My Favorite Summer Memory

The start of the new school year is a difficult time for everyone, and I am definitely no exception. This has been the best summer yet and I’m beyond sad to see the late nights out with friends and days dedicated entirely to binge-watching Netflix being replaced by late nights studying and stress over grades as I begin my junior year. There are countless different factors making this summer amazing, but I’d have to say that the biggest was the France Trip that took place this summer.

As everyone knows, each language class offers a trip every two years to the country affiliated with the language, and this summer I was one of the eleven students to fly overseas to France for three weeks. Now to provide a little personal background, I am completely obsessed with languages. They’re one of my biggest passions and I plan on trying my very hardest to spend the rest of my life constantly traveling, learning new languages and cultures as I go. Unfortunately, I had never been out of the country before this summer, so to say that I was excited for this three-week trip to Europe would be a massive understatement. I spent the months leading up to it simply ecstatic and unable to believe that I was finally going to get a taste of the life I hope to lead.

I remember the first few hours after landing in the Paris airport vividly. The first taste I got of France (besides the airport, which really doesn’t count because it’s just a couple hours of dragging heavy bags through a bunch of different lines) was on the bus riding into Paris. At first it looked just like America. There were a ton of trees and fields everywhere and not much else. It wasn’t until we started to see the buildings on the outskirts of Paris that I got hit with the first wave of “oh my god- I’m actually in Europe”. If you’ve never been, the architecture is surprisingly significantly different than that of America. I think since Paris is such a large and famous city I had foolishly expected to see a lot of gray skyscrapers filled with windows, similar to New York City, but my expectation couldn’t have been farther from reality. The city was a collection of cream and orange buildings that have either been there for centuries or are architecturally modeled off of buildings that have, almost none of which exceed the city-wide limitation of six floors. The stark contrast of France’s beauty of history and color versus America’s beauty of progress and intimidating skyscrapers was one of the most amazing things to me. It reminded me that there was so much of the world that I had yet to see and so much culture that I had yet to experience and I fell in love with Europe at that very instant.

This was definitely not the only moment I was overcome with emotion almost to the point of not being able to function simply because I was in Europe and surrounded by so much language, culture, and history, but I think it was my favorite of these moments simply because it was the first. Overall the trip this summer was the best experience of my life. I’m already head-over-heels in love with traveling and I can’t wait to pursue a lifetime full of it.