Thursday, April 2, 2009

Monday, March 30, 2009

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Meteora

Meteora used to be a community of 20 monasteries in the mountains in the north of Macedonia. Now there are only six still with monks and we visited the largest of these which is more of a tourist centre than a working monastery. Even so the monastery was spectacular.










The only part that was hard was the four hours by coach before we started to see the mountains in the distance. Mountains which are in fact remarkably like those of Montserrat.










One of the curiosities of the Monastery is that all the women have to wear a skirt out of respect for the religious community.










Getting to the monastery is a feat in itself. When we first set eyes on the monastery it became apparent that it would be impossible to get Jordi up there.










Two hundred and forty steps we were told. We seriously considered it, for a couple of seconds or so, and then decided that Jordi would unfortunately have to miss this out.
























Even on the steps up to the monastery in itself the views were spectacular.

























































Of course on the way back the long drive there, and the lack of sleep from the night before took its toll.












Project activities on our first day

On the afternoon of the first day we went to the Greek school for the first time. The school is really quite similar to our own school and the students all look the same too. We waited in the playground for five minutes and then went in to the presentation of the project activities.



















The weather was still marvellous and so waiting outside was no problem for most of us. In fact nearly everybody took advantage to take some pictures.

























A lot of group photos were taken.

Inside the school theatre Nikos made a short presentation of the first afternoon's activities.




























As you can see at the back of the room the Greeks had prepared visual presentations about the different countries. Most of us were there, our photos printed out and on the display. Except Marcel.

After this we all went to different classrooms and started the presentations about the contents of the word banks. We all had half an hour with each of the participating countries in which we watched the presentations they had prepared and talked about the different words.




























We started with the Swedish and it was surprisingly successful, our students learned quite a lot. Unfortunately we had five countries more after that and I think that in the end there were just too many words to learn.
























Maite, we discovered, was particularkly good at Greek. She learnt a lot of phrases which she practised a lot the next day.








Of course the inevitable did happen and we discovered the students practising a lot of words and phrases that were not officially included in the word banks, things like, "can I have a cup of tea,"... well ok no, other things more essential. But I can't write them down here.