High school students see more than the sights

After a steady diet of pork and potatoes while traveling in Europe and Russia, Davis Crow was ready for something different.

The first thing the Sebring High School student did when he got off the airplane in Charlotte, N.C., was eat pizza.

Crow, who will be a sophomore this year, and Tiffanie Clarke, a 10th-grader at Avon Park High School, took the trip of a lifetime earlier this summer. They joined 31 students who participated in the People to People Student Ambassador Program 2009 Imperial Capitals of Europe Trip.

Other than eating pork and potatoes every night, Crow said the trip was great.

"It was really, really, really awesome," Crow said.

The 20-day journey, which began in Fort Myers, took the group to Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia. They explored castles that are centuries old and visited a Russian family's summer home in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Crow said he liked the scavenger hunt in Estonia, where they had to ask people about the country.

In addition to visiting the Berlin Wall, the group went to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Krakow and the museum that is there now. They met a 79-year-old man who experienced the Holocaust.

"We learned about the Holocaust in school," Clarke said. "He talked about being whipped and beaten and only eating bread and water. Sometimes he didn't get to eat at all."

The trip started off a bit rough on the flight from Fort Myers to Charlotte, Clarke said, because the plane experienced turbulence and dropped 500 feet. She noted that the Air France crash in early June off the coast of Brazil was on the minds of the travelers.

"Everybody was kind of scared," she said.

Clarke said the eight-hour flight from Charlotte to Europe "seemed like 12 hours" since the students didn't know each other.

"The trip was much quicker on the way back," she said.

Crow said he had been asked before with his family, but this trip was different.

"It was much more different," he said. "I liked it better; it taught me responsibility."

People to People International was founded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.

Eisenhower believed that direct interaction between ordinary citizens around the world can promote cultural understanding and world peace.