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Here I sit, over a week after returning from my trip to Europe, mulling over what to say in reflection. In truth, it’s difficult to reflect upon everything that happened, because like so many events in our lives, even just a short time afterwards, it’s turned into a faint glimmer of what it was right when we had just returned.
The pictures have been shared, everyone has asked how things were in Germany, and I’ve answered enough questions for a few months. Okay, the pictures actually haven’t really been shared, but I’m terrible about putting things online in general. Still, I can’t escape the nagging feeling that it was just a dream. Ten days removed from the routine of life back home and thrust into a whirlwind of activity and novelty.
The biggest question still in my mind is how does it feel for those who travel internationally regularly? After years of traveling back and forth between the US and Europe, do the differences in culture and experience stop being so vast seeming? For us, we were immersed in a world that we could only imagine before being there. Sure, our host students were a lifeline that kept us from drowning in a foreign environment, but after three days in Marburg, I had no qualms with the idea of going off alone into the Oberstadt because I wanted to look at a little shop I’d seen on an earlier trip.
This probably reads poorly, since it’s more of a stream of thoughts than anything collected, but that’s how life is. It’s a stream of events and experiences that can quickly pass you by if you aren’t careful. I think the best thing about our time in Europe was the wonderful feeling of having no cares. Having the whole afternoon and evening to do whatever you wanted, no obligations until the following morning, we were free from the shackles of the routines of our daily lives back home, even if only briefly.
Being a smaller group of Americans in Europe traveling together created an instant bond that let us get past much of the wariness we normally have for strangers, since I hadn’t met any of the students from Madison prior to the trip. In the end, I knew at least half of them well enough to feel like close acquaintances at least, if not friends.
In the end, it’s those experiences that I won’t forget, the shared bond of travelers, late night discussions of whatever random topic came up, sometimes with strangers outside the hotel, sometimes with our host students, and sometimes with classmates and friends. Freed from the ordinary and with no expectations, the journey became a chance to escape for ten days, to be someone else perhaps, even if it was just our true selves.
The class work was interesting and meaningful, but it can’t compare to the soul baring you are forced to do when you are operating in a country where you can’t read the signs and can’t expect people to be able to answer simple questions reliably in a language you speak.