Our intensive language course led us to England, to a lovely old town called Canterbury, two weeks before the Easter holidays. In this town, there was our school where we had our English lessons every day.

We were split up into two groups and every group had a perfect teacher, who talked to us so much that we couldn’t switch to German after these two weeks. The language lessons in the mornings were quite different from the lessons in Austria. Paul, the “facilitator” of the one group, made us members of a big company discussing about an employee or let us sell items to each other as if on a street market. Nothing could stop him from saying “Arsenal is the best”, which made the lessons quite fun.

Of course the whole language weeks didn’t consist only of English lessons, but also of numerous exciting excursions. The first one was a visit to Cambridge: interesting small university city where we couldn’t find just one university building, because there are colleges everywhere in the city. We also caught a good day to visit Cambridge, because it was graduation day.

Our next excursion was a spectacular walk through Canterbury itself. We walked through the rest of the city wall, visited the ruins of Canterbury Castle and we had a closer look at the Cathedral, where we had a guided tour.

Dover Castle and Hellfire Corner with its Secret Wartime Tunnels was the next spectacular excursion. These tunnels were built in Napoleonic times, but were used in the Second World War, too (Operation Dynamo). Dover Castle was a Norman fortification, also very interesting today. Although we had not so much time to explore everything in detail, I liked this excursion most.

Leeds Castle was our next destination. “The loveliest castle in the world” it is called, and we could find out if this statement was true. With its big grounds, aviaries and maze, it was really the loveliest castle I’ve ever seen.

We made two excursions to London: The first was a sight- seeing tour and the other, more fascinating one, was a visit to Madame Tussaud’s (wax museum) and to Dominion Theatre. Both times the weather was quite un- English: It wasn’t raining and the sun was shining. Our tour led us from Big Ben and Westminster Abbey to 10 Downing Street, then through St James’ Park to Buckingham Palace and from there to Trafalgar Square, followed by a walk along the River Thames to St Paul’s Cathedral and afterwards by tube to the Tower of London. If you think that that was the end of our tour, you’re wrong- we visited the biggest Hindu Temple outside India, where no shoes were allowed. The second trip the most of us considered as the best of all our activities. If it was the museums visit, or the free period of shopping, or Janine crying “This is too loud” during the “We Will Rock You”- musical in the evening, or crossing the Tower Bridge in the night, none of us can say.

After the excursions we mostly had free time in the evenings. Most of us spent it either on their own, because of the small rooms many of us had in their host families or by playing cards at Patrick’s and Stefan’s. Our host families didn’t arrange just our bedrooms, but also our food on the weekends. Apart from that, we had lunch in the Stafford House canteen. Some of us decided that it was too horrible to eat, and had their meals in the restaurants in the city instead. We expressed our opinion about the food during the presentations on the final day.

All in all, the combination of interesting English lessons, perfect teachers, excursions and nice host families made us feel good the two weeks we spent in England and apart from having a good time we probably learned something, too.

Report by Lenka Laurencikova and Godwin Gundacker, 7A