This year during Spring Break, Concord Academy students had the opportunity to participate in various off-campus trips. They were designed as an educational experience. However, they also included tourism and sightseeing.
This article covers the trip to Germany, but there were also trips to Mexico, Italy, and Georgia. Unfortunately, since there was no spring session this year, we could not leave a week early. Due to this, after we left Vienna on March 18th, I only had 6 days left in my break, so I hope Spring Session returns next year.
The chaperones travelling with us were Daniel Mertsch, and Kim Blodgett. Our assigned Explorica tour guide, Felician, met us in Berlin and was with us all the way until Vienna. He had knowledge of the history, culture, was a great guide and was fun to spend time with and talk to. When we were on bus rides between cities, Felician would pull out his notebook and give us a quiz on what we saw and learned, with fun questions and trivia. I feel that he made the tour an amazing experience for all of us.
The trip was 11 days long, with two days of travel. We spent 9 full days in Europe, travelling through five cities. We left from Boston on March 8th, transferred through Paris and reached Berlin on the morning of the 9th. Somewhat jet lagged and tired, after dropping off our stuff at the hotel we went on a guided tour of Berlin. Learned about the GDDR and the division of Germany, as well as visited the Berlin wall. Throughout the tour we visited Leipzig, Dresden, Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna.
In cities we would go sightseeing and visit museums. Notably, In Nuremberg we visited the Nuremberg trials museum. We saw and visited the courtroom in which the trials took place. The same day, we visited the Nazi party rally grounds, a massive 16km2 area, in which the Nazi party held their political rallies and parades. We travelled to Munich, stopping in Dachau concentration camp, the first concentration camp which was launched less than a month after Hitler took power. It was a surreal experience walking through the exact same places in which so many innocent people died. I now believe that to disconnect the holocaust from a number, one must visit a place where it happened. In Munich we went sightseeing after a city tour. We would often have free time to enjoy the city in our own groups, it gave us autonomy, and allowed us to go to the places that interest us. After Munich we travelled to Vienna, where we went to a concert of Mozart and Johann Strauss. Everyone loved the concert, and it was a highlight of the trip.
Surprisingly, there were only 8 other students on the trip with me, and both the Italy and Mexico trips had around 15 people. It seems that this year there were either a lower number of people participating, or a lower number of applicants, possibly due to the trips cutting into Spring Break. In my opinion, the low number of travelers was a good thing, as it addressed some of the problems of the France trip I participated in last year.
Last year, with a 30 people group, someone was constantly getting lost, and the bus was crowded and loud. Thus, the trip felt really disconnected in some ways. In Germany, we all became friends with each other, and I feel that the trip was much more enjoyable with the small group. “You get to break out of the CA cliques,” said Daniel Xu ’25. However, since we traveled to five cities in nine days, we had little time in each city. Amilyn Feng ’27 offered a possible solution: “Either we cover the same amount of cities and then stay in each city for longer, or we take the same time and go to fewer places.” Though it was fast-paced, it was memorable, fun, and I made new friends whom I still talk to.
I really enjoyed this trip, many problems from last year's trips were resolved, it had less people, was longer, and had an amazing guide and chaperones who brought the trip to a new level. I really enjoyed it, and recommend the trips to people considering them.