Hamilton students enjoy trip to Spain

by Russ Lawrence for the Bitterroot Star

Spain recently welcomed 32 Hamilton High School students with sunny skies and mild temperatures, as HHS Spanish teacher Erika Marlatt led a group on a spring break tour, leaving Hamilton on March 23 and returning April 3.

Marlatt proposed the tour a year ago, and was overwhelmed by the immediate response. In addition to the 32 students who eventually signed up—28 young women and four males—the group was joined by 15 parents and chaperones.

“Hamilton loves to travel,” Marlatt observed, and with such a large group they were able to enjoy a private tour tailored to show off the highlights of Spanish culture. The group was escorted full-time by professional guides provided by their tour coordinator, Education First, an international agency with decades of experience in arranging student travel.

“That’s what sold it,” Marlatt said. Having an experienced, professional, English-speaking guide backed by a well-regarded agency gave parents and students the confidence to invest in the trip. On returning to Hamilton, Marlatt confirmed that “it was everything I told them it would be,” and praised EF for running a near-perfect trip. 

Marlatt is a believer in the tandem values of language learning and travel. Such a trip “fortifies the program, and gets kids excited about traveling, seeing real-world reasons for studying a language,” she said. That lesson sank in with the students on the trip, including Emma Ivie, who observed that “everything we did was about [Spanish] culture, but we had to use language skills” to appreciate it. She was able to speak with the locals, noting that “at first I was nervous, but it got easier.”

Charlotte Hawkes added that not all those on the trip were studying Spanish, so those who were had to speak and translate for the others. 

Marlatt’s other goals for the students were less academic: to realize how lucky they are, and to experience ‘difference.’ “Not the same things we’re used to, but something inherently different.”

The students confirmed that both of Marlatt’s goals were achieved. Hawkes observed that the trip changed what she’s grateful for, including clean Bitterroot air. The major cities they visited were crowded, often with noxious odors and dirty streets and sidewalks, and she was impressed both by the sheer number of people in the cities, and by how much they walked. The students were all glad to return home to a clean environment, but also to bathrooms and showers that weren’t tiny and cramped. Still, both Hawkes and Ivie expressed an interest in returning to Spain—and elsewhere—some day on their own.

The opportunity to experience “difference” wasn’t wasted on Elli Harmon, who explained that while she’d never experienced the customs and culture of city life in Spain, she also came to realize that the people she encountered were equally oblivious to her Montana lifestyle. “There’s so much difference in the world—they have no idea how I live,” she said. “You could honestly live your life in one block,” she observed, contrasting Spanish city life with the need for a personal auto to live as we do in the Bitterroot.

Their itinerary provided ten days on the ground in Spain, with nights spent in Granada, Seville, Madrid, and Barcelona. They traveled as Europeans do, by a combination of bus and train, eating typical dishes and partaking in experiential opportunities including a flamenco dance lesson and a cooking class. The latter involved breaking up into teams which were assigned a recipe to prepare, in Spanish. The students had to go to the mercado (grocery store) to buy their ingredients, and one of the tasks was to speak to a stranger about the regional specialties they prepared.

Juan Perez Aranaga is a Spanish exchange student attending Hamilton High School, and while he didn’t go on the trip, he made a list of favorite foods for his classmates to try. They managed to check off every item on the list, with croquetas (creamy, crunchy ham fritters) and churros con chocolate topping the lists of favorites.

The formal education on the trip derived from visits to Spain’s iconic destinations. They explored the Moorish heritage of southern Spain through visits to the Alhambra in Granada and the Mezquita in Córdoba. A walking tour of Seville took them to the massive cathedral that houses the bones of Christopher Columbus, and to the tower where Spanish galleons delivered treasures from the Americas; Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral and Park Guell introduced them to the architectural genius of Antoni Gaudí; and their time in Madrid included one of the world’s foremost art museums, the Prado.

They also visited an olive oil producer outside of Córdoba, where they not only sampled the pure olive oil, but were treated to orange-infused oil as a topping for chocolate ice cream!

Student Eleri Wheat found herself more willing to try her language skills when they were outside of the cities, such as at the olive grove and during a beach outing near Barcelona. The students welcomed such breaks from the hectic pace of the city visits.

The packed itinerary was all in the service of education, Marlatt explained. “There’s so much learning that goes on during the trip, with guides on the bus providing information on what’s coming up,” and answering questions about what they just saw.

Students found the guides to be engaging, informed, and often humorous. Marlatt added that the EF guides did a great job of keeping the group safe and well-oriented to the day’s activities, while encouraging the “happy vibe” that the group maintained.

Harmon competed to win a Global Citizen scholarship that helped her pay for the trip, provided through Education First’s Global Classroom Foundation. She noted that attaining fluency in Spanish has been her overriding desire since sixth grade, and expected the trip to help her “understand that there are other ways of living in the world.” She described herself as eager to explore and immerse herself in other cultures, and was sufficiently motivated that she earned the rest of the money for the trip herself.

Ivie cited a contrarian reason for signing up for the trip. Her family has traveled extensively in Spanish-speaking countries, but her parents favor less-touristy places and activities. Ivie was eager to visit some classic tourist destinations, but was also looking forward to becoming comfortable traveling on her own, apart from her parents. On her return, she felt much more self-sufficient and secure, and was pleased to have been able to take the lead when they broke into smaller groups, relying on her language skills and travel experience.

Based on the success of this trip, Marlatt plans to continue a program of occasional trips abroad to Spanish-speaking countries, offering students a glimpse of other ways of living, doing, and thinking, and providing a powerful incentive to continue with their language studies.