Friday 12 February 2016

Today was amazing! Not only for us, but especially for the students. Since they are off to their host families they can't tell you about it in the blog yet, but we will make sure they do tomorrow.

We started with a lovely breakfast at the Ridge Motel. Our students were encouraged to taste some toast with vegemite which I'm sure they have lovely pictures of on their mobile phones. The faces were hilarious.

Then Ed (Mr Croft) took us in the bus to Collie Senior High School. They got a taste of Australian football (Aussie Football) but I'm afraid none of them were really good at it. Luckily the torture didn't last too long for them as they were taken on a tour of the school, visiting several classrooms and the library.

Mr Croft took us to the coal mine, where we got an introduction into coalmining and the importance of it for Collie. We drove off to see one of the big shovels they use and were treated on a real blast. This scared of a couple of kangaroos so we finally saw them and lots of the girls started cheering. So we drove off to the golf course to see some more kangaroos in the wild and have lunch.

Our next stop was the Dam, where we learned some more about Australian nature. But we didn't have much time there, because some of the kids had to be home by three.

Our final stop was the Collie Shooting Range. Our students got the opportunity to shoot clay pigeons. At first everyone was a bit scared to hold the gun but some of them proofed to be really good at it. Tannia shot 1, Camille 2 and Gwenny was our winner, shooting 3 of them. Us, teachers, were really bad at it, hitting absolutely nothing.

We ended the day with a lovely 'Barbie' with all friendly Collie people. The students had so much fun and they ended up singing and dancing together. It was really hard saying goodbye to everyone.

We really enjoyed today and hope this was the first of many visits to Collie.

(Ms Tytgat & Ms Tyberghien)