Emerson’s Kasteel Well program has many unique aspects, including an excursion to Amsterdam, which occurs during the second weekend of the semester. 

This semester’s excursion included the soft launch of the Living Learning Community (LLC) into the castle’s academic program. The LLC aims to center the residential, academic, and travel components of each student’s experience around a certain theme, this semester’s being “water.” 

Chester Lee, the assistant director for academic support services at the castle, said that the theme of water was proposed during a vote taken by staff and faculty members. 

“Water,” Lee said, is “something that is connected to the Netherlands and has the Dutch DNA.” 

To incorporate water into the Amsterdam excursion, students visited the NEMO Science Museum and the Maritime Museum. This itinerary was proposed by Daan Lodder, director of the LLC, and Rob Dückers, director of the Kasteel Well program. Before the development of the LLC, the Amsterdam Excursion was not as packed with events as it had been in previous years. 

The excursion started at 5:45 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 20, with the resident assistants running around the small campus blasting Pitbull songs and banging on doors to wake their residents. By 7 a.m., all 85 students boarded two coach buses and traveled back to the city that they touched down in just one week prior. The itinerary for day one of the Amsterdam trip included a historical walking tour and visits to the water-themed museums. 

Saturday’s schedule was a day full of museum visits, with students attending the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum, and more. 

Zyon Lindeblad, a sophomore writing, literature, and publishing major, went to the Embassy of the Free Mind, a museum that seeks to cultivate “free thought and action” as part of its mission to lead to greater equality in the world. Lindeblad credits the embassy as an introspective experience. 

 “That just makes you think about religion and life and your place in the world … and it’s been wonderful,” Lindeblad said. 

The last day of the Amsterdam excursion included two optional trips: one to the Van Gogh Museum and the other to the Anne Frank House. A limited number of tickets were available for each option, and some students chose to take tours on their own. 

Isabella Piantini, a sophomore visual media arts major, went to the Van Gogh Museum on their own and enjoyed how the museum laid out the life of the late artist. 

“I know a little bit about [Van Gogh]’s life, but it was just a way that I had never thought about his life,” Piantini said.  “There was [a] part where they had excerpts from letters that you could listen to … a letter that his brother sent him, a letter that his sister-in-law sent him, [with] people reading [them] out.” 

The Van Gogh Museum does extensive research on the life and works of the Dutch painter to curate their collections, which helps visitors like Piantini embrace that history. 

“I just feel like I connected so much more to him as a person and the struggles that he was going through, with his mental health and the astounding amount of people in his life that did not care about him,” Piantini said. “It made the whole museum and the story of his life feel more tragic.”

At 5 p.m. on each day of the trip, students were free to roam and explore the city of Amsterdam. The free evenings were for learning how to navigate new places using public transportation, which will happen in countries students will travel to. Using these skills, students were tasked with getting back to the castle on their own Sunday evening.  

Trudy Miles, a sophomore business of creative enterprises major, said that she and her seven friends traveled back to the Netherlands campus from Amsterdam together. They had a rough outline of how to get back to the castle, using information provided by the Office of Student Affairs (OSA) at the castle.

“We figured it out ourselves in the end,” Miles said. “It wasn’t too hard but it challenged us in a very positive way. It definitely set me up to know how to navigate around other countries … and even back home in Boston.” 

Students have the opportunity to independently travel for a few weekends before heading to Prague in late October for the second and final academic excursion of the semester.