VisionQUEST: Salzburg, Austria
On The Village Program, we all had two periods of independent travel. Called VisionQUEST, these periods of exploration and discovery are built into the program to insure that all of us get out of our adopted “home town” of Pontlevoy and the comfort zone of our 1000 year-old abbey. VisionQUEST 2 followed right after our JourneyCOURSE, which for me was a seminar based in Munich and dedicated to the history of the Nazis and the Holocaust. I’d always been intensely interested in the Alps and in Austria, and to be totally honest I’m also a life-long fan of “The Sound of Music,” which has as its setting the lovely mountain town of Salzburg. So when JourneyCOURSE was over in Munich, I jumped on a bus with my classmate and friend Kaitlin from Louisiana, and together we snaked our way among gorgeous mountains and over rushing streams through the Bavarian Alps to Salzburg, Austria.
Though just taking a bus to get from one major European city to another would have been a huge deal for me before coming on The Village, it was simple to do after all the travel I’d learned to do in my time so far on the program. So once Kaitlin and I arrived at our station in Salzburg, we walked twenty minutes to our hotel and settled in. The walk was gorgeous, the leaves were gold and had fallen off the trees. I could write on and on about how majestic and beautiful Salzburg felt to me during the days I was there, because it seemed almost everywhere I went that I was seeing a perfectly framed view that had been staged just for my camera to capture.
Salzburg not only stole my heart, but it also taught me that it is possible to love a place as much as you love your home. I fell in love with Salzburg all at once: the people, the culture, the history, and the food. Salzburg is not just an historical marvel, it is also a college town and a melting pot of people whose creative gifts to our world have been monumental even if Mozart’s singular genius is left off the balance sheet. As I met this city’s genius in its many guises, I also found in my immediate comfort there many indications that I’d changed in dramatic and tiny ways during my overall journey abroad, chief among them that I now feel “at home” wherever I find myself staying and that getting myself out and about to chase my dreams is no longer some impossible-feeling test. Even in the dynamic enchantment of Salzburg, I learned that I could see and do everything I wanted to and still have time to relax, reflect and appreciate my discoveries at the end of the day. (I also learned that I’m capable of taking 6 trains, 1 metro, 1 cab, and a car ride from a Village Program professor all in one day, while avoiding a complete and total mental breakdown along the way.)
My time exploring Salzburg independently and with Katilin — away from The Village Program and the planning and arranging its faculty and coordinators do for all of our program trips and so on — helped me to feel a dramatically increased sense of overall self confidence and personal resiliency as a traveler. Without the time built into The Village calendar for VisionQUEST, the moments of growth and excitement I found in Salzburg (and during VisionQUEST 1 — which is its own story — wouldn’t have happened in the same intensive ways. Most of my classmates have said some version of the same after coming home from VisionQUEST. Because the time spend traveling without our professors as “built-in” tour guides helped us to see the world through our own eyes and in our own way, it’s likely true for us all that VisionQUEST showed us that even if if where we want to go is indeed a “long, long way to run,” we can get there ourselves and will surely love it when we do. Thanks Salzburg for the enlightenment!
