Flinn Memories from the Summer

As a birthday gift to a friend, I put together a video of the Central European Seminar I chaperoned this summer.  From the end of May through June, I traveled with 17 incredibly talented and brilliant college sophomores from Arizona to Hungary and the Transylvania region of Romania.  My co-chaperone, Anne-Marie Norgren, and I are both recent Flinn scholar graduates and were lucky enough to be asked to assist on the trip as chaperones.  We spent a very full three and a half weeks learning about the Hungarian nation, European politics, ethnic issues, and bonding as a group of friends and scholars.  I thought I'd share the video as a testament to all the wonderful places and people in Hungary and Romania, and to try and communicate through pictures, music, and videos some of the deep joys, colorful personalities, and challenges of traveling we experienced on the trip.

Making the video was a wonderful reminder of the importance of revisiting media from my past.  With so much digital output in life - cameras, emails, movies, music, texts - it is easy to not take full advantage of the power of these technologies to strengthen our connection to the past, in a positive way. Going back through these pictures, for instance, reminded me of the incredible personalities of all these people- the smiles, the creativity, the laughter.  They also helped me replant myself in the excitement and joy I felt as I went through the new experience of chaperoning a familiar trip.  While reading Time and the Art of Living by Robert Grudin a while back, I wrote to a friend that seeing good experiences as memories, and only that, is as harmful as banishing bad memories to the past.  Technology can be overwhelming, but it is supposed to make life better.  One clear way is how strongly it can connect us to memories. And in that way, make them more meaningful. 

Flinn Central European Seminar 2010 from Matt Rolland on Vimeo.

The songs on the movie are:

Hungary by Muzsikás

É Choxanyi by Kalyi Jag

Ezraoul by Fishtank Ensemble

Vonat by Muzsikás

Up Around the Bend by CCR

Hoppé by Palya Bea

Lohajim, Rebbe by Budapest Klezmer Band

Csillag Vagy Fecske by Csik Zenekar