The idea was to create a universal second language. It's not intended to be everybody's first language, but if everyone has Esperanto as a second language then you could travel anywhere in the world and talk to the locals. It's designed to be easy to learn, so it's very regular. In practice it's far easier for Europeans to learn because the vocab is very close to Romance languages. That's one of the major flaws with the system, but it's not a problem that there's any real solution to at the moment.

If you want to find out more (and maybe see some samples of the language), lernu! has a lot of good information.

In terms of weirdness… whew, that's a big question! I read a book called In the Land of Invented Languages, which is a brilliantly written history of artificial languages. Many of them were designed to improve human thought or communication. Most of them were either laughably crap or simply failed to take off. Esperanto is strange as one of the few success stories. I was taken aback at that Esperanto convention because I found so many people for whom this was a very real thing. They had a giant room stacked to the ceiling with books in Esperanto, including translations of The Hobbit and The Wizard of Oz. In Europe, especially in the early 20th century, Esperanto had a lot more traction than we imagine. I've found postcards of family members writing to each other in Esperanto. They even had their own currency. I find that kind of thing very weird, and oddly exhilarating. These people are mad — you'd have to be — and yet they've made their madness a reality. They make it work. I think that's pretty exciting.