Our journey started at 6 am in front of the school. The coach was already waiting for us, 23 pupils from Year 9, Ms Lehmkuhl and Ms Dreyer. The luggage was loaded, we said goodbye to our parents and entered the coach. From this point we started our trip to Hastings in the UK, a trip that would take us 14 hours.
After travelling through the Netherlands, Belgium and France we finally arrived in Hastings at a parking spot near the beach. There our host families who would take care of us for the next five days picked us up. First it was kind of weird to suddenly live in a foreign family and share a single bathroom or kitchen with them. But they were very friendly and kind, so it was no problem for us to feel good after one to two days.
In the next days, there would be trips to London, Greenwich, Canterbury, Dover and of course through the Old Town of Hastings. In the morning we usually met between 7 and 8 am at the Lidl carpark in our neighbourhood to start our trips with our coach. But on the first day of our journey, we took a guided walk through our ‘new hometown’ Hastings, which is a similar size to Delmenhorst and played such a pivotal role in Britain’s history. Fortunately, we were able to spend two whole days in London. After a 3-hour journey through traffic we finally arrived in this big city, where we visited many, many attractions:
The London Eye, Big Ben, Covent Garden and Buckingham Palace were just a few of them.
Although we had quite a few sightseeing tours in London, we also got enough free time to collect some great impressions ourselves.But also our trip to Canterbury was an experience, where we were taken to a huge cathedral, „The Cathedral of Christ Church“. The main tower of this building (actually 72m high), the old walls and the enormous size of this church impressed us very much.
Also the high cliffs of Dover were just amazing. There was no fence or barrier. There was just a 100m high cliff a few steps away from ourselves; impressive but scary at the same time. After this awesome week it was time to say “goodbye Britain“. This time we met in the evening and drove through the night back to Germany, again by coach to the ferry, by ferry from Dover to Calais (France) and then by coach again through France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In the morning we ended our journey at 9am exactly where we started it.
(Cedric Warrelmann 10e)
