it. When I put his trip in perspective I think of Will as the guy who gives out the Publishers Clearinghouse prizes but these winners don’t have to enter to win. Like I said earlier that going on an around the world trip like Will and Hand are doing has always been a dream of mine and reading this book get me excited to maybe have the opportunity has well. The unfortunate part about their trip is that Will seems to be not enjoying a lot of the aspects. This is because he is still in mourning of his best friends death as well as getting beat up. I don’t know if he feels guilty that he gets to be in all these places and his best friend is dead but it makes me upset as well. It also feels like Will is starting to real dislike Hand. Will is always talking about how much he hates the things he does and then it seems like Hand doesn’t even notice how much Will really doesn’t like him. Overall this book has been really great and has made me think a lot about what I would do if I were in Will’s situation and if going on this trip was the right situation. I hope that in the end Will will somehow find peace in the fact that he has done so much by giving these poverty stricken people money and will also find some way to move on from his friends death.