All right, first up is Anna (see picture above). She works in the Writing Center with me and is a junior this fall. Hailing from Kenosha, Wisconsin, Anna is majoring in English with minors in History and Classical Studies. Anna wrote the following three posts. I'm just posting them! :) Enjoy!
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Part I: Overview
So I just got back from my second May Term trip (the first being my trip to London last year through the Theatre department). This second trip was also through Coe’s Theatre department, but it was a completely different experience. They’re on the same continent, but Belgrade, Serbia, feels like worlds away from London, England. But I can talk about that later — now I should be getting on to my overview of the trip.
This trip started out with five days of class (with six hours of class time a day) at Coe. Now before anyone freaks out, it wasn’t that bad and it never felt like we were spending six hours of time on class work. Each day of class was divided into four sections: history and culture, plays, language, and movies. The first hour was always dedicated to learning about Serbian culture and what we might expect to see in Belgrade. The second hour was our time to discuss the reading for the day — usually a play, followed by a chapter or two of a “documentary” book called With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia by Asne Seierstad. The third hour was our crash course in Serbian, meaning our attempts to learn enough to pretend to be able to communicate with the native speakers. (As frustrating as it sometimes was to realize that you can’t learn a language in five days, I’m so glad we spent the time on it. I feel that knowing even the little Serbian that I did made life so much easier once we were actually there.) The other three hours of class were devoted to a movie, again, usually a play, though we did watch one documentary. So class wasn’t that bad. Six hours a day, but divided into bite-size chunks. Our class met from 1pm-4pm and then again from 7pm-10pm. We actually had a lot of fun with the movies; we made popcorn, had candy, and ended up using another student’s apartment rather than the real classroom!
At the end of the week, we had a final rather than watching a fifth movie. Most of the group freaked out a little bit at the prospect of a final exam, but it was really nothing to sweat. We were only being tested on four and a half days worth of material and there was nothing to worry about if you had paid any sort of attention during class. We were tested on basic information, like general history and big cultural events, a little language (meaning, phrases you should be able to recognize), and then some theatre terms and concepts that we needed to have an understanding of. All in all, nothing to really be stressing about.
Once we got to Belgrade, we weren’t really tightly scheduled. The Serbs are a fairly laid-back people, so stuff happens when it happens there. There were plenty of things that we did together as a group, but we were also free to go out and explore on our own in smaller groups (say, three or four of us rather than all fourteen of us!). We ended up sticking together a lot of the time, simply because we all had similar interests (hey, that’s what happens when you stick a bunch of theatre kids together), but after the first few days, there were quite a few of us who were willing to go out and find a meal or souvenirs in smaller groups.
Our days were mostly spent sight-seeing, visiting museums, fortresses, monuments, and theatres (with a lot of walking and bus-riding mixed in), while our nights were either devoted to the theatre or free for us to do what we pleased. We took a bike tour, a river “cruise,” day trips to the cities of Kragujevac, Zemun, and Novi Sad, visited an archaeological dig outside Belgrade, took an unofficial tour of Belgrade University, saw Tito’s mausoleum and a cathedral under construction. We saw Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in Belgrade with Serbian subtitles, ate too much good food, and got slightly sunburned. I think it’s safe to say I had a really good time.
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