Maybe that’s another reason Eastern Europeans don’t travel as much - the train system is absolutely horrendous. Communist-era infrastructure is common, and the former Yugoslavs destroyed all of their train lines in the civil war, and rebuilding them has been difficult to impossible (not just because of funds, but because they’re all different countries now.) And the roads are a nightmare. It took me fifteen fucking hours to get from Skopje, Macedonia to Sarajevo on the bus - a distance of about 200 km.
That was three and a half years ago and I’m still kind of irritated about it.
This is correct, unless high school has changed greatly since I went. You’re supposed to be in your seat for each class, at all times, and not be out in the halls except during “passing periods”, which are the five or ten minute breaks between class periods (“recitations”, I think you probably call them).
I don’t think the numbers would be convincing as to a greater willingness to travel overseas. Given the exchange rates, Western Europeans can go just about anywhere and find it reasonably cheap to pay for food, lodging and other items. The morning news on Black Friday interviewed a few overseas visitors who’d come over to NYC to shop. If they can do that, then naturally they’re much more capable of coming over here for other reasons too.
Even before times got so bad here, it seemed to be the case that, the older you got and (usually) the more money you earned, paying for a ticket got easier in inverse proportion to one’s willingness to travel rough. IOW the tickets are often a steal, but you need a lot of money when you get there. IMO you can’t truly experience the great cultural centers of Western Europe from a campground on the outskirts.
In spite of my remarks about traveling rough, I think it’d be a kick to go on one of those walking tours, where you hike from place to place but you stay at a decent inn of some kind each night, and the tour organizers ferry your things from place to place. I don’t know if they still do that, but P.G. Wodehouse often mentioned them in his stories.
This is no different from the (Eastern) European public schools I worked in. My kids arrived in my classroom, we studied for 45 minutes, and then they left. They had to ask permission to use the bathroom, but it was just a formality - I always said yes. I just wanted to know where they were going! I don’t recall it being different from my American schooling experience in that respect.
The only difference I can think of is much for the worse. Because Bulgarian public schools don’t have a substitute teacher system, if a teacher is ill or can’t come to class for some reason, the kids will often just have a free period. (Sometimes if a teacher has a free period, they’ll get conned into babysitting for an hour.) Then they wander around the school making lots of noise and distracting other classes in session, up to and including walking into classrooms and interrupting lessons. I once had to physically remove a 12th grade boy who was about twice my size from my third grade class. He’d just wandered into my classroom, started walking around, and refused to leave. It was awesome. Great system.
I had to come back to say I realize that the elite “public” schools of the UK, on which the fictional Hogwarts seems to have been modeled, do seem to be very regimented, at least as much if not more than a typical American high school. But this only applies during school hours; afterwards, since the typical student lives there, they enjoy the advantages of being there without the requirement of sitting in a class; they can study in the library, join a pick-up game of some kind, or whatever. Most American students know only class, lunch, and possibly study hall while they are on the grounds of their schools.
A lot of younger people may not be aware that students at U.S. universities also used to be much more closely monitored and disciplined, even after hours. This was until the the abandonment of the in loco parentis ideal towards the late 1960s. Students in dormitories had to obey curfews and prohibitions against opposite sex visitors. I’m not sure how this applied to students who lived off campus.
BYU is the outstanding example of a contemporary, non-military university which zealously monitors student comportment with regard to grooming and dress, and visitation even for students living off campus, as the link demonstrates. This is utterly atypical of American university life nowadays, however.
When I was a kid, I remember reading an autobiographical story by Roald Dahl where he talked about his experience being severely beaten by an older student: he was basically a slave to his assigned upperclassman, and after he had burned the latter’s toast, the older boy had the privilege of whacking young Roald with a stick using all. his. might. As an American kid, I was horrified. This plus many other episodes made a British public school sound like utter hell for a child, and young as I was I thanked God for not making me English.
But of course, the setting was the better part of a century ago, so I don’t know how it compares to students’ experiences nowadays, or vs. when I was growing up (and read the story) in the 70s.
Such students were known as “Fags” (the word having a vastly different meaning back then), and the whole system was lampooned pretty well in one of the Ripping Yarns episodes where the posh boarding school even has an officially designated “School Bully”.
FWIW, Sir Harry Flashman (especially from the George MacDonald Fraser series of novels) was a “School Bully” and in some of the later novels he expresses concern that someone he used to bully will come back and undermine or otherwise nobble one of his plans, out him as a coward, etc.
I believe these experiences were included by Mr. Dahl precisely to illustrate how an English Boarding School c.192X wasn’t all Cricket, Classics, and Going On The Lead The Empire the way it’s often portrayed. One of Dahl’s short stories also deals with the idea of an adult businessman sharing a train carriage with someone that he’s almost- but not quite- entirely sure is an older student who used to torment him at boarding school, interestingly.