Rome

We have no history in North America. Sometimes we like to pretend we do, like when we go to Old North Church in Boston and dream about the Revolutionary War and how brave Paul Revere must have been to go out there and warn all of those British that they weren't going to take our guns [sic]. My parents live in a house in Rhode Island that has been around since the early 17th century and sometimes it feels like it's about to fall down around their ears with the weight of all of the years it has seen. But really, when we look at Europe, we realize how we have just been fooling ourselves the whole time. In Konstanz, there are whole streets of houses that were first mentioned in sources in the 1300's and were around for who knows how long since then, making my Memere's house look like Gatsby's nouveau riche manor of the American dream. At lot has happened in the past three hundred years on our side of the Atlantic, but our history books will always be dwarfed by the thousands of years that western civilization has had to build up in Europe.

In no city I visited was this more clear than in Rome. Unfortunately, I was only in the Eternal City for about two and a half days, which didn't get me time to do much more than see the things one is 'supposed' to see on a run-through, snap a few photos basis, but it was very influenced nonetheless. Particularly in the case of the most popular tourist attractions, you've really already seen them enough, from photos, movies, and the like, that being there in person is as much a sense of odd deja vu as a new experience. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly awesome to finally see the Colosseum or walk across St. Peter's Square, but for me at least, it's more a feeling of selfish satisfaction at finally having seen a place I heard so much about, rather than an appreciation for the place itself.

For me the best part of being in Rome was just absorbing the atmosphere, because the city just feels Old. By the time I went, I had already been in Europe for about six months, so I thought I was over the sense of exhilaration at a building that has existed since before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In Rome, however, the feeling is particularly acute, particularly since the architecture at every turn seems to show evidence of just about every stage of human history since the birth of Christ. Roman ruins and even well preserved castles bump up against medieval churches whose iconography still seem to betray traces of Byzantine influence and high Renaissance palaces that clearly inspired the backgrounds of the famous Italian masterpaintings that you see in every art museum around the world. Just being there is an aesthetic experience of its own merits, pulling you back into reminiscences on the history and culture that formed our own collective cultural unconscious. More than any other city I visited, being in Rome feels like being in touch with the past.

Vienna

I'm a bit of a nerd about most things, particularly when it comes to things the arts and literature. I've been known to get my kicks by reading Nietzsche and on my ipod you'll find as much Debussy or Bach as the Beatles or White Stripes. That's part of what makes travelling in Europe so exhilarating for me; I love to breath in the atmosphere of the cities that shaped the artists and writers I love and feel the environment that nourished their cultural background the way they have formed mine. Thinking rationally, I realize that our society and way of life have changed so much since then that it's foolish to think that too much of that spirit still remains, and it's all too clear that most of the remnants of the Enlightenment that seem to be hanging around are carefully calculated by city-planning/advertising firms to appeal to people like me who will then proceed to start throwing my money around in a fit of nostalgic rapture, but you can never quite divorce yourself from the feeling. Of all the cities I visited, Vienna was probably the one that most stirred my submerged feelings of cultural connection.

The capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and an important city in the Holy Roman Empire before it, Wien (as the city is called in German; it's where we get Wiener Schnitzel and Wiener as a name for a hot dog) has always been full of upper-class Austrians who want to make themselves look good by patronizing the arts. Because of that, it's a talent magnet that was the home of such big names as Mozart, Beethoven, and Freud, and less well-known figures like Haydn, Mahler and Schoenberg. On top of that, the 18th and 19th century architectural grandeur has been maintained with almost overzealous accuracy, making for such incongruities as a four story H&M with wood-panelling and spiral staircases. The whole city oozes charm and sophistication from every pore.

On some level, it's clearly a facade, a conscious attempt to maintain an older importance while simultaneously cashing in on millions of people per year who either love culture or want to be the sort of people who do. The 'Mozart Ball' phenomenon is a case in point. In every souvenir shop in Vienna, and most of the large chains, you can find Mozartkugeln, tiny confectioneries of marzipan, nougat, and chocolate wrapped in cheap foil stamped with the face of Mr. Wolfgang Amadeus himself, and every third street corner has a store dedicated to the gaggingly sweet abominations and other paraphrenalia related to the composer whose attractiveness/face recognition ratio is the highest. (No one would want to eat a chocolate if they had to stare at the tortured mug Beethoven to do it)

At the same time, however, there are genuine cultural activities that don't throw themselves at you for the money, but wait to be found by those with a true love for them. While we never got a chance to go inside, the Freud Museum is supposed to be more than just a place to buy posters that say "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", and really gives a picture of the history of psychoanalysis. It's also right down the street to 'Der Wiener Diwan', a pakistani restaurant with decor reminiscent of any coffee shop in Northampton where you eat as much as you want, and then pay as much as you think the meal was worth. The Museums of Art History and Natural History are built in a true empire style and give an absolute overload of incredible paintings and artifacts. Probably the coolest thing, though, was the Opera House, where for 3 or 4 Euros you can get a standing room ticket for any opera, if you are willing to stand in line for half an hour or 45 minutes. We saw Mozart's Le Nozze de Figaro, and while we were so high up that we only saw about half of the stage, and we could barely move for the whole three hours lest we lose our places, it was absolutely incredible to see some classical music so casually. You didn't have to be dressed up and fancy; you just had to have leg muscle endurance and get there early enough to have an official standing spot with an LCD screen that shows the libretto. Not necessarily for the faint of heart, and indeed, one of our friends left half way through. But if you have even the slightest interest in classical music, or if you just want to see what it's all about, you'll never have a better opportunity.

Bratislava

Apropos of nice cities that you wouldn't visit if you were just doing the typical European Toure, Bratislava. When we first planned to go to Budapest and Vienna, we wanted to finish off with a few days in Prague, another quite well known city. We couldn't find a particularly inexpensive way to do that, so we decided to hit up Bratislava instead, considering it's basically parallel with other destinations. Luckily, the Hungarian friend we were meeting in Budapest knew a few Slovakians of Hungarian descent who studied there, so we managed to get the local touch. It was, admittedly, good luck for us. Bratislava is quite pretty and very historical, but to the naked eye it is a pretty typical Central European Old City (TM). Without the benefit of a little native explanation we wouldn't have gotten quite as much out of it. Of course, that's true for any city, and I think for a day or a day and a half, Bratislava is a good place to spend a restful interlude in an otherwise pretty crazy holiday. The Castle is lovely and has a view into three countries, a must see, but otherwise, I would recommend just roaming around free and trying to find the myriad little knick-knacks that are hidden throughout the city, from the compass rose that gives the distance and direction to most major world cities to the random grid of tiles that chimes when you step on it. That's basically what we did for most of our little less than 24 hours in the capital of Slovakia.

The rest of the time, when we weren't sleeping, we spent in the pub. Our 'tour guides' were a pretty cool lot, and since we had lost about half of our group to shopping, we started and ended our day in the appropriately named Slovakian Pub as a meeting point. Even though it clearly intended to present a picture of 'traditional Slovakia' for the tourists- picture a smoke-filled room with long benches, winding further and further back into a tiny building, all next door to a McDonalds and surrounded by ten chain cafes and Kebab shops for a picture of the overly incongruous anachronism - we were assured that it was still basically a good pub, if a little pricey for students. We all tried each of the typical local drinks: a Slovakian beer, Kofola, the sarsparilla-like local competitor to Coke, and for protection against the February wind, a Tatarski Tea, a hard liquor whose strong taste polarized our guides and whose only resemblance to tea was the way it burned your gut if you drank it too quickly. It was a mark of the unpredictable differences in Purchasing Power Parity even between countries right near each other that in Slovakia we paid 4 Euros for these three drinks when we wandered back into the streets warm and slightly jollier than before, while in Vienna a single beer would have costed around or more than three Euros. It's something important to keep in mind while travelling; even apart from actual levels of poverty or wealth in a country, because Slovakia is by no means a poor country except by comparison to some of the most wealthy norther European countries, a dollar can go a lot further in some places than others. Remember that, and try to plan your trips around that contrast. A trip through Hungary, Slovakia and Austria can average out to be cheaper than just a few days in Scandinavia countries.

Budapest

There are a lot of really cool cities in Europe; most of them are, in fact. You have heard of all the big ones already, the major capitals and principal tourist traps: London, Paris, Barcelona, Venice. If you have already been to Europe or are planning to travel alot, you've probably also considered Prague, Amsterdam, or Munich. But don't confine your curiosity or your travels to the list of places you already know, because there are some amazing cities, particularly a bit East of the beaten path. My case in point is Budapest, Hungary, which is both the farthest East I managed to get, and one of the cities I was most taken with.

I went in late February with about seven friends at the start of a week that was going to take us along the Danube from Budapest through Bratislava and ending in Vienna. We didn't know much about it before we left, but a bunch of friends who had interrailed through the area strongly recommended it, and we had a Hungarian friend we planned to meet up with and get that native connection. We stayed for two and a half days, which is long enough to get a good sense of the flavor of the town, though a little longer there wouldn't go amiss. There is a lot to see, and good enough nightlife that you might not want to get up too early in the morning, if that is your thing.

Budapest's charm is mostly in its mix of modern cosmopolitanism and an antique milieu. Until the end of the First World War, it was the 2nd Capital of the Austro Hungarian empire and its architecture is full of examples of that Empire's 19th century pomposity. The country was communist until 1989, however, and maybe because of that seems to have less of a museum-like veneration for its pristine condition than, for instance, its wealthier neighbor Vienna. There was construction everywhere when we were there, which was in my opinion rather exhilirating than frustrating. It was really neat to see the process of modernization swarming around but not eclipsing the remnants of the past. A particularly humorous example came our first night, when my friends and I cracked up laughing over the bright red neon of a 'Szex Shop' sign, almost walking right past Europe's second largest synagogue right behind us. Budapest is full of that sort of juxtaposition between old and majestic and the slightly sordidly new.

Speaking of 'Szex shops', be prepared to be more befuddled than ever before by signs and menus. Hungarian is completely unrelated to the Indo-European language family that English is a part of, and even if you happen to be fluent in Finnish or Estonian, the differences and vocabulary and spelling make Hungarian a special case. Of course, if you are doing any significant amount of travelling in Europe, you aren't going to speak most languages you encounter, but the foreignness of Hungarian is particularly extreme. Your high school Spanish won't help here like it might in France or Italy.

The currency is also quite surprising. Hungary isn't yet part of the Eurozone, and I guarantee that the conversion to the Forint will be the most confusing you will ever have to deal with. At the moment $1 converst to 181 Forints, possibly leading to brief moments of terror when you see the price of a burger listed somewhere around 400, only to realize you are saving money. I recommend finding the exchange rate when you get there and establishing a quick rule of thumb (I think ours was 10 Euros to 2800 Forints), because if you try to work out exact conversions every time you want a cappucino, you'll soon go insane.

Oh, and when you are in Budapest, don't forget to go to the famous thermal baths. Hungary is situated on one of the largest hot spring systems in Europe, and Budapest capitalizes heavily on that. There are probably half a dozen different bath houses in the city, the largest of which are the Gellert on the side of the Danube called Buda, and the Szechenyi on the Pest side. Depending on who you ask, one or the other is too expensive, crowded, or touristy, but when you can spend most of the day soaking in lovely hot water for around 10 Euros in what is essentially a 19th century palace, I don't think it really matters which side of a river you do it on.

Morocco

Considering the blossoming civil war in Libya and the wave of anti-authoritarian protests that are sweeping all of North Africa and the Muslim world, it would be naive of me to give current travel advice for a vacation in Marrakech. While Morocco is a very stable country and its protests have been limited to calls for constitutional democracy rather than absolute rule by King Mohammed VI, who is one of the most progressive and open-minded leaders in the Arabic world, it would be playing with fire for American college students to go for a weekend on the town there until well after the outbreaks have been allowed to run their course and the scars can heal.

That is a shame, because it is in such turbulent times more than ever that Americans need to crush their prejudices about Islam, which even those who scoff at the theory that President Obama secretly wants to institute Sharia Law and are outraged at Peter King's recent Islamophobic hearings have been inundated with through two Gulf Wars and 9/11. When a dozen friends and I first made plans to spend a week in Morocco this December, for example, the only other American who wanted to go was forced to pull out before we went, because her parents, two generally well-educated middle-class adults from Long Island, asked that she stay in Germany. They argued that if she spoke English or showed her passport, even in the airport, she would be followed and attacked. Their reasoning here was almost sympathetic; they oppose the war in Iraq and thought that Muslims would naturally feel strong enough to stoop to violence against any and all enemies of their co-religionists. They meant no harm, but it is exactly this ingrained idea that there is something inherently different or savage in the Muslim faith that needs exposure to be refuted.

I imagine that most people who study abroad are much more culturally sensitive than your average American to start with. They probably know that Islam is not inherently warlike than Christianity. Its early history may be characterized by war and expansion, but the Catholic Church in that time period did not do much better, with its strong persecution of heretics and the two-hundred fifty years of the Crusades. They would assert that Muslims are no more fervent or liable to religious discrimination than the devout Christians who are particularly strong opponents. Nonetheless, it is an eye-opening experience to be able to go to a land whose beliefs are so different from your own and see that the people are not inherently alien. They may all be trying to convince you to buy something, but so is everyone on a given street in Manhattan; the Marrakechans are just more open about it. And they have enough heart, for instance, to stop a crowded bus so a Canadian tourist who has forgotten to hit up the bathroom before she left can relieve her tormented bladder. That's more than can be said for most American or German bus-drivers, I think.

Heidelberg

I am sure some of the people who stumble onto this blog via the International Program Website will end up studying in Heidelberg. I am sure if you do, you'll love it. I wish I could persuade you to Konstanz, and I am sure the Freibergers wish they could persuade you there, but if you want to go to Heidelberg, do it. From what I hear, the Uni is ancient and lovely, and great for all of the liberal arts. The Old City, which is the only part I saw, is also wonderful and on the whole it's a great town. If you are trying to make up your mind, I think you'd enjoy it. It seems like a great Uni town.

Actually, here is a good place to make a point that might seem obvious, but actually bears saying: Study abroad is going to be fun. It's as simple as that. I don't know anyone who has committed themselves to their exchange and not had it pay off in spades. Two people who studied with me earlier this year were unhappy and went home, but it was clear that they had been able to let themselves open up and really take it all in. One girl who left actually began to regret her decision as the day approached, once she realized that most of her problems were typical initial homesickness and that she had become happy. Everyone has troubles at the start of their exchange, with getting adjusted to other customs and finding friends, but it always works out incredibly. Being an exchange student is like being a first semester freshman. Everyone from the Uni is trying to help you, and everyone you meet is in the same boat and wants to be your friend.

A corollary to that is that wherever you study, you will love it. You've probably heard that before, but it bears repeating. When you first plan to study abroad in a country, the choices you have can be bewildering. There are about a dozen universities under the umbrella of the UMass/Baden-Wuerttemberg program alone, and it's hard to make up your mind where to study. You haven't heard of at least half of the places, and they all offer similar classes, and how are you supposed to know whether Ulm or Tuebingen will better suit your academic tastes? Here's a secret: They would both equally. I picked Konstanz on a whim. At first I wanted to go to Freiberg or Heidelberg but the process was taking to long so I picked the dark horse. The city and people are awesome, and my choice has paid off, but I don't fool myself into thinking it was fate or something.

There is no such thing as one true love, and there's no such thing as one true study abroad program.

Liechtenstein

My younger brother is pretty sharp for a high school kid, with a head for history and a surprising global consciousness. That's important to know if you want to get the full significance of his response when I told him I had visited Liechtenstein: "Where is that? I have never heard of it." I was sort of surprised, but not incredibly so. Before I came to Germany, I had heard the name, but knew nothing about the country. Since I visited, I don't think I have heard anything about it, except when a friend nostalgically alludes to our visit.

Honestly, I think the country prides itself on not making a name for itself. The little principality is one of the top three richest countries in the world, but it seems to not like to boast of the fact. Everything in Vaduz, the capital city is kept very clean and in good order, and groceries for lunch were a little more expensive than they are in Germany, but there were no blatant displays of ostentation and little evidence of major commercial activity. The people drive new but simple cars and live in well-built but quite traditional houses. In comparison to a close competitor for the title of "Nation with the highest per capita GDP", Luxembourg, Liechtenstein is downright pastoral. In Luxembourg, the capital of the country, you can not walk down a street downtown without seeing two international banks, three restaurants where I am not classy enough even to be a dishwasher, and six or eight shops that make your wallet feel lighter just to look at. The two cities couldn't be more different, except for two main points of comparison: They are both incredibly rich, and uninteresting to tourists.

I hate to entirely right off a city, because I do think that on a year abroad, you should go to as many places as possible, taking every opportunity that comes up. Some will be less interesting than others, but are still worth a go. Vaduz was the same. There wasn't much to do in the town, because we went on a Monday, when the Prince's personal gallery was closed. Not sure what else to do, we decided to take a hike into the mountains.

That was what really changed the day from a fairly typical expedition out of olde Konstanz and made it into a 'Really Good Day' (Trademark). We walked up a long trail through a quiet evergreen wood until we got to the Prince's castle. I have seen better castles - bigger, more dramatic. This one made a particular impression, however, for still having residents. It is hard enough to comprehend that hundreds of years ago, the nobles lived in castles the way you or I live in a three bedroom, 1.5 bath family home. It's quite an epiphany to realize that some people still do. We wondered what it would be like to be a young teenager growing up in a castle like that, and what a girl would say if he were ever allowed to invite one over. It's not something that's easy to wrap your brain around.

Apart from that, the alps are incredible. Everyone has seen the Sound of Music, but it's entirely different to actually be up there, where the grass is greener than you have ever seen, and the sky bluer than you thought possible, and you can see what basically amounts to an entire country by craning your neck a little. When we first got into Liechtenstein, we were curious why all of the world's rich people would want to live in such a quiet, boring little town. Before we even got halfway up the mountains, it was clear why.