Reasons to leave home

Whether a trip abroad is worthwhile depends on why you are going.

One of our tutor’s students is contemplating a Spring Break trip to Europe next year, as part of a group tour arranged by teachers at her school.  On the face of it, it’s a great opportunity: Paris, Monaco, Provence and Barcelona, all in ten days.  Unfortunately, he can’t really help in her decision.  She must balance the family’s finances, with (soon) two children in college, against what she might gain from the trip.  And her perspective is radically different from any of ours: she has been out of the US, but only at such a young age that she remembers nothing of it.  We have quite a variety of visa stamps in our old passports.

So what would a High School student whose life has been largely confined to northern Virginia get out of a trip to Europe?  The most tangible things would be the actual experience of seeing great art and architecture.  We’ve argued before that the flat screen of a computer or TV is simply no substitute for the round world.  Add to that the experience of immersion in a different language.  We found it unexpectedly affecting, and a bit alarming, to realize on our first forays abroad that we couldn’t fall back on English if we had to.  For students of a foreign language there’s the exhilarating possibility of using it outside the classroom, in the wild as it were.  Our tutor’s student is in an upper-level Spanish class, so unfortunately won’t get to practice it until toward the end, where in Barcelona it will be mixed with Catalan.

She mentioned the point that it would be an extended period away from her family, with her friends.  That in itself, taken the right way, could be a maturing experience, even though it’s less tangible than a selfie taken in front of the Louvre.  For the historically inclined, there’s the thrill of actually being in a place figuring in the textbook.  This affects people differently, though, and we know of one traveler to the Mediterranean who thought the ruined Greek temples should be cleared away and the land put to better use.

The Spectator, a daily publication in London, put it this way in April of 1712: “Certainly the true end of visiting foreign parts is to look into their customs and policies, and observe in what particulars they excel or come short of our own; to unlearn some odd peculiarities in our manners, and wear off such awkward stiffnesses and affectations in our behaviour, as may possibly have been contracted from our constantly associating with one nation of men, by a more free, general and mixed conversation.”  This is a typically Enlightenment attitude: a rational plan of self-improvement; but worth considering for all that.

We think the greatest benefit might be the deep-down realization (rather than just repetition of the phrase) that people do things differently there.  Actually experiencing a city where the signs and conversation are in a different language, the unwritten traffic rules are different, where the food is cooked differently and served at different times, and the whole ambience has a different flavor could have the most profound effect.  It might be intimidating; it might be exhilarating.  Thinking back on our first experiences, we remember both.