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What is the most exciting thing you have done through school?

Prom

Walk out the gates

Left and never looked back.

Reply 3

PinkMobilePhone

Volunteer Team

When I was in school, I guess (aside from leaving, which is kind of obvious), the most exciting things were going on the Year 8 trip to Paris, and going on Spanish exchange in Year 9.

The Spanish one was probably the most daring for me, because our year group was separated into the kids that studied French, and the kids that studied Spanish. Roughly half and half. Band A (Spanish) and Band B (French).
All of the other subjects that we took - English, Maths, Science, and so on and so forth, you only ever had classes with the kids from your own band with.

So at that point I had never had any classes with any of the kids from Band A, and I had never studied a word of Spanish.

The Spanish exchange trip was supposed to be for Band A, obviously to go over and stay with a spanish family to be able to practice Spanish with, but they had a few spare places so they threw it open to Band B.
Me, being me, was the only person from Band B to take them up on it.

So off I went, with a bus load of other kids I'd never spoken to in my life, to stay with a Spanish family when I'd never studied Spanish in my entire life :giggle:

That involved a lot of hand gesturing, and funnily enough the father of the family had studied French when he was younger, so there we were trying to speak broken French to each other.
The teenage daughter of the family was studying English in school, so it gave her an opportunity to practice that, although she wasn't great at it.

Funny experience one time when I was out shopping with her, and I wanted to buy a razor to shave my legs. I struggled to get her to understand what I wanted to find. Eventually I sort of babbled "For men!" and made a shaving gesture at my face. "For women!" and made a shaving gesture at my legs.
She understood then :laugh:

Truth though, it was an amazing experience. I loved it. I'm not at all afraid of not being understood in a foreign country - you get by somehow.

I later took up Spanish in Years 10 and 11 as an elective subject when we were picking GCSEs. So I ended up doing both French and Spanish. But at the time of the exchange trip, yeah, not a word.