We expect Europe Semester to be amazing, to be great fun, perhaps also to be overwhelming, exhausting and exhilarating. We want it to enlarge our understanding of the world and of God. But sometimes false expectations can get in the way. Over the years a number of Euro-Sem myths have sprung up-myths we thought it best to air and debunk, so you won't be distracted or disappointed when you learn what Europe Semester is not.
That's first, but not necessarily foremost. Others are more important, but this one can get quite distracting, and it's one we need to get cleared up while you are planning. In the past, students had more of the luxury to shop. You've probably heard tales of Prague crystal, Florentine leather, German Birkenstocks, etc. that have always come home with Europe Semester students.
Today we are living in an era of tighter airline restrictions on luggage size and weight, and in a phase of more crowded Europe Semester busses. All of you will be signing an agreement to limit yourselves to 40 lbs. of luggage and to specified size restrictions. We'll talk about how to cope with those restrictions as you purchase luggage and decide what to take.
Crystal in Prague is not quite the bargain it might seem on the shelf if you add in the cost of wrapping it safely, shipping it from a Czech post office, and then wondering about it for the next six weeks, until someone at home lets you know it arrived safely. Shopping on Europe Semester comes with all kinds of hidden costs.
On the bright side, airline restrictions free us up to enjoy what it means to travel lighter. EuroSem veterans have been known to say "I can't believe I got home, and I'm still wearing those same outfits. I don't know what to do with all that stuff in my closet."
Europe Semester is a great time to do something else with all that energy that we normally devote to all our "stuff" back home. Instead of worrying about wearing just the right outfit, sit in a street-side café (where no one knows you any way) and muse on how the locals dress, or don't dress. Instead of spending frustrating hours in shops looking for the right momento, why not run on the banks of Lake Geneva or climb to the top of the Eiffel tower. Better to bring home memories than momentos. Europe Semester is a unique opportunity to come to an understanding of how the memories, the friends, the answered prayers, and the new attitudes you bring home are much more valuable than a few pounds more in possessions.
It might be easier to say that Europe Semester is not your trip-period. It's Europe Semester. To plan a "Senior Trip" might be to focus on exactly the things that you want to do, and on the people with whom you want to do them. Europe Semester will be something less. And something more. You won't always have the freedom to do everything you wanted to. And sometimes you'll have to do things you don't want to.
Travelling with a group this large means we will occasionally have to make personal sacrifices for the good of the whole. You may have to get back to the bus earlier than you want to on some stop. At another site, you may not be able to get on the bus soon enough. You will room with someone other than your best friend, or you might end up rooming by yourself when you would rather have company.
Travelling with an academic group means you will spend more time reading, writing and studying than you might on a trip with your friends. Sometimes you may need to give up an evening out to finish an assignment. You may have to take a sandwich back to the hotel while your friends go out for pasta because you need to prepare the report due at the next destination.
All of this means Europe Semester can be more than any backpacking trip to Europe. You may get the strange pleasure of recognizing the residents commemorated in London's Blue Plaques, because you read about them over the summer-maybe even wrote on them. Or, you may get the gift of a life-long friend you never would have made if both of you had stayed on campus together.
Living, studying, eating, riding in a bus, walking through cities with 40 Westmont students, four leaders and four adolescents, we will carry the Westmont community with us everywhere we go. We bring our campus culture with us. We will often live it out in microcosm.
We will send you on homestays in Berlin, seat you at meals with English Quakers, introduce you to tour guides, and encourage you to attend worship in languages other than English. But if we provide opportunities to engage with the local culture, we can't make you practice that engagement.
The size of our group and the idiosyncratic nature of the Europe Semester experience (no one does anything else quite like this) can foster a kind of insularity that is even more limiting that what we have on campus. Believe it or not, you'll have to work to move outside the Westmont culture. Alone, or joined by one or two friends for security, we hope you will strike up conversations with Italian shop keepers, or Dutch waiters, that you will ask questions about how locals receive Americans in Normandy, that you will extend yourself to worship in Strasbourg, even though the service is in French.
A Westmont student from a previous year, during an evening river cruise in Prague, was heard to say, "I'm just tired of thinking about everything all the time." You will work for your academic credit this semester. You'll start in the summer, and you'll study and write plenty of hours while we're on the road.
You will also study in ways some of you never have before. You'll get to learn while you're playing, and to play while you learn. We hope each of you will know the joy of dinner conversation that moves, unscripted, from small talk about the day to reflection on some aspect of European history or culture as it's revealed in the food on the table. We hope you will watch the tedium of a bus ride melt away in a heated discussion with the people sitting near you about how best to handle British ownership of the Parthenon marbles.
We hope each of you will find yourself closer to God, and more
free to love God because you have studied your Christian heritage,
and walked through the places where that heritage has played out,
with the help of that essay you wrote or that textbook or that
lecture on European civilization. It will not be easy, but it's
certainly worth the effort.