In August 2010 Jen led a group of 16 Juniors to Estonia for a fun filled 9 days.

View the trip video @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdvwOf6dYLg

In April 2010 Sandra and Louis won Senior Scholarships to Holland.

Olivia went on the English in Action scholarship trip to Austria in the Spring and had a great time!

Olivia's Austria 2010 report

Early in January I applied for the travel scholarship to Austria thinking I would have no chance of getting in, however I got an excited phone call a few months later from Cat Reeve saying we had both got in. So off we set, Cat, Scott McNulty, Ali Rab, Mark Snell, Lara Hyde and I from Exeter coach station at 1am. All of us had packed huge suitcases for the week ahead except Scott who had bought a small backpack!

After a 5 hour bus journey, 3 hour flight and 2 hour car journey we arrived in Yspertal, Austria on the Sunday. The program was called English in Action, from which there are 50 people ages 15 – 21 from Slovakia, Austria, Italy, Hungary and the UK. From the start everyone got involved with all games and split up from their countries to come talk to others.

The food was certainly something we had to get used to and wasn’t the best part of the trip, the boys being typical farmers ended up finishing the girl’s bowls off. Salad was an everyday part of the meal and also soup, Ali Rab was not amused! Breakfast was very interesting with salami and yogurts every morning, so the first day we set off to the shops to stock up on chocolate and biscuits!

At the beginning of each day we would have a warm up at 9am, so meaning a 7am start. But we ended up learning many new games from the ‘shakey shakey game’ to the pointing game. Then we got split into groups to have a lesson with a teacher and the leaders learning about the environment, farming and nutrition. We were all dreading these however they were really fun and we started to learn lots of German words, which have certainly stayed with us.

The first night we had a presentation of our countries food and traditions. Scott being crazy as he is came down wearing my skirt and so everyone decided the UK lot were extremely weird. As we had to fly we brought walkers crisps, bake well tarts, crackers, short bread and dairy milk chocolate. Unfortunately we forgot tea, but luckily we found some English tea at the local store! We got to try out all the other countries food from pate to Sherry. On Monday morning we set off around the local town to do a treasure hunt in different groups to get to know each other, the weather was hot which made it really good, however it was me who got covered in water from the village fountain thanks to the boys! That evening we were shown a traditional Austrian dance and everyone got to show their countries local dance, we chose the hokey cokey! It was that or the Umpa Lumpa dance! We also had to dress up in traditional dress but going as Chavs or football hooligans wasn’t the best of choices.

Over the next few days in our groups we got the act out famous movies; Mark certainly enjoyed acting out Scary Movie! We also did Cinderella in different forms from puppet shows to pantomimes which Scott loved wearing a dress and earrings! In our spare time we got to play lots of sport from volleyball to football. Wednesday we went on a 45km bike ride which was very hard but we rode through the mountains which were incredible, along the way we were learning German and so I decided I wanted to try and start a conversation with very random Austrians. I later learnt that some of the words I was learning weren’t very suitable! At the end of the ride we got to go to wine tasting, which certainly loosened a lot of us up, especially as Lara wasn’t too keen on some of her wine so gave it to the rest of us, we also got to eat at an Austrian restaurant which was superb. However having to get back on our bikes for another 20 minutes was interesting after drinking all that wine. We had a few near misses with lampposts.

On the Thursday we got to walk to a local lake for the day which was extremely warm water and spent the day chilling out and playing games, Mark amused us all by spending a fair amount of time with the blow up Milka cow! The Thursday and Friday evenings were spent doing Karaoke and having dances. The bar in the hall was used extremely well and the lemon lager went down a storm. Cat and I decided to show off some Devon moves from the combiner to the lawnmower! We looked pretty special. The same time we were staying there some German footballers were too, Cat ended up having a 16 year old Austrian admirer. But when we set off to bed the teachers would invite us for red wine and food at 3am so we ended up having about 2 to 3 hours sleep a night.

It was the best thing I have done to date, we met so many lovely people, when it came to leaving time many of the girls ended up having a tear or two because everyone had become so close. On the way home we stopped off in Vienna which was beautiful and ended up extremely funny as Mark caught a pigeon and got abuse from a local. He was also very happy as he got to go on a train for the first time and Ali Rab got to fly for the first time. However the one thing we did miss was cider so when we got into the airport it was the first thing we all bought. Austria was certainly the most amazing experience for me and now I won’t think twice about applying for a travel scholarship!