Meeting students from foreign countries Part 2 (an experience of a lifetime)

When the day of the trip finally came, I was so excited to meet the people who were also taking part. My mum took me and the two students from my school, who had been successful, half of the way to the Aztec centre. There we would meet our teacher, who then took us the rest of the way. When we reached the Aztec centre, I was quite surprised. I thought it was going to be a massive building with acres and acre of land but it wasn't. We got out of the car and made our way to a small building on the right hand side.

We went in to see the pupils from the other school in England who were sitting down next to the tables. We were all extremely nervous and didn't talk to each other.

Our teacher and the teacher from the other school were giving us encouragement, but still no words came from our mouths. After a while, I thought I had to do something about the quietness in the room, so I introduced myself to the other students from the other English school. Surprisingly, the other pupils from my school then did the same and finally the other students joined in.

Unfortunately, it went back into awkward silence. With disappointment, I saw the students from my school instantly pull their phone back out. I was annoyed. I had not brought my phone, because I was scared of damaging it whilst doing activities. I became extremely bored which was not what I thought the day was going to be like. Then the people from Sweden entered the room. The boy was called Thor (yes like the superhero!) and the girl was called Alexandra. They sat down and introduced themselves to the group.

Again, the room fell silent and it was at this point I said to myself, "This is going to be a really REALLY awkward day." Then the pupils from Finland came in. The female student was called Ida and the boy was named Patrik. (Unknown to me at this time, this was the student that would end up coming to stay at mine for the Friday night of his week's stay.)

Still, even with all the people in the room, there was no conversations taking place. My teacher, who had took us to the Aztec Centre, tried to encourage us to speak, but literally everyone was too nervous to speak to one another. So the teacher said, "we are going to play a game". (It wasn't really a game). She explained what was going to happen and that we had to introduce ourselves to everyone and tell them an interesting personal fact.

We all got up and I introduced myself to the first of the two Bens, that were taking part. His interesting fact was that he was half Welsh. I told him that I raised money for charity, as I couldn't think of anything else that was interesting about me. I did manage to talk to everybody and felt this was an achievement. Most of the people were still quite shy but I had managed to make friends with the people from the other English school.

We headed over to our first activity - this was Archery. While we were walking down, some people were talking, but only to their own friends that they already knew. When we reached Archery, we were told to sit on a wooden bench and then told to collect the equipment we needed. We went over to the Archery boards and I, amazingly, volunteered to go first together with the two English boys and the Finnish lad. I failed miserably, managing to hit the board only once. Whilst the rest of my arrows were either flying over the board or hitting close to the bulls-eye.

Aztec Centre, Archery
(source) yumping.co.uk

When everyone had taken their turn, at the archery, we all came off. Ben and I made our way towards the snow.

Even though the snow was starting to melt there was still plenty of snow. Ben threw a snowball at my back. I wasn't going to let him get away with that, I thought, and I launched a snowball straight back at him. Suddenly a full on snowball fight was underway. Every country, taking part in the project, was throwing snow at each other (sometimes putting it down each others back). We were throwing snowballs at each other for what seemed like ages.

During the snowball fight the students from Germany arrived. They introduced themselves. The male student's name was Johannes and the female student's name was Emma. The snowball fight continued until some of the group went back to get some of their belongings. The rest of the group and I went back to playing archery. This time I actually managed to hit the board!

More to come ......

Thanks for reading,

Matthew