There is no way to adequately communicate the piquant experience of drinking airag for the first time. Passing a brightly colored plastic bowl brimming with fermented mares’ milk around a group of friends on a sunny day in early autumn on the inexpressibly beautiful Mongolian steppe, I was struck by this seemingly trivial revelation. At best, you might be able to describe the flavor by combining usually unassociated adjectives, such as milky and astringent, or suggesting possible (but unappetizing) methods of fabrication in the absence of large quantities of horse milk or the knowledge of how to process it properly. (For a completely inaccurate recipe, try one cup of slightly spoiled skim milk supplemented with a shot of watered down vodka and a squirt of lemon juice.) But this isolated moment was only one of many new and unexpected experiences that would catch me off guard that day, and every day for the next nine months of my life, as I traveled within and between seven amazing countries as part of University of Puget Sound’s Pacific Rim/Asia Study Travel Program.

Reflecting on how my education developed during my time as an undergraduate at Puget Sound, I realize how much influence this unique program has had on shaping my academic career. I came to the university from small-town Wyoming, specifically because of the singular opportunity for extensive undergraduate travel and cultural immersion that I perceived possible through the Pacific Rim program, gaining life-informing international experience in tandem with a full year of university credit. During my first two years at Puget Sound I was accepted into the program with 23 other students, with whom I spent a year forming friendships, preparing travel documents, getting immunized, and researching information about our various countries of destination—including the culinary peculiarities of each place, which resulted in the periodic preparation and sharing of meals with one another. The program took place during my junior year, and though the group had become reduced to 20 students, while adding two individuals who we would all come to appreciate as crucial support staff, we set out with those we left behind in our hearts and our minds open to the adventure unfolding beneath our rambling feet.

Throughout the entire, perpetually varying trip, there was one thing that was an undeniable constant—movement. We traveled by plane, train, and automobiles of all variety; we rode spirited horses, vocal camels, and shaggy yaks; we pedaled bicycles, zipped around on electric scooters, and puttered on mopeds; boated and bused; but most of all, we walked. Though the experience of perpetual transience prevented us from forming deeper connections with the locations we passed through than perhaps we might have if we had participated in a more traditional study-abroad program, we were able to appreciate and engage with the people we met and our surroundings in fundamentally different ways than the tourists we continually encountered ever began to. Informed by the content of our coursework and the opportunities made possible by the program—specifically due to the incredible connections and effort on the part of the program’s director, Elisabeth Benard—we were exposed to places, situations, and individuals that fed our increasingly complex understandings of the intricate elements that constitute and connect each of the places we passed through.  

Considering the brevity of our time in each locale, the richness and variety of our experiences would have been impossible without the benefits we received as part of the program. In particular, the two homestays that each of us participated in, where we were welcomed by families in and around Kyoto, Japan, as well as by Tibetan refugees living in Dharamsala, India, were invaluable. The warmth, generosity, and inclusion that I personally experienced as part of my adoption into the Sano family on the suburban shores of Lake Biwa and my warm welcome by Nyima and Tseyang into their small, brightly painted single-room home in the foothills of the Himalayas, exposed me to intimate aspects of my hosts’ foreign cultures in a familiar context of supportive and loving relationships that transcended our lack of a common language.

With the world as our literal classroom, the citizens of each country as our instructors, and everything that we observed or directly experienced as the materials to excite and facilitate our learning, we grew as both students and the cliché “world citizens.” We benefited specifically from the expertise and knowledge of our “official” instructors, who both emerged from the places where we found ourselves and traveled from the United States to directly involve themselves with us in the subject matter of our courses.  As students, we investigated subjects ranging from the biodiversity of Mongolia’s unique biosphere to the history, ideologies, and technologies that shape Malaysian architecture. Through both traditional and—more frequently—nontraditional avenues of education, as part of the Pacific Rim program we were challenged in a myriad of ways from start to finish, each trial and triumph causing me to become increasingly appreciative of the unimaginable opportunities I was able to access on a daily basis. 

In such ways, and so many others, my time as part of University of Puget Sound’s Pacific Rim program has influenced and informed my undergraduate education, shaping an academic experience I imagined but had not dared to hope would be realized. Such experiences, though different for each of my fellow PacRimmers, and often as trying as they were uplifting, continue to influence me at the present and will inherently help to shape and propel my perpetual movement into the future.