U.S.-Scottish exchange lets music students take note of difference

Lutherville pupils see similarities, curiosities

Four days into the exchange, Katie Furlong had noticed the differences.

The visitors spoke English, sure enough, but with a strange accent.

They marveled at the heat.

And their spelling, well -"You spell program different," the 13-year-old from Lutherville told her new friend, an exchange student from Scotland.

The Scottish teen-agers, 68 music students from a school a half-hour drive from Edinburgh, are visiting families of band members at Ridgely Middle School in Lutherville.

Their itinerary includes trips to New York, Washington and Amish country in Pennsylvania, as well as two concerts.

At the first of the performances, at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore on Monday, Katie chatted between songs with her exchange student, Lindsey Wight, 14, a trumpeter. Katie was eyeing the "Concert Programme" when she noticed the spelling difference. Lindsey affirmed the discrepancy, and then the girls brushed it aside to chat about more important topics.

"It's a meeting of two different worlds, and it's working," said Claudette Womack, an assistant principal at Ridgely. Womack said the purpose of the exchange is broadening the horizons of the participants.

This is the seventh year of Ridgely's exchange program, which started with trips to the Ukraine and Russia and then shifted to visits to England, Iceland, Scotland and Wales.

"Kids have said to me, `Oh, wow, they're just like us,'" said Sue Wilson, band director at Ridgely who organizes the program.

Ridgely pupils were scheduled to go abroad this summer. After Sept. 11, however, the Baltimore County school board canceled all overseas trips. So instead, the exchange partners from Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, Scotland, and another group from Wales decided to visit the United States.

"For us, too, it's been an eye-opening experience," said Jan Brinch, a Timonium parent playing host to two Scottish students. "We've learned how lucky Americans are, how our lifestyle is just easier." The second concert takes place at 7 tonight at Ridgely.

The Welsh students visited earlier this month. Arriving June 21 for a weeklong trip, the Scots have taken in such American hallmarks as the snowball and Philly cheesesteak. They leave tomorrow.

"Big, really big," said 16-year-old Frances Alcock, a bagpiper in a red-and-black kilt, impressed by the size of the houses, cars and shrimp - or prawns, as she called them.

Frances' host, a Baltimore County bagpiper named Sean Gearhart, said he had learned about Scottish soda, a candy bar made from the soda and gravy made out of sheep intestines. "It's a lot cooler there," the 13-year-old from Mays Chapel added. "Rains a lot more, and I guess there's more traditional music there."

Earlier at the Inner Harbor concert, Frances and Sean had picked up their bagpipes, and the instruments began to skirl. Soon, French horns joined in with a bellow, then the whistle of flutes. It was "Amazing Grace." A breeze blew, and a foghorn sounded. At that moment, you could have been in Scotland, not downtown Baltimore.