From ACIS Participants to College Roommates

You never know who you’ll meet on an ACIS Tour: The person next to you on the tour bus might just become your college roommate! Henry and Varun met in 2024 when their ACIS groups in Spain were combined and one year later, they joined forces in an unexpected way. Henry shares their story on our latest spotlight.

Tell us a little about yourself! Where are you from?

My name is Henry Frye. I live in a small, rural town in South Georgia called Thomasville. I recently graduated from Brookwood school, but my ACIS trip was the summer going into Senior year. I love all things mechanical and fast – and food. 

Where did you travel with ACIS? Was it either of your first time bring abroad?

My school’s ACIS trip to Spain was my first time traveling abroad. After almost missing the passport deadline, I was cleared for the itinerary. Madrid, San Sebastián, and Barcelona, with a few other stops along the way. 

What were some highlights of your trip? Any fun stories to share?

I’d say my trip highlights were definitely Madrid and San Sebastián. Knowing Spanish, I felt I was most immersed in culture I’m those cities. For my top 2 memories, I have to narrow it down to a night in San Sebastián and Basque Country. At one town in Basque, we were dropped off for the day to explore and just hang around in general. My friend JT was the only other senior from our school, so having a smaller group, we hit it off with some kids on our tour group for Jersey pretty fast. Matt, Doug, Ajay, and Varun. We started walking around together that day and ran into a San Miguel sponsored mini-rave. Though we didn’t drink, the hosts were offering free bucket hats to anyone who could get the dance floor going, since a lot of people were just standing there. So we planned, we dispersed a little and started a conga line, joining in slowly to not look like one big group. Eventually about 100 people had joined, and we wore those bucket hats for the rest of the day!

The other story happened on a particularly bad night for me emotionally when I decided I needed some peace. If you’ve been to San Sebastián there’s two mountains around the horseshoe bay. While we were on a theme park on one, I noticed something cool sticking out of the other mountain and asked any of the kids from my school if they wanted to hike it with me. When they said no, I took it upon myself to hike it alone at sunset, after seeing reviews on google that it was a family park and relatively safe. After a good few miles of hiking I got to the top and realized it was an old Spanish fort with a Jesus statue almost resembling a smaller version of the one in Brazil. I watched the sunset from that mountain and was only compelled to hike back down when I heard the city singing in the streets in unison for the Spain v. England Euro-Cup finals. I came down, joined the parade, and ended up in a quiet bar along the river watching the finals with a Spanish family; who invited me over after they saw me cheering for their team; eating the best cheesecake I’ve had to this day. 

What do you think impacted you the most or changed your perspective?

I think that trip boosted my confidence immensely because of the independence it allowed for me to explore and to immerse myself in the culture. Through that, the trip gave me a passion to travel and learn more about places other than my small town. 

What connected you and Varun on tour?

Varun and I met on the trip because both of our schools were too small for a private tour so they paired his school with mine and one other from New York. We gradually hit it off in thanks to the proximity and, by day 3, my friend JT and I chose to hang with them instead of our own group most times. Our chaperones were very encouraging and, since we were seniors with relatively good standing with them, they let us hang around with who we called “The Jersey Boys” for the rest of the trip. 

Tell us more about the past year and how you kept in touch!

By the end of the trip we had made a group chat between the 4 Jersey Boys and 2 Georgia boys and joked about flying down to Cancun or my friends beach house over spring break. The group chat would stay alive somehow with more talks of fictional trips and just funny stories trying to keep in touch. After I’d been accepted, the roommate struggle started, and the parents were really putting it on me to figure it out. When you commit to a university, your high school usually creates an Instagram post, and of course my post somehow reached Varun. A few days later I get a text out of the blue asking if I’m going to Purdue University in Indiana and wondering if I’d like to room with him. By the way, this school accepts 130 kids a year to this major and is the only place in the country that has it, so it was wild he was going! From there on we’ve stayed in touch but everything’s finalized and we’ll be rooming together fall of 2025.

Why do you think Travel Changes Lives?

How does travel change lives? Quite simply it expands horizons and lets people realize their place in the world. For me, it’s given me three things: Comfort, Confidence, and Purpose. The first thing you realize when you travel is how small the world is. It’s corny, but traveling abroad has made me pay attention to cultures and news articles outside of the US I never would have before. It also brings confidence. If I hadn’t been comfortable 1000’s of miles away speaking a different language, I never would have moved to a city 50x bigger than my hometown knowing no one but a kid from Jersey. The last is purpose. It’s hard to explain, but I believe you’ll never understand your place in the world until you’ve seen it, sort of how you can’t tell a machine by just one gear. But now that I have seen more than my corner of the US, life almost seems easier back home. Only by being thrown into a new environment did I understand the pieces that make it run through learning from tour guides or history things I don’t pay attention too at home. When I got home I had I new understanding of the way things worked, and general awareness of my surroundings as someone who’d never seen them before.