On Wednesday, 21 June, our fourth forms flew to the quaint little city of Galway, Ireland. It was the beginning of an exciting journey.

In Ireland, we met our native speakers Will, Patrick and Holly, who would be teaching us for the next couple of days. On Thursday, we had our first English lesson with them. We started off by playing a lot of games in order to get to know each other, like Werewolf. In the afternoon we strolled through Shop Street and went down to the harbour.

On the next day, we had lessons again and walked along the sandy beach to Salthill. Although it was raining, we enjoyed ourselves a lot, we went to the Atlantaquaria (comparable to our Haus des Meeres in Vienna) as well as to the Curry’s Fun Park. What you probably should know about Irish beaches is that there are dead jellyfish everywhere!

Next came Saturday – what an exciting day! We didn’t have any English lessons on that day, instead we learned some lessons for life. We drove to the Cliffs of Moher, where one of the most famous movies ever was filmed, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. On our way there we saw a lot of cows, sheep, ruins and the stone walls Ireland is famous for, the so-called Famine Walls.
Should you ever want to scale the Cliffs of Moher, you have to be careful not to be blown away by the strong wind there. In the evening of that great day we could enjoy some singing and dancing. Moreover, we took part in a pub quiz about different songs, such as Galway Girl by Ed Sheeran.

As there had been only lessons for life on Saturday, there had to be some English lessons on Sunday morning, of course 😉. Then, in the afternoon, we made our own little video clips as part of a project and watched them all together in the evening. We had made a documentary about bread, a western movie about cheating, a love story and a number of other clips.

Finally, Monday arrived, our last day in Galway. It also started with lessons, after which we did a photo shooting in the streets of Galway. Our assignments were, for example, to find something typically Irish, something that summed up the whole week or just to take a random photo of something we particularly liked.
We concluded the day with saying thank you to “our” native speakers, whom we had grown quite fond of, and all together danced a Polonaise to Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl.

All in all, we had a great week and a lot of fun in and around Galway. It was a totally worthwhile experience!

Lena Mannersdorfer, 4a