The author addresses the issue of language stays abroad, especially long stays as in the Voltaire program in the tradition of the “Grand Tour” that aristocratic youth in Europe undertook in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The results of her investigation are twofold. On the one hand institutions maintain an educational conception of these stays (scholastic framework, evaluation) but on the other hand the motivations and effects on teenagers involved may well be quite different: to escape for a while from the clutches of school and family in a sub-conscious search for adventure and the experience of otherness, of the unknown, self-discovery and personal transformations. The length of the stay is decisive and it allows gradual adaptation as part of detachment, and it makes these trips similar in many respects to archaic rituals of initiation in the transition to adulthood.