Slow Travel: Maybe the fastest way to really get there

Some ideas die hard. An example: Europe is small and compact so while abroad in Europe you should “take in” Dublin, Rome, Prague, Berlin, Paris and Barcelona, like stops on a tour. Another idea with nine lives: being abroad is a once-in-a-lifetime chance so you owe it to yourself to travel as much as possible. Two things wrong here: an intensive program of study abroad can very well lead back abroad for anyone who wants that to happen and, secondly, the value of the sojourn may well be unrelated to the number of miles traveled, or places visited.

IFE urges students to travel into a country and not just across (or above) it. Local trains and buses, rental bikes and town and country foot trails are good tools for getting to know small and mid-sized cities and their surroundings, or valleys known for their Romanesque churches or wine villages or geological sites. What's new in art in Bordeaux combined with what's old in the Dordogne. Or Salamanca and its university, before heading over the hills and down the Douro to Porto. IFE urges students to travel responsibly (avoid jets, buy local), and modestly, open to exchanges. Taking time to get to know one place leads to encounters and local-language conversation. Focusing on one district of a large city, away from its center and famous museums (to be visited as well!) is a case of less is more. Students are encouraged to use travel for exchange, random acts of mutual sharing, for continuing their inter-cultural education at the grassroots, free of the worry of checking world monuments or global shopping spots off a list. The destinations and modes of transport are different because the objective has changed.

But if low-cost jetting about the continent is not sustainable, what about traveling far to study abroad? As an “offset” to such travel, there is a non-trivial carbon benefit from four months spent living in France or Spain compared to the same period lived in the US, where per capita annual carbon generation is – by any of the measures used – more than twice that of Europe. Furthermore a lifetime of improved habits amounts to a lot of carbon saved. And relationships begun abroad add to the grassroots global networks which are probably the only hope against planet-sized greed. (There is a reason why the carbon-footprint concept was developed by Big Oil.) At IFE, It's not whether to travel, but rather where, how and why.