“No.” She looks at him squarely, and he, still sniggering, has one question before departing: how might one identify which prostitutes were up for S&M? Did they have different colored lights in their windows? They don’t, she says; look for leather costumes.

At the end of six weeks in Amsterdam, I’d hoped nothing would shock me—in fact, it was something of a goal. I had a sense that there was something inherently judgmental in shock at the spectrum of humanity. I’d decided that interest was a more appropriate stance—one that didn’t moralize and didn’t pretend to a categorical normality.

It was a difficult line to walk, since I still felt there were many things reserved for outrage. But consensual human sexuality just wasn’t one of them, at least not in the Red Light District in Amsterdam, where you could be faintly surprised at just how many quirks and kinks could be satisfied, but were more taken aback by how sanitized and touristy it was.

Watching a man trying to buy a wife—a breeder, more accurately—made me queasy, cemented some of my suspicions about how some men are taught to regard women. But I could file it under the category of life experience, transmute it to racy anecdote status. This is what we’re supposed to get when we travel, right—good stories and a broadened horizon? A cultivated sense of nonchalance?

At Harvard, the unflappable attitude is easy enough for most to cultivate, or at least affect, because even the most sheltered pretend to world-weariness, and because, more charitably, the scope of human experience is fair game under academia. But within this paradoxically insular world of cosmopolitanism, where many spend far too much time in privilege and classrooms and offices, being experienced with this world is often incorrectly conflated with being blasé.

As for myself, rejecting the eastern seaboard internship circuit for one summer isn’t terribly revolutionary in the grand scheme of things, and it’s true that the concept of “real world experience” smacks of a little condescension. But leaving Cambridge for a job wandering around in drug-vending coffeeshops and smartshops and wading through brothels and sex shows—it beat my summers chained to the computer. To drink absinthe, behave brazenly and rudely to strangers in bars; to play mindgames with thieving landlords; to hop trains and planes solo, to abandon compulsive scheduling, at least for a time—it taught me something that despite an abstract knowledge of it, still managed to come as a shock: Harvard is not the entire world.

Irin Carmon ’05, an associate magazine editor of The Crimson, is a literature concentrator in Quincy House. Her months of crisscrossing continents are about to wind down, but not for long.