Like many students here  Gustavus, I had a great January Interim Experience: along with 72 other students, I traveled through seven different Central European countries on tour with the Gustavus Wind Orchestra.  Although we were never airlifted from any performance site, we did share some pretty remarkable experiences (along with a few unremarkable long bus rides).

All the band members got back to campus a day early to start our intensive rehearsal schedule in preparation for our trip. We also had an interesting class every day with Dr. Emmert of the History Department, where we learned about the prevailing influences on that region of the world from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between our 90-minute class, three and a half hour group rehearsal, sectional rehearsals and individual practice time, we didn’t get much chance to take part of the more ‘traditional’ activities of January term, but we gladly traded them for a more rewarding experience in Europe when we got there.

Getting 80 people around anywhere is quite a task, but add their instruments, luggage, equipment and traveling internationally with them is really something else.

As anyone who has traveled abroad knows, flying across the pond is hard enough to figure out on your own or with your family; the logistics required to keep all of us students organized is so far above my ability to comprehend, especially considering how in the end we didn’t lose much and got places relatively quickly. When in Europe, we had two coach buses that would take us from place to place, which wasn’t the most comfortable or quick way of getting around, but it kept us together with our things and gave us an opportunity to take in the countryside (as well as experience what a gas station in Europe is like to pee in).

As some of you know, I spent spring semester last year in Sweden, traveling with 13 other Gusties on a college-led program (as an aside, the Sweden 2011 program is taking applications until March 1, and if you want to know more about it, come to Fika at the Swedish house Thursday nights at 9 p.m. or check it out online) and I spent a lot of time comparing my experience there to the one I was having in Central Europe. Outside of the things you’d expect like currency exchange and travel time, a lot of things were different and hard to get used to. For one, I had learned some Swedish before traveling to Sweden, and even if I couldn’t communicate in Swedish well, everyone under 65 in Sweden speaks perfect English (I’m almost not exaggerating when I say that).

Even with a little Russian experience, I couldn’t understand any Czech or Polish and couldn’t make heads or tails of Hungarian. There were accents over letters you didn’t even know were possible, like umlauts that were italicized and ls that had lines through them.

What stuck out the most to me during my time there was the depth of history that part of the world is saturated with. Maybe all the castles and churches we visited had an impact on my perception, but even when we were driving through small villages in Poland I couldn’t help but think of the German tanks that made the same journey 70 years ago.

Each city we went to was so full of history we didn’t get a tenth of enough time to really appreciate it, yet we did get enough time to fall in love with them if the city spoke to us. I remember being jet lagged and extremely cold our first day in Europe, but walking through the streets of Old Town Prague seemed to make me forget about it. And although we were pretty tired and run-down by the time we got to Austria, I remember feeling excited and super enthusiastic looking at all the monuments around the Ring Road in Vienna.

There are so many places I’d go back to in a heartbeat from the countries we got to visit in our two short weeks there. I know all of us in the band had what our director Dr. Nimmo calls “Intense Life-Changing Experiences,” or ILCHEs for short.  Moments like catching the teary eyes of an old man during “The Hymn for the Lost and the Living” by Eric Ewazen on the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz not twenty miles from the camp.

Although the students on this campus won’t have my experiences abroad, I recommend taking every opportunity to travel and study abroad you can; it has changed my life, and is something no textbook or film can replace.