When Lauren Stossel ’07 stood in front of The Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris a few weeks ago, she probably wasn’t expecting to bump into two Wesleyan classmates. When Elissa Kozlov ’08 left her dorm room in Nic 7 to catch a flight to France, she probably didn’t realize she would be one of four people on her hall to spend the break in Paris. And when Cait Petre ’06 decided to study in Paris this semester, she most likely had no idea she’d see five Wesleyan students there in the span of one week.
But the stars were aligned for student travelers this break. Cheap airfares coupled with a significant number of students abroad in Paris made the City of Lights the latest Wesleyan hot spot.
Stossel was able to eliminate hotel costs by staying with Petre for the duration of her stay, during which she happened to bump into two Wesleyan students at Notre Dame, and met up with friend Jonas Carpignano ’06 for drink. The social networking of Wesleyan deepened as Carpignano met up with Maude Bass-Krueger ’07 the following days.
Kozlov, traveling with Marty Schapiro ’08, also took advantage of cheap lodging, staying with a friend from high school studying in Paris.
“It was really a pretty affordable trip,” Kozlov said. “And it seems to fall in with the typical Wesleyan social life.”
As Kozlov suggested, there may be a cultural, as well as an economic reason that so many Wesleyan students made Euro-trips.
“I think that Wesleyan is a school where we don’t glorify the typical spring break hotspots like Cancun and The Bahamas,” Kozlov said. “I’m guessing places like that just don’t register as well with a lot of the community here.”
Outside the Paris and Europe trend, this attitude of the untraditional college spring break holds weight. Rose Komesar ’07 spent the break with four friends in Southern California and then the beaches of Northern Mexico.
“I was so happy when we got to Mexico, and we missed all the invasion tours by a week,” Komesar said. An invasion tour entails several busloads of college students from the California and Arizona area for a week of beaches, clubs, and partying.
“It’s a lot of drunken debauchery,” Komesar said. “Not that we didn’t have our own drunken debauchery, but there were just five of us, and it was great to just relax and explore on our own. Most people who traveled over break seemed to have gone someplace interesting, or at least something different than the whole ‘spring break Cancun’ thing.”
That’s not to say that Wesleyan students didn’t have fun on their cosmopolitan vacations. “Our trip was a really good combination of spring break typical fun, and European culture,” Kozlov said. “We tried to balance it out by doing the touring and museums and stuff during the day, and then hang out with Parisians and go to clubs at night.”
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