Each fall for the past seventeen years, I have worked to promote short-term study abroad experiences for my high school students. Students, for their part, always want to go… to go anywhere. Many of my students have never ventured beyond the quaint confines of Rhode Island, and some even have yet to step beyond the city-limits of our idyllic New England city-village of Warwick. With this being reality for many of my students, the allure of strolling the streets of Rome, or wandering down Las Ramblas, or even perhaps enjoying a few moments inside Les Deux Magots to get in touch with their inner Hemingway is irresistible. And so my students begin saving their meager earnings from part-time jobs, babysitting gigs, and door to door snow shoveling during the sometimes harsh New England winters, in order to pay for this grand adventure. They abandon the colloquial teenage dreams of buying a used car and embrace the spirit of adventure and the drive to just go.
But once we go, once we get there, now what? Do we stick to the itinerary, listen to the guides and take in the hundreds of factoids about Versailles, or this Emperor, and that war? Do we snap away taking thousands of digital photos of buildings we won’t remember if and when we ever scroll through the endless stream of pictures? Or do we dare for more? Do we attempt to get to know our new city as more than a passing stranger or a touristic one-night stand checking off “to-do” boxes from our well intentioned guide books? Of course, we do! And I have taken it upon myself to not only introduce my students to the official brochure of the city, but to engage the city, to know the city, and to become part of it, even if only for this single moment. For now they find themselves in that place, that city that once existed only in their minds and on the brochure, is now their reality.
Let’s be clear, I am not suggesting the abandonment of the tour guide or the brochure. These resources are invaluable to the courting process of the city, and make no mistake about it, when we visit a city for the first time that is exactly what we are doing, we are courting the city as if it were a new love interest. We were attracted to this city for superficial reasons, its reputation and its appearance, but now once we are there, we must find out if there is any substance behind that pretty face. After the tours and the visits to the important places, I always encourage my students to take a walk and to get lost, just for a while. No map or guide book, just walk. (Don’t worry parents, they all have GPS Smartphones to find their way back). And yes, there is purpose to this perceived madness.
Think back to the time before your cars were equipped with that same GPS technology. When you had to find your way to a friend’s new house for a party, or to a job interview, or to any place in any area where you were not quite sure what you were doing or where you were going. Think of how you engaged with this unfamiliar area. You become hypersensitive to the road, to the buildings, the street signs, the people walking, the cars passing by as you search, sometimes in vain, for a single sign of familiarity that you are going in the right direction. Maybe in your anxiety, you lower the volume of the radio to better concentrate on all you are taking in? You’re nervous, yes, but you are super-alert and you are noticing things you would otherwise miss if you were driving in more familiar surroundings. I want my students to walk with this same sense of purpose and anxiety, I want them to notice their new city, to be hyper-sensitive to every sound and smell of the city. (And I would even argue that if we took this approach in our own city, we would discover a great many things about all that which we think we know)
Philosopher Michel de Certeua once wrote that a city truly lives in the dark space between the crowds, the space that, when you are part of the crowd, you are unable to see. It is only when we move beyond the crowd that those spaces become visible, but this happens only with purpose and intent, and de Certeua argues that once the traveler is able to do this he is transformed from pedestrian to visionary. What a wonderful goal to have for our students, for them to transform into visionaries of and for their new city, and then to bring that purpose and intention home with them for a chance at endless discovery; for that, above all, is the purpose of travel.
When I ask my former students about their travel experiences they never go to the tour or the official guide, they always point to those times when we got lost, either literally or metaphorically:
“That time in Munich when the trains stopped running and we had to take about a dozen cabs to get back!”
“When we wandered into that film festival in Vienna and no one spoke English!”
“Watching the World Cup at that outdoor café in Delphi, and there was not a single Greek there! Just fans of the Spanish and Dutch teams yelling at each other in languages no one understood, only to hug each other and party together after the game was over.”
“That small Flamenco bar in Sevilla with the great Chorizo!”
“That time I bartered with the guy in Morocco because he wanted my Red Sox hat!”
“The Vatican at night. When we went back it was a completely different place. It seemed more natural or real.”
“When we sang with the street musicians in Paris and the entire crowd was cheering for us!”
“Playing soccer with those kids in Barcelona at the square. We didn’t even speak the same language, and it didn’t matter. It was awesome!”
“That time we walked for two hours to find Hard Rock in Athens, only to discover it was about a hundred feet away from our Hotel. That was the best day of the trip. We saw so much of the city and we would never have seen any of it if we had any sense of direction at all.”
“The night we rented the Karaoke room in Prague! People in the other rooms wanted to come into ours!”
“Krakow at night was so beautiful. I can’t even put it into words.”
Some of these experiences happen by chance, others I orchestrate a bit for the students. During our trips I try never to have the kids go to bed early, they should be tired the next day. So as other chaperones bring their students back to the hotel after dinner and do their room checks around seven or eight o’clock, we are just getting started. The city at night is a different place from the city during the day, and the kids can always catch up on sleep when they get home.
To really know a city and move beyond that courting stage, we need to meet it not only at its best and most glamourous. To be honest with our new city, we need to see it with its makeup off, after the lights go down, to see it in a more natural state, and it is an absolute must that from time to time we get purposefully lost. To paraphrase Woody Allen’s protagonist from Midnight in Paris, whichever city you are in is a singular experience, for no where else in the Universe does this place exist, and for all we know this could be the hottest spot in creation!
So go… get lost!