Traveling
There are two kinds of travel that one
experiences while studying abroad. The first is the itinerary based hopscotch
version. In this type, each day is spent jumping between tourist locations and
public transportation, trying to check off as many sites as possible while
still maintaining a quality visit to each place. I shall call this ‘Type A’
travel. The second is the ‘long-term’ travel style. This ‘Type B’ version is
built through an entire semester spent in a city—strolling the streets of an
unfamiliar foreign country long enough that they transform into familiar home.
I used to get irritated while walking down Copenhagen’s Vestergade 7 (the
street where the DIS (Danish Institute for Study Abroad) campus is located),
because it felt like every time I heard an American accent in a passing conversation, it was always talking about booking the next flight to Paris, or all the cool places that were on the “To See” bucket list. People studying for an entire year or semester in a country seem to forget that they are, in fact, “traveling” every moment of their visit. How cool is it to spend enough time in Copenhagen that it’s possible to observe the differences from day to day? These quiet nuances of beauty would go unnoticed if there wasn’t enough time to be aware of the extraordinary.
So, for the first four weeks of my
visit here, I was a little bitter that the DIS students weren’t enjoying the
gifts of Type B travel because they were too distracted by Type A
opportunities. It got to a point where every time someone would start talking about their latest EasyJet booking I would struggle to suppress an eye-roll. This issue was totally NOT my problem. Most of the people I
was listening to I didn’t even know, so I shouldn’t have given it one iota of care.
However, we just returned from a weeklong study tour/road trip through Germany,
Austria, and Switzerland that followed a distinctly Type A itinerary and my
frosty attitude towards this travel method thawed a little. To sum it up in a
very non-descriptive, cliché sentence: the week was really awesome.
(tour crew)
This type of travel lets you see a TON
of different places in a short period of time. It’s almost like sticking “Light
Bright” pins on your mental map of the world. Remember ‘Light Bright’? That
weird art game where you’d put a black sheet of paper over this light screen
and then punch transparent plastic pieces through the sheet to let a colorful
pin of light shine through. Stick in enough of these and you could create a
glittering picture or a constellation or just a bunch of holey black sheets of
paper.
(photo cred: the Google)
Each place visited in this rapid fire traveling is kind of like
sticking a light bright piece on your dark internal map—it creates a
beautifully illuminated pattern of the environment and an identification of
place. Type A traveling can be exhausting, however; getting out of an unfamiliar
bed every morning at 6:00am and then gunning at top traveling speed all day
before crashing in a new hostel the next night. Not exactly a restful vacation.
For our trip we took a bus from Copenhagen, down through Dessau, Germany to Dornbirn,
Austria, and then bumped over to Switzerland, where we flew back from
Basel.
Our trip was focused
on architecture, so we visited a smattering of museums and impressive
constructed feats. The overall theme of the journey was: take the bus for a few
hours, hop out with sketchbooks and cameras at the site, take a tour, do some
scribbling, hop back on the bus, eat a gigantic dinner, stay at a hostel, wake
up early and repeat. The department puts a strong focus on keeping a ‘Visual
journal’ so at each site visit you’ll find a bunch of notebook laden kids staked
out in prime sketching locations or juggling watercolor pencils and
paintbrushes as they roam the museum halls. Here’s an example of a visual
journal page from the Kuntsthaus in Dornbirn, Austria.
(Sidenote:
kunts means ‘art’ in apparently all of the European languages, a fact I
discovered after wondering why the past 6 museums we’d visited had all had the
same name.)
We visited some
pretty swell buildings too. There was the Saint Benedict chapel in Austria by
Peter Zumphor,
The church turned out to be a
surprise 55 minute hike up into the alps which was pleasant for some people and
not so pleasant for others.
(sketch of the Austrian Alps)
Then there was the
Heliotrope in Freiburg,
by the German architect Rolf Disch,
the first building in the world to capture more energy than it consumes. It’s
also the architect’s personal home in a very private neighborhood which we
clomped into with our maps and cameras to watch a poor family sitting down to
what was intended to be a quiet outdoor dinner and a towel clad lady hastily
shutting her window curtain.
Highlight of the trip, though, was definitely the
Therme Vals in Switzerland. The Therme Vals are a series of bathing pools built
out of quarry rock by old Peter Zumphor. When you check into your hotel, you
get a wristwatch with a screen that’s all black (probably to signify some
elusive metaphor for the value humans place on time that is ultimately useless
once you dissolve into the dark walls, steam, and mineral water of the baths.),
and a floor-length fluffy white robe, which is donned between room and bath. We
rolled into Vals last Wednesday, after an extremely impressive navigational
feat of the Swiss highways, dangerous, careening asphalt paths by our
magician-driver, Renee. Some people immediately flocked to the baths but a
fellow trip-mate, Alexandra (‘Dre’) and I hit the obscure and leafy path
outside the hotel for an ambitious run straight up an Alp. 15 minutes into the
run we were pretty toasted, with our Danish flatland legs and lungs on fire.
But it was beautiful. I used to think the Rockies were the pinnacle of mountain
existence but they seem like adolescent boulders in comparison to this
magnificent range. (Which is a weird paradox since the Rockies are nearly 50 million
years older than the Alps.) In the
valley, the chalets of Vals are sprinkled amongst lush fields of grass. A few
farming huts explore the higher terraced grasslands, providing for the grazing
sheep and cows.
(Vals, Switzerland)
Then we joined our fellows in the baths.
Holy smokes was it surreal.
(**sidenote; cameras are not allowed in the Therme Vals so these pictures were
shamelessly stolen from the Google.**)
The next morning, we convinced a solid
group of 10 to wake up at 4:30am and tackle the Alp closest to our hotel by the
light of the full moon. The goal was to make it up to a hidden lake to watch
the sunrise, but 30 minutes into the hike, our numbers had dwindled to three.
The landscape was breathtaking. Jagged, snowy peaks with avalanche paths
carving deadly white rivers that seem to scream with both a terrifying danger
yet irresistible allure.
(photo cred x 2: Dre)
We hiked for another two hours but never did quite
make it to the lake. Or see the actual sunrise, since even though the sun rose
at 7:18, it takes awhile for the fiery ball to top out above the mountains and
by that point we were gorging ourselves on the most extensive and delicious breakfast
I’ve ever seen/eaten at a hotel. I thought I’d have to travel to a tropical
country to taste my first Dragonfruit, but there it was, laid out on little
individual serving platters in the Therme Vals buffet.
The next three days
were spent in Basel, Switzerland, home of twisting cobbled allies, expensive
cuisine, and ridiculously delicious chocolate.
Our crew staked out a hostel
next to the Rhine River for three days and from there explored the Vitra
furniture Campus
and Vauban in Freiburg, Germany.
We then flew back
from Basel—22 weary design students lugging suitcases laden with Alpine milk
chocolate. Back to Type B traveling in Copenhagen. And I think our time here has entered a
new phase, because when I stepped back into my cozy bedroom of Klematisvej 10,
I found that I was a proud recipient of JUNK MAIL! You know you’ve weaseled
your way into belonging in a new place when you can hold up a folded slip of
paper in completely unreadable Danish and have your host mom tell you to throw
it out because it’s just an advertising ploy. It left me feeling strangely
elated. And it’s these little things that create the beauty of long-term
travel: Finding plums on an afternoon jog.
Taking a few random turns on the
bike path and discovering a hidden castle. Realizing that the button to summon
the train station elevator is labeled with “i fart” and then giggling like an
immature 12-year-old. Appreciating how lovely the sunshine is when it rains the
majority of the time. It’s running down the gravel path to the Køge beach and
seeing my own footprints in the sand from the day before, as if I am a local in
the area. And it’s realizing that, oh yeah, we kind of do get to be locals in the area for a period of time.
So, all in all, it’s fantastic to take advantage of the close proximity to exciting European cities, but remember to look up and explore the sensitivity of the seemingly mundane commute on the s-rail, because Type B travel is not just witnessing an area, it’s witnessing an area enough times to notice the unique differences in day to day life. And that’s a pretty cool experience to be a part of.
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