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"adventure"
Ukrainian Language in Lviv: Isabel Meigs, Winter Fellowship for International Travel 2015
Isabel Meigs, senior Russian major and recipient of the Winter Fellowship for International Travel, reflects on her time in Ukraine, studying Ukrainian language and culture.
On the Sunday in between my two weeks of language instruction, I went on an excursion called “Karpatskii Tramvai + SPA”. The tour left at eight in the morning from the Hotel L’viv in a Mercedes mini-bus and drove three or so hours south of L’viv into the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast and the Carpathian Mountains. Our tour guide’s name was Yurii. Besides myself, there was a young couple whose common language (but neither of their native languages) was English, a mother/five-year-old son pair, a mother/teenage daughter pair, and a whole group of middle-aged friends from Dnipropetrovsk. And a French bulldog wearing a camo jacket.
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Presidents Summer Fellowship, Rediscovery and Writing in the Desert Part 3, Nathan Martin
Colonel Armstrong Tree
Nate Martin '16, English Literature, is a President's Summer Fellow on a trip through the American Southwest with the goal of rewriting his connection to poetry by visiting areas where he first established that connection.
It was one of the last nights of my trip and I was in northern California, looking for a place to sleep. I googled "campgrounds" and after rejecting a bunch of RV parks that came up, I found Bullfrog Pond Campground. It seemed remote and also near, so I set the google directions to it from my phone and headed there.
I turned off I-5, onto a winding river road through small communities. This ended in a small town where I turned onto a smaller road. This road ended at a park entrance. The sign said "Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve." I was immediately ecstatic, as the coastal redwoods were the final thing I really wanted to see on this trip. I've wanted to see them since I first learned they existed, more than a decade ago.
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Tracing Faserland, Fellowship for Winter International Travel, Ben DeYoung
Ben DeYoung is retracing the steps of a trip across Germany as it is presented in the novel "Faserland" by Christian Kracht.
Excerpt from the first stop: Hamburg, Germany.
...I took to the street, unsure of what, exactly, I was looking for. In Hamburg, Faserland had not given me much to work with; he describes the light, but travels the city only at night, and spends most of his time in his friend's apartment. His main characterization of the city, other than his description of the light he does not actually see, comes in the form of what is also not actually there, namely the city that was destroyed. This unseen city, and the reconstruction of Hamburg, would eventually also play a large part in my impression of the place, but I was at least initially struck by a timeless aspect of the city, namely the dialect characteristic of Hamburg, and of its region, Schleswig-Holstein.