At breakfast we met up with the teachers from the 3rd partnered school which is in the Slovakian Republic. Three of them can speak English, but the other 2 cannot, and obviously we aren’t so great at Slovakian! But we all said hello and introduced ourselves.
Today was the official opening of the Comenius Meeting. At 10 o’clock we were collected by 2 English teachers, Magda & Magda, the headmaster of the school and also the owner of the school. They took us to the school and we were taken into an Assembly. The children were all there are very excited. The hall had been decorated for the day, and it was obviously an important event.
They started assembly by singing the national anthem with great gusto, I was really impressed with how well they all knew their anthem. Then a school flag was brought in, and the meeting was officially opened. Their are 4 schools on the site, with children ranging from 3 to early 20s, but we are officially matched with the primary school, so each class from the age of 6 to 13 did a song or talk to welcome us. They were all in English, from the youngest who sang the Hokey Cokey, to the oldest who told us about their school, city and country.
It was a really lovely event and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
After the Assembly we took a tour of the school visiting all of the classrooms and saying hello to the children, it’s a brand new building and was very clean and bright. At the end of the tour we were given a ‘pre-lunch’ of polish delicacies. There were Pierogies, bread & dripping, a soup which we didn’t manage to determine what it was, and lots of cakes. It was really lovely and all made for us by the parents.
Magda & Magda, our 2 hosts, took us out for a walking tour around Goleniov after lunch. This town was part of Germany before WWII, but become Polish afterwards. I was asking if that meant the grandparents were German but apparantly all the German people had to leave and the town was repopulated with Polish people.
The town was quite badly damaged during the war, so there are not many older buildings but we did see some beautiful older buildings on our tour, as well as lots of flats. However, even the flats looked nice as they had all been painted in pretty colours, rather than the grey that I would have expected.
We walked around Goleniov for a couple of hours, and took a look in a household shop. I wish i had taken a photo in the shop, it was very different to our shops (although it was pointed out it wasn’t that different from Maughns in Whitley Bay). The prices weren’t particularly cheap though, we had all been expected prices in Poland to be very very cheap but they are quite similar to at home.
After our tour, we went back to school for another lunch. This was in the school cafeteria which was absolutely tiny. We were really shocked ot hear that 120 children had a hot meal in the cafeteria every day. It was a very small room that had many 6 tables in it, I think possibly 25 children could have sat down at once, so they had to eat in shifts.
Lunch was soup, followed by pork and chips. The pork was rolled up and wrapped in bacon. It was really nice.
We had the afternoon free and then we met up again in the evening for a meal. It was quite challenging trying to work out what we were ordering as the menu was only in Polish, but I ended up with a Chicken Kiev which was really nice. We walked along to the pub after dinner and played some pool and drank a few beers, just for the cultural experience you understand….
