Photo courtesy of Mikah Northrup.
Five HHS students visited Germany and Austria from Wednesday, March 5, to Friday, March 14, including two travel days, in the first German foreign language trip since before COVID-19 in 2019.
The trip had a smaller group of students than HHS German Teacher Eric Garchow has taken in past years, which allowed the students to ask more questions throughout the trip. The group included senior Eric Siebrass, juniors Sam Tunks, Mikah Northrup, Anthony Kuehn, and Jacob Thomas, and chaperones Garchow and HHS Skilled and Technical Sciences Teacher Kiley Dodson, who has had four of the five students in class and knows the fifth student she has not had in class.
“It was nice to have a small group, because we didn’t have to make reservations for everywhere in advance, so we had a little bit more flexibility and freedom,” Garchow said. “And when you’re leading around a small group of kids, if kids have questions or have comments or anything, we got to kind of talk in a small group, rather than, you know, I felt like it wasn’t like I was in a lecture hall trying to talk to all these people at once and get everyone involved.”
Over the ten days of the trip, including six days in Germany and two days in Austria, students visited museums, saw natural and historical sights such as the German Alps and the burial place of many members of the Habsburg dynasty, stayed with a host family and attended German school for a day, and enjoyed being immersed in German culture.
“(My favorite part of the trip was) probably leading a walking tour of Vienna. There’s just a lot of really significant historical sites there,” Garchow said. “I like European history, and it’s the former capital of a European major power, so just all sorts of Habsburg history there. And a lot of the kids are really interested in that too, so that was kind of cool to share, ‘Oh yeah, you’ve heard of that guy. This is his tomb.’”
