I spent the day with Ella in a café talking about what we wanted from our experience away. Some time ago I became dissatisfied with the idea of capital-hopping and collecting countries. I believe your exposure and understanding of a place is heavily limited by spending only a few days or a week in a capital before moving on to the next country. This is typical when doing things such as interrailing and it's how I started a few years ago. It doesn't allow you to experience the varied culture of each country. Think about the differences of your homeland in northern and southern regions or with each city you have visited. I understand that two of the biggest factors when travelling are time and money - where one is usually limited, and so it’s not always possible to stay for long. I truly believe you must slow down as much as you can and see fewer countries but more destinations. Of course it's a scale based on time and living in a new place would be more insightful. As an arbitrary merit badge I would be much more interested in hearing the ratio of cities to countries that an individual has travelled through, rather than hearing how quickly one has visited them.
We left the café to see the sunset by the organ. Ella shared with me that upon his visit to Zadar in '64, Alfred Hitchcock said that Zadar has the most beautiful sunset in the world. It was good, but not extraordinary, not until Ella turned around to face inland and saw that this was in fact the gem. Initially papaya, the snow-capped mountains and troposphere were then illuminated pink; the clouds gave definition to the sky which looked like cotton-candy as they turned a lighter shade of rose.