With slide photographs of a crater in Iceland, the Wolfgangsee (Lake Wolfgang) and other impressive scenic photos from Austria and Germany beside him, Nick Batty, a senior at ConVal High School recently shared his travel experiences to Europe. The talk took place in the Stephenson Memorial Library in Greenfield and was also attended by Cindi Hodgdon, Nick’s German teacher for the last three years.
Batty recounted his first travel experiences abroad, which took place in April of this year. His group of about two dozen ConVal students started in Iceland and concluded their roundtrip journey in Munich, after stops in Salzburg, Hallein, and Vienna. The trip was part of the ongoing exchange program with the Akademische Gymnasium, a high school in Salzburg which was founded in 1617 and celebrates its 300th anniversary this year. The school’s exchange with ConVal is now in its 19th year.
Apart from gaining international travel experience, Batty was able to apply his German language skills to real-life situations in Germany and Austria where he stayed with a host family. “I’m not fluent,” Batty said. “But if you dropped me into a German-speaking country for a year, I could survive.” For more about Batty’s presentation, see this article in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.