So, to understand how I got to today, we need to go backwards. I’m going to start in 2009 because everything before that is the boring “well, my dad watched the History channel so that’s why I like history”. Boring, expected and I’m not even sure all that true? I can’t really recall him watching the History channel more than say…the news (and man, does he love the news). In 2009 was my first trip abroad so that is really what started this whole thing. Seeing how I’m speaking about events seven years ago, I’m a) going to forget a lot, and b) be brief because of point ‘a’.

I was in the 11th grade when my high school offered two trips over spring break. One to the Galapagos islands and the other to Germany and Italy. I often think about how my life would be different if I went to the Galapagos islands instead. Would I be at school studying oceans or something? Anyway, Galapagos, I realized was to be a trip for the biology grade 12s and being in 11, it probably would not have been a fun time. Plus I really sucked at biology.

So I went to Europe with my Grade 11 Socials teacher, a group of my high school’s students and my future History 12 teacher who accompanied the other high school’s students. Together we formed a group of like, thirty 17 year olds and we set off to Europe.

I don’t really want to give a day by day account of the trip because I frankly don’t really know it and I don’t really want to write it out. I flip through the pictures on my Facebook every once and a while. I see photos that I took and that were taken of myself and others sleeping on the bus. The multiple days where we ate nothing but gelato. Our adventures of running through Florence at night (and being catcalled for this time. At the time, it made us feel grown up, but now it just disgusts me.) Photos from when Dan and I wandered away from the group (and broke the major rule of the buddy system which was set at groups of 4) and explored the residential areas of Venice.

We were 17. We acted like it. We had spats. We made new (boy)friends. I can only speak for myself, but I never at the time, thought the trip would have such a (dare I say it?) life changing impact on me and my life.

On that trip I saw the real-ness of history. I walked around the Colosseum, I saw the Vatican, I saw a castle!

But we also saw the heaviness and realities of history. We saw where Hitler started his political campaign and more importantly we went to Dachau, the first concentration camp. Nothing can prepare you to see it. You can read all the books, watch all the documentaries on the History channel and mentally prepare yourself in whatever way you see fit, but nothing can do it.

Our visit was brief. Just an afternoon, but anytime you spend there sticks with you. Suddenly everything relating to the Holocaust has a place in your understanding of the world which they lived and died. The idea of a concentration camp was no longer this abstract notion. It was real. You touched it (and it touched you).

So that is the first event which started the ball rolling into today. The first trip abroad, the first instance where history was real and not just in a history book, the event which inspired me to declare History as a major and which showed me that being overseas wasn’t all that scary.