The Mongolian standard, that's what we're calling it today.

Students at the Salzburg Academy are deciding on their lesson plans this afternoon, determining what news stories and concepts can be valuable education for the rest of the world. For their professors and the working journalists here, this process may be easy — or at least make sense. They've seen enough of journalism to approach it from the outside and observe it at a distance.

But for the students, the destination is foreign. They've been on one side of the classroom for all their lives, and now they're going to try the other side. Similarly, on news, the students have been consumers or, if they've had internships, producers to an extent. But standing outside news is a different task. When news and education meet, there's a critical realization to be had: What's valuable information to me may be worthless or incomprehensible to someone else.

Which is why we're applying the Mongolian standard today. The curriculum-planning students have to ask themselves, as vaudevillians did with then-far Peoria, "But will it play in Mongolia?"

The students come from the United States, Argentina, England, Turkey, Uganda, China, and a host of other countries, all removed some from Mongolia. (China's a neighbor, yes, but the major universities are a hike.) At the same time, Mongolia is exactly how far the lesson plans have to reach. One of more than 100 institutions using the curricula, the Mongolian Institute of Radio and TV is waiting. The students have to learn how the reality they've known so far can connect.

In a sense, news consumers around the world struggle these days with the same issue. Sources are shifting; personal news is becoming public matter; local news is increasingly going global and vice versa. Whatever individual realities have been, we've all become students to a changing world. As we live in that world's steady information stream, whether we wake up in Washington, Ulan Bator or even Salzburg each morning, Mongolia and not-Mongolia now come at us in equal measure.

Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.

Taken in my first hour here. Here's behind the classroom palace…

… and the courtyard of the Meierhof, just a few steps from the palace, where we have our rooms, lounge (where I'm typing) and lectures…

… one of the many ridiculous rooms in the palace (more pix to come)…

… the back of the palace, where we drink wine…

… and continue looking at the mountains.

Post coming later this week: Which of these scenes were actually in The Sound of Music, and what they totally faked you out on.

#salzburgacademy – I throw this open to blog, Facebook and Twitter commenters. The question is the most provocative one I've heard in the international mix here so far. Women from the Slovak education department raised it yesterday. Are Americans more comfortable in their outgoingness, compared to the rest of the world? Or living in a Hollywood society, do they unknowingly perform in their interactions?

Here at Big Old Palace, they give you a map when you want to go into town. The map shows three roads. Those roads are the only three you need. In the middle of the map, there's a drawing of the mountain with a fortress on top that you can see from everywhere. That's helpful too.

Walking into Salzburg's city center: The very first thing I saw.

"The old man by the clock would watch passersby from his window…"

The Austria-Australia jokes apparently never end. Which I like.

At a cart in the market, I tried to order a local beer with a local accent. The cart people replied in English. Oh well. Beer was obviously good.

Amazing violin on the street. The summer music festival is beginning…

How long could I stand in front of the horses and still get a shot? The best test of the new digital camera so far as this pic was mid-jump.

What was this building? A church? Another palace? Need a better map.

I'd had Wooden Heart stuck in my head all day. All day. And I'd almost gotten it out when I ran into this man playing it. Redemption moment!

Why I know Wooden Heart, based on a German folk song, which the man was probably playing. This reason will not surprise you at all.

Austrian humor at the airport…

… and a mountain by the taxi stand. Mozart Airport, my friends.

The Frankfurt-to-Salzburg leg was quick, and the Knight folks got a ride to the palace together. We're now exploring the grounds and amazing rooms. Pix of those to come. Exhaust kicking in a little, but lunch soon.

Are free drinks enough to offset bad movies? Yes. It's a busy 6 a.m. at the Frankfurt airport, and that's my best European travel lesson so far. While Lufthansa seatback screens may go heavy for the chick flicks and kid stuff, the steady wine pours, a chocolate mousse and an after-meal brandy should be a lesson to the industry. A lesson! If Lufthansa could do some trades with Virgin, we'd be close to the world's perfect airline.

The plane was packed, but my seat choice yesterday morning lucked out with an empty seat to my right. A dozen or two Academy students were on the flight, and hopefully they're all as excited for the program as Denisha Chase who sat to my left. The trip is study abroad for her.

Didn't get in any sleep, but knocked off a New Yorker and a half and watched some TV and He's Just Not That Into You. Could have been decent, failed. How did the people making the movie not realize they were blowing it that badly? How could they have justified that script to themselves? What made them think gays should be the new Magic Negro? Ugly. Why did so many young people have landlines? Where was a little thing called Facebook? But I did like Affleck and Aniston.

The Frankfurt airport is now even more packed than when I began this post. Signage could be better — Germans, you're letting me down — but I guess navigating between terminals, through a passport line and a security check without any English earns the airport two thumbs up.

On the front row of airport newstand racks, National Geographic is two magazines down from Playboy. A little cart brought stacks upon stacks of newspapers to the store, so … take heart, Web-hating journalists?

Sunrise here is blocked by a few buildings but looks good above them. Salzburg flight in two hours. Time to hit the Camel smoking lounge? No.

Behind the two random people in front are my aunt, my grandmother, my mom, my uncle, and my grandfather. Into the salt mines we go!

The last thing I thought about before I fell asleep last night and the first thing I thought about when I woke up this morning were the same. This dream is a daydream, but the dream, as they say in Risky Business and on couches everywhere, is always the same. I grab the yoke and pull back hard. My heart pounds and the jet fights to level.

When the thought hit this morning, I got out of bed, checked my e-mail — it calms my nerves, a reminder of connections, people and comfort — and watched a video that I knew would distract me for a few minutes.

I fly anyway. That's how I usually put it. Fear of flying is dumb, plain and simple. It's irrational. People ask me if September 11 contributed, and I don't think so. Falling in love for the first time was what did it.

Years into the guarantee of the family, love was different, expanding, pushing on map lines. When you said goodbye at the airport, there was a new and tenuous connection with the world at stake. You can call this reason as dumb as a fear of flying. It's true for me, that's all.

So, you, let's have a toast. Here's to … flying to another country, flying on a tiny plane, flying with a passport, flying to a new region, flying in the cockpit, flying across the country, flying over real mountains, flying the red eye, flying to a new altitude, flying on a huge plane, and the loved ones and friends alongside, slowly leading you from the ground to the sky, from the aisle to the window seat and across the ocean.

In the order in which I've learned them. (Is this an exercise to help me feel like I know something instead of nothing about this trip? You bet.)

1. Salzburg is in Austria.

2. It's been a long time since the Blessed Sacrament geography bee.

3. The Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change is not a scam.

4. The Sound of Music owns Salzburg. Don't fight it.

5. The Springsteen tour will be in Spain at the time.

6. Schedule will permit some things but probably not Spain.

7. But the Salzburg summer music festival will be happening.

8. I need to visit the salt mines (and take a picture there), fortress, funicular, Sound of Music tour, Mozart house, and city market.

9. A funicular is not a funnel cake.

10. I need to eat everything else, like chocolate, tortes and pretzels.

11. I'm flying Lufthansa, spelled with a super-quiet "h."

12. Neither my phone nor BlackBerry will work in Salzburg.

13. I don't own a watch, so I'll carry an unusable phone as a watch.

14. Tom Stoppard is going to be in our general vicinity for a week.

15. Traveling to Europe takes as long as traveling to California.

16. My electric razor and unusable phones need a electric converter.

17. My laptop just needs a plug adapter. We'll also root for wireless.

18. Best Buy staff have grown sharper. Radio Shack staff, less so.

19. The Salzburg music festival was the Von Trapp escape scene!

20. I'm gonna be sleepy.

21. Salzburg is currently six hours ahead of the East Coast.

22. Leave 3:20p ET, arr 9:25a local. Leave 8:30a local,  arr 3:15p ET.

23. Temps range from 50 to 80, so I'll need to bring all my clothes.

24. The #1 song is Austria right now is Emilíana Torrini's Jungle Drum.

25. Aka Grey's song when the icicle hits Cristina. Am I ready to go yet?

For the first time. But I'm eventually coming back. Heading to Austria later this month, I'm going to spend three weeks as a Knight fellow at the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. The four fellows — two from the USA, two from Jordan — are going to be working with faculty and students from around the world as they create new lenses for media literacy and critical awareness. But my favorite parts so far? The Salzburg airport is apparently named W.A. Mozart Airport, and our classrooms are in the palace where they filmed The Sound of Music.

If you've been there or near there, any and all advice is welcome. I've begun reading all I can in preparation, but there's much more to go.

Two weeks out, I'm excited and nervous. My foreign travel experience consists of Montreal, Toronto and Niagara Falls, Canada. My longest flight over water likely involves Lake Michigan. I joke that my brother, jetting off these days to Beijing, Madrid and Sao Paolo for work, is the Cooper most likely to cause an international incident. But really now. We know there's only one Cooper most likely to fall down the Alps.

Or, as we all learned as children, this could happen…