"Travelling. This makes men wiser, but less happy."
~Thomas Jefferson, Paris 1787
What is the value of travel? Is it really worth the hassle of working for two or three years to save up enough money to take a trip? Is it worth sacrificing your time? Is travel important, or is it just a luxury? What can I see in another country that I can't see on the Internet? These are just some of the questions that I get when I invite students to travel to Europe with me. The best way to answer these questions is to share my philosophy behind travel.
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| Giving the Alpenhorn a try in Switzerland |
Travel has a tremendous educational benefit. In fact, it is the best form of education available. If your goal as a student is to learn something about the world and how other people live, then your best bet to accomplish this is to visit those people where they live. The world is a very small place, if you only see your small part of it. By visiting other places, meeting the people who live there, and learning about thier cultures, we broaden our own view of the world. It is easy to ridicule and fear what you don't know. This fear causes us to be even more isolated in our thinking. If the following century is to be a global century, it benefits us all to gain some exposure to the world through travel. Many of my former students and tour participants have taken this message to heart by participating in study abroad programs during thier university studies.
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| Dinner in the Latin Quarter in Paris |
I am not an advocate of travel for the sake of traveling. It is entirely possible for one to travel to another country and to see nothing of the place or it's people. Ask your average business traveler about this. Some travelers only stick to a well-worn touristic zone when they travel, often being ushered from one canned experience to another. Ask cruise ship passengers about this type of experience. For travel to be meaningful, it must be done with your boots firmly on the ground, in the culture of the country in which you are traveling. Learn some of the local language and try it out! Find out where the locals hang out and spend some time there. That is one of the big reasons why I do not enjoy staying in a hotel in the suburbs when traveling in Europe. It may save you a couple of dollars, but you lose out on experiencing European cities in the evening hours, when the rest of the tourists are shuttled off to thier hotels for the evening and the real residents of the cities take back their streets. Being able to spend an evening enjoying a passagiata with the locals in Rome, or an evening with Bavarian families in a biergarten in Munich more than makes up for the expense of a hotel closer to the city center.
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| Trying the local cuisine (frog's legs) in Paris |
My first travel experience came at the age of six. I traveled to Munich to visit family with my parents and my grandmother. I still remember that trip very well. In high school, I was fortunate enough to be able to travel all over Japan for ten days with my high school band. The next year I traveled to Berlin, Passau, Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich. I remember seeing the Ossis (East Germans) ditching their little Trabant cars on the side of the road and driving off in their brand new Volkswagens and Mercedes Benzs. I remember the overwhelming sense of historical signifcance watching the machines demolish what was left of the wall in Berlin. I actually had the feeling of being part of that moment in history, as the barbed wire borders came down and a new Europe opened up. The change was not just images on a TV screen anymore. Seeing eastern Germany only a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and only a couple of months after unification, changed my perspective on world events and drove my passion for European history. I was fortunate enough to have a mother who believed that giving me these travel opportunities was one of the most important things she could do for my education. I'm sure it wasn't easy to make them happen, but somehow she managed it. This is a big reason why I continue to offer these opportunities to my students.
Beware! Once you travel, you will be left wanting more. Travel can open your mind and broaden your horizons. However, once you return home you will probably want to begin planning your next voyage.
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| I made the front of the ACIS website! |
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