Klarinet Archive - Posting 000964.txt from 1995/10

From: Martin Pergler <pergler@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Sound of America details
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 12:09:27 -0400

On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, Nate wrote:

> It looks like a few of us student musicians here are interested in the Sound
> of America honor band, so let me tell you all about it.
[...]
>
> You'll stay in great hotels -- all air conditioned! Other student tours
> often times put you up in other people's houses which would really suck.
> Imagine having to stay overnight in some foreign family's home! I think that
> would be really weird.
>
Sorry, don't mean to be obnoxious, but I can't resist some sort of
response to this. When I travel, I tend to _prefer_ to stay in some
foreign family home...you learn an awful lot more about the culture and
meet amazing people (I still [very occasionally] write to a family I
stayed with in Finland on a high school band tour about 8 years ago).
People tend to be very friendly and accomodating, expecting the same in
return of course, and show you all sorts of wonderful places you would
never see as a standard tourist. Hotels are really rather boring places!

> The countries you'll visit, and the cultures you experience, truly make the
> trip worthwhile. There are tour guides on the buses so you can understand
> the history of some of the places you'll go. And everywhere you do go is
> packed with exciting things to do. In Switzerland we could go on a cable car
> ride to the top of a mountain, ride the train to a different mountain, or
> just shop around in the town. We stayed three days in Paris, and had an
> entire day free to ourselves! In Austria we saw Mozart's birthplace, which
> was pretty cool. If I were to tell you every exciting thing we did, though,
> I'd get yelled at even more for the length of this post.

Exactly.
Anyway, great to hear you enjoyed the trip, Nate, and nice of you to
pass it on to us. But I do think you would have enjoyed living with
other families if you had had the chance.

Martin

-------------------------------------------------------
Martin Pergler pergler@-----.edu
Grad student, Mathematics http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~pergler
Univ. of Chicago