The VJC UK-France Lit trip really expanded the students' horizons. In 9 nights and 10 days, the 32 Lit and non-Lit students covered so many cultural and literary highlights that we could not really believe that it was only 10 days.
For UK, we went for the authentic Elizabethan theatre experience by standing throughout the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) performance of Othello, just like the Elizabethan playgoers. Other than the sore legs, the play was good and we learned so much from the highly interactive and fun workshop we had in the afternoon and the special preview of an RSC rehearsal too. Now what was the play they were rehearsing? It was not Othello....
A chief takeaway from this trip was how Shakespeare's words are truly meant to be and deliver a sensory overload and experience, not just words on the page. Of course, we were blown away by Sir Ian McKellen's impeccable comic timing in Chekhov's performedSeagull too and thankfully had a very knowledgeable guide at Shakespeare's house that really opened our eyes to the fact that infant mortality in Elizabethan society was very high and this affected the social customs and Elizabethan concerns in drama and that the people slept upright!
Westminster Abbey, the place of the coronation, marriage and burial of all British monarchs with few exceptions since 1066, was super impressive. It put into perspective what a young nation Singapore was. Every nook and cranny of the Abbey was literally stuffed with history, art and culture and you are literally walking on the remains of the great and worthy like Isaac Newton and Geoffrey Chaucer. Imagine, there are at least 3000 such notables buried in the Abbey. To do justice to such an awe-inspiring place, we had the best professional guides at the Abbey.
Dickens Festival was a blast too. Lots of us took pictures with the costumed players parading the streets. To talk about every highlight in the UK we experienced would take too long so you just have to be content with a list: Jane Austen's house, Roman Baths, Imperial War Museum, Charles Dickens' House, Canterbury Cathedral, Eurostar...
France was no less an eye-opener and we could register the difference between both countries. Both has long-standing monarchies but the style of architecture in France was grander and Louis XIV's Versailles Palace and gardens totally redefined grandeur for us. The Hall of Mirrors, where the WWI Treaty of Versailles was signed was, needless to say, impressive.
We went to France to experience and see for ourselves the WWI battlefields mentioned in our Literature texts and found the sites lovingly maintained. We were so fortunate to actually speak with WW2 veterans who were having a memorial service on the very day we visited too. Our guide for WWI sites, Brian, was a fount of knowledge and enthusiasm.
Paris, the eternal city of romance, exhausted our camera batteries in a hurry. We hit the Louvre, D'Orsay Museum, Notre Dame and the magnificent Eiffel Tower in a short span of 3 days. Try climbing the Eiffel Tower to the 2nd level. Your legs will hate you but your eyes will love you. 80km panoramic view from the top of Eiffel on a clear day. That's twice the span of Singapore. Really puts a new and literal spin on expanding our horizons. Another big difference was how much pride the French take in their own artistic and historical heritage. This is evident from the busloads of internal (French) tourists that we saw everywhere, which is so different from Singapore.
Needless to say, we all felt that 10 days was not enough and, many groups of students were saying it was the best trip of their lives so far and they all wanted to come back on their own. The teachers were very proud of the students, who really took their learning seriously and many could be seen reading the materials they have bought, or scribbling down their precious memories of the trip.
