Europe

An Educator’s Perspective of Traveling Abroad with Teenagers to Italy Without a doubt, travel has changed in the last 15 years. For…

Another French lesson was at the movie theater. The phone rings in the first scene, and the actress slowly picks up the phone and responds, “Allô!” Damn!!! It’s dubbed in French. Fight or flight immediately sets in as I quickly asked myself “stay? go? stay? go?” Due to the fact that it was nice and cool and could zone out a little, I stayed.

The original road trip to Belgium and visit to The Abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren was cancelled due to the exorbiant price for train tickets, I chose the alternative, the clock and watch capital of Europe, Luxembourg.

Fortunately I didn’t seek out the Tour de France, it came to me in Besançon. For those of y’all who don’t follow athletes in lycra, this is the July event where 160 or so cyclists jump on a bicycle and race around France trying to finish in the shortest time possible so they can wear a yellow jersey.

When my flight from Ireland via Frankfurt arrived during the brisk Geneva evening at 7:30, I had already mentally prepared to stay the night in Switzerland and travel onto France the next day. Yet, the last train to Besançon left in an hour. Not an overabundance of time to execute an international arrival and subsequent train departure.

My stop in Dublin wasn’t to find U2 playing in a local park or Pierce Brosnan referring to his role in a James Bond film, but to finally decide if Guinness was a beer I really like or not.

No Parisian visit is complete without heading up the Eiffel Tower. Yet students had to decide between the Eiffel Tower with me or ride a bateau mouche with the other teachers.

We left the French beaches of Cote d’Azur the next morning on a bus to the home of the 1968 Winter Olympics, Grenoble.