Slovakia Report Visit

On February 8th we set out on our journey to Slovakia. Prior to our embarkation we had discussed the purpose of our visit and our aims with our Slovakian counterparts. The purpose of our visit was to create a festival with the dreams and teams programme, to demonstrate British culture to elementary school children in Bratislava. The aim of this was to educate. The dreams and teams programme and the students involed in the project had previously participated in festivals and projects of a similar nature, with aims to demonstrate other world cultures.

We arrived on the 8th to a lively party of students and teachers, from C.S. Lewis Gymnazium. The students from the school took us back to our hostel, 'Hotel Blues'. Hotel Blues offered us a nice stay through the week; it had a theme of world travel. We used a very environmentally friendly bus service which ran on electricity, like the local Fylde trams.

During our stay in Bratislava the Slovaks also did their best to educate us on their culture, this involved many activities such as Hiking and an evening at the Bratislava Philharmonic. We were also fortunate enough to visit a near by stronghold. After the visit to the stronghold, we were lead
to a traditional Slovak pub, where we ate our first Slovak meal. We were all recommended a traditional meal and dark fizzy cola orientated beverage. The meal we were recommended was, Slovak Traditional Shredded Potato Dumplings with bryndza cheese and bacon, most of us opted not to try the meal as it sounded a little adventurous and were very hungry, but Mr Dawson claimed it tasted tangy as of the goat cheese. The drink we were recommended was Kofola, this is a natural drink and tasted a bit like aniseed. As for our dessert we were poppy seeds cakes which they named opium cakes, this also tasted like aniseed.

We woke early at 6:30 am, and had to be ready by 7 to meet Maria at the Hotel entrance. We were taken to the 84 bus and crossed the Danube River to a rural area of Bratislava. The school was less modern than ours, looking more like a primary school. This surprised us as we thought it would have been bigger with it being inside the capital city. We were taken inside and lead to a classroom, where we spoke about our plans for the festival. With this done we were divided into 3 areas of focus: Management, Activities team and Designers. We all carried out these roles so the festival would be a success. The management team sorted out the finances and contacted the press about the festival. The activities team sorted out the events that would captivate both Bristish culture and the attention of the Slovakian children. The designs team used their artistic technique to create posters to show the location of each activity. Other posters were made to show exits and toilets for health and safety reasons. For the other part of the day the poster team would inspect the work of the other groups and by doing this created more ideas for posters.

The festival was a huge success as this was the first time, in Europe that two school had come together to create together to create a dreams and teams day. We believed that the Slovakian children learnt a lot about British Culture. We learnt that the Slovak children knew alot about Britain as of the quiz run by Daniel Warren. Ryan Salisbury was given a hard task of looking after a non English speaking group of Slovakian children, but was helped massively by our Slovakian counterparts. Connor Pogson played some thespian warm up games with the Slovaks. These had been used previously in England in our own sports leadership days with our local primary school. The children enjoyed the games but did not really understand Connor's accent so it was necessary for a Slovak to translate. Brogan Fraser taught Morris Dancing to the Slovak children, this they enjoyed and continued to dance through the day. Joseph Newson was put in charge of football, but with the slovaks having a good knowledge of the game he was only able to develop
their skils, whcih he successfully did. Elizabeth Grogan was given the gruelling job of looking after the V.I.Ps of the school, she did this very professionally. Jamie Railton was placed in charge of Bench Ball, which the Slovak children didn't know about, so he did very well to make sure they enjoyed the game. Dail Carr was given the job of taking photographs with Maria and then running the refreshments stand at the break, she did very well and manage4d well under pressure. Overall we think the festival went well, and it was very educational.