Following the Equator | EF's Educational Travel Blog

How to navigate three exceptional art galleries

By Paul Mattesini | EF Tour Director

A tour director friend of mine just finished a London, Paris and Madrid tour. Quite a super trip to go on, and one that offers a chance to visit three exceptional galleries. EF tours are busy places; sometimes a visit to a sight can be limited in scope due to the huge range of other great places to get to in a city. It seems a shame to lose some time coming to terms with what a museum has to offer and what you might want to see while standing, clutching your ticket, in the doorway.

Fortunately, the British Museum, Louvre and Prado all offer some great online help for you to do a little pre-tour planning.

Although not included in the actual tour, London’s British Museum is free of charge to enter (great price) and open until 8:30 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, making it an outstanding choice for free time. In 2010, BBC Radio 4 has been running a superb "History of the World in 100 Objects" series in conjunction with the museum, and this offers a chance to get a great overview of the range and depth of exhibits on offer. Maximize your time and make use of the museum’s sheets offering the best way to spend one or three hours at the museum. Make sure to have a look inside the reading room, restored in the late 20th century and now available for all to visit. Around the museum, the neighborhood of Bloomsbury is a relaxing place to get lunch or just enjoy the atmosphere.

Meanwhile in Paris, one of the great ways to enter the Louvre is via the Carrousel. Your EF Tour Director can lead you to this point, having first given you some time to see the large glass pyramid (above) and courtyard as well as views of Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe through the small arch. Heading down some stairs, you immediately see some of the original fortification walls and the inverted pyramid. Your tour director can point you toward the information desk (free floor plans available) and entrance to the three main galleries. I would suggest heading up the stairs toward Sully and all the way to the end of the corridor. Going down some steps, you will walk through parts of the old fortifications. Where do you go from here? Well, the Louvre website offers some great self-guided routes that you can follow, each of them 90 minutes.

The Prado in Madrid, located close to the Ritz hotel, was originally designed to be a natural history museum, so you will find plenty of animal sculptures around the exterior. The museum website has a choice of three self-guided routes to follow around the gallery. Featuring some of the great European art and sculpture, this easily accessible art gallery can be a relaxing treat after the overwhelming size of the Louvre. Also, if you are in the mood, it is only half a mile or so to walk from the Prado to the excellent Reina Sofia gallery (featuring Picasso’s Guernica and so much more).

Photo: Al Ianni via Flickr (CC license)

Summer European Events: Sports, Music and More

Travel, quite often, is about being in any one place at any one time. If you are in any of these places, you might enjoy partaking in some of the following this summer.

Fete de la Musique (Paris, 21st June): This day of free concerts is shared across many cities worldwide, but the idea originated in Paris in the early 1980's. 

Barcelona (Grec) Festival (13th June to 1st August): Enjoy music, theatre and dance performances at a variety of places in the city, but principally at the Grec Theatre (a Greek style amphitheatre), which is located on the side of the Montjuic Hill. The nearby Olympic Stadium will also host the European Athletic Championships in the last week of July, with tickets from as little as $15.

All England Tennis Championships (Wimbledon, London, 21st June to 4th July): One of the four Grand Slams, these matches are the only ones played on grass. Tickets for the main courts in the second week require a lot of luck or cash, or both. However, get there early and line up (queue) for tickets on the outside courts and you will see some top action for sure.

Calcio Storico (Florence, June 24th to 26th): Played on a sand pit in front of the Church of Sante Croce, this annual event is a brutal recreation of the earliest form of soccer. It is a kind of ultimate fighting with a ball in the middle and smoke bombs in the bleachers. If you cannot watch it live, just be around the spectacle to share some of the atmosphere.

Open Air Cinema in Athens: Throughout June and July, almost every neighbourhood will have an open air cinema, showing films in the original language (with Greek subtitles). Most films are shown at 9 p.m., and it is a great way to join some locals for a night out. Your tour director can help you discover what’s showing and where.

A personal favourite, which takes place at the end of May, has been cancelled due to crowd concerns. There will be no (legal) cheese rolling in our part of the world this year. Come back in 2011.

Focus On: Vimy Ridge

Three Aprils ago, thousands of high school students from Canada converged on a sloping field to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, where a Canadian expeditionary force defeated a German defensive line in northeast France in World War I. It was an outstanding victory for allied forces fighting Germany and remains to this day a watershed event showcasing Canadian spirit and sacrifice.

I was an EF Tour Director for a group from Georgian Bay in Ontario going to Vimy. On April 9, we filed onto the battlefield and took our place in front of the Vimy Memorial, a stone structure that is at once hulking and soaring, with the best capturing of sadness that I've ever seen in a towering outdoor statue (it's Mother Canada, mourning her lost countrymen). 

Group Leader Spotlight: Phil Leswing

First-time group leader Phil Leswing teaches psychology at Greenfield-Central High School in Greenfield, Indiana. Phil (pictured at left with his wife and son) began organizing his 2011 educational tour to Spain, France and Italy this past October, anticipating he would travel with a small group. Two hundred people showed up at his first meeting, and he now has a group of almost 70 travelers. Here, he shares his story.

What inspired you to take an EF tour?

The joy and inspiration I get from traveling was the first factor that motivated me to travel with EF. When traveling with a group, I get as much joy and inspiration from seeing other people excited as I do from my own experience. There is a powerful force generated by groups of people traveling together. I chose EF because of two things that seem like they can’t coexist, but they do. The professional side of EF is outstanding. I also appreciate the personal side of the company. The open and constant communication has made it easy as a first-time group leader to feel like I’ve been doing this for years.


How do you use your blog to promote your tour? Do you use any other types of social media (ex. Facebook, Twitter) to promote your tour?

I use the blog for trip and meeting updates right now. As we get closer, I’ll be adding information about the destinations and our trip details. My Twitter just announces the trip and connects to the blog, so it is not really in use yet, but I can see us using it in the future.


As a first-time group leader, you've been incredibly successful at recruiting students for your tour. What’s your secret to success? How do you encourage students to sign up for your tour? 

The first thing that made recruiting students successful was finding a core of social students who were very interested in going on a trip. I then involved them in the decision-making process of where we would go on our trip. We set up our first recruitment meeting in October, and I started going to classes and talking up the trip. The posters and itineraries that EF provides were hung up and distributed before our meeting, so even more people were getting exited. We had over 200 people show up for our initial recruitment meeting. I was amazed by the turnout. I had gotten some gelato to share with the group. I had Flickr slideshows going of the destinations we would be traveling to, and I had EF YouTube videos playing. One of the potential chaperones had traveled with EF in the past, so he spoke with the group about the professionalism and personal connection that EF provides. We had a best price deadline of October 31, and a first-night sign-up raffle for $50 off the trip.

Around the world with EF staff: Recollections from Dublin, London and Paris

By Catherine Henkels, EF Tour Consultant

In October, I embarked on my first EF Educational Tour. I had traveled to Europe before on my own and with a group, but never on an EF tour and I was excited to find out what it was all about. The tour I went on was Dublin, London and Paris, a tour that visits three countries in only 10 days. The advantages of traveling with a group became evident pretty quickly, as it would be difficult to see as much as we did in such a short time.

I traveled with a group from Indianapolis, Indiana, and there was at least one person on the tour who had never left the state before.  The EF staff greeted the Hoosiers at the airport in Dublin, and despite many hours of travel, they were happy to be there. In what I soon learned would be a recurring theme throughout this tour, we didn’t let jetlag slow us down.

The first day in Dublin we took a walking tour to gain our bearings, and after dinner, most of the group ventured out to see what Dublin was like at night. The group leader decided that boys and girls should split up for the adventure into the city. My colleague, Emily, and I accompanied the girls to explore Dublin by night. We walked around the Temple Bar area, where street performers drew crowds. The students got a kick out of seeing the human statues and the different styles of the locals. Dublin was definitely a nice introduction to Europe for this group, which was comprised of many new travelers. There was very little in the way of language barriers and there was no need to use public transportation, as Dublin is a smaller city and easily walkable. We could gain our bearings and adjust to our new surroundings, without adding the additional maze of mass transit systems.

Follow Paris O on Twitter

Paris Orientation—EF's free training seminar for new EF Group Leaders—is always an eye-opening experience. It's the best way for teachers to learn about educational travel and about EF, plus everyone gets to see the sights in the City of Light.

I'm fortunate to be joining a large group of new group leaders at our Paris Orientation this weekend. We'll be visiting the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and lots of other great sights and neighborhoods during a full weekend of exploring.

You can follow along on Twitter, as I'll be posting updates from Paris Orientation on the official EF Tours account: @EFtours.

If you're already on Twitter, be sure to follow @EFtours. If you're new to Twitter, check out this video explanation of Twitter in Plain English.

For more about Paris Orientation, check out the official Paris Orientation site on eftours.com.

Our 10 Best of 2009

Thank you to everyone for reading, sharing and supporting Following the Equator in 2009. We sure enjoyed posting great stories, facts, tips and profiles about educational travel and the group leaders who make it possible.

We're already planning some exciting new things for 2010. Most of all, though, we want to hear from you. What do you want to read and see on this blog—more interviews with teachers, more amazing travel photos, more fundraising and recruiting ideas, more tidbits about the things to see and do on tour? Let us know at equator@ef.com.

As we look ahead to an exciting year of travel in 2010, we thought we'd take a quick look back at a successful 2009 and our 10 favorite blog posts of the year. Feel free to post your own comments below.

So that's what Clint Eastwood sounds like

The first movie my wife ever saw in the original English version was The Bridges of Madison County. She was quite taken with the experience of hearing Clint Eastwood's real voice for the first time; until that point, she'd only heard Clint dubbed into Spanish, by a Spanish actor who probably also dubbed Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Hanks.  

More movies would bring her more revelations: Jack Nicholson's real voice, Robert De Niro's real voice, and the real voices of a host of other Americans, right on down to Steve Urkel (American TV shows were dubbed into Spanish, too). For her, there was no comparing the English voice to the Spanish dubbing: The real English was far superior and far more satisfying. 

Focus On: The European high school experience

When I was an EF Tour Director, with a captive audience of American high school students on my bus, I enjoyed the opportunity to highlight major and/or fun differences between the U.S. high school experience and the European one.

Below are some of these highlights, taken from interviews I held with some German, French and Italian friends. This is just an collection of unexpected and fascinating differences that came up over coffee with friends about their high school life. It's not scientific, exhaustive or comprehensive—but just too much fun to keep to myself!

Focus On: European license plates

If you find yourself in a tour bus on a highway somewhere in central Europe, looking out at the license plates of the cars passing by, you might think Europeans have devised a public way to grade drivers.  

There are cars whose license plates bear an "A"; presumably they are the best drivers. Then there are those license plates marked with a "B"; good drivers still, one supposes, but could be better with more road practice. Before you know it, license plates marked "D" and even "F" pass by—with drivers either oblivious to their poor grade or defiantly refusing to let it bother them. 

Suddenly, as you wonder why you haven't seen a "C" driver all morning, an "E" drives by. An extra rung on the ladder of shame before hitting "F," perhaps? Then a "P." A driver graded on a pass/fail basis, maybe? Then an "NL." Not Listed? No License? 

If the grading-system hypothesis is beginning to feel like a stretch, it's because it is. The letters represent the country the car (and driver) is from. "A" is Austria. "B" is Belgium. "D" is Germany (Deutschland). "E" is Spain (España). "F" is France. "P" is Portugal. And "NL" is the Netherlands.

Focus On: Latin Quarter in Paris

For visitors to Paris, the most notable attribute of the Latin Quarter is its labyrinth of frenetic, people-filled passageways lined with a smorgasbord of ethnic food, music and entertainment. If nearby Notre Dame is like a stodgy old schoolmaster that hushes voices and stifles expression, then its foil is the Latin Quarter. The Latin Quarter is like the rumba.

So students could be forgiven for thinking that the "Latin" in the name "Latin Quarter" might be there to evoke something that pulsates with an energetic joie de vivre spirit, like our word "Latino" can do.

At least I hope students can be forgiven, because before I bothered to see why the Latin Quarter was called the Latin Quarter, I too made this quiet and subconscious Latin/Latino conflation.

Photo of the Week: Mont Saint-Michel

Legend has it that the church atop Mont Saint-Michel was founded by Saint Aubert, bishop of Avranches, after repeated visions from the Archangel Michael 1,300 years ago.

"I thought this picture was pretty cool because of the seagulls in the front of it," nal1320 wrote in Flickr. "I liked this picture so much I blew it up and framed it in my room."

Want to be featured as Photo of the Week? Join the EF Tours group on Flickr, and add your travel photos. We pick a new one each Thursday.

Photo: nal1320 via Flickr (EF Tours pool)