School trips/tours abroad?

PrettyRad

Hi all! Have many of you had experiences of school trips abroad? I've travelled quite a lot with my school in the past five years, but my two favourite trips were to Manchester and Krakow, Poland.

I'm going to share my experiences here, but I'll split them into two posts to avoid any really long posts.

Share your good (and bad) experiences!

PrettyRad

We went to Manchester, in March 2013 as part of TY. We left the school by bus at 4AM and drove to Dublin Port, where our ferry to Holyhead was delayed from 8AM to 10AM due to terrible weather. Once on the boat, it was supposed to take 3 hours, I think, to get to Wales, but the awful choppy water and gale force winds/torrential rain continued and we had to slow down. Then the BBC news came on on all of the TVs and informed us all that Wales was being hit by a snow blizzard, which freaked us out a bit. Well after 9 hours on the ferry, it finally docked and we got off, only to drive through ice and snow across Wales. There were lorries overturned on the road and our bus door kept being forced open by gales!

Once we finally got there, at midnight, we all went straight to bed. Our trip to Alton Towers had to be cancelled due to the snow, but we went to the cinema instead. We visited the Imperial War Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Lowry Gallery and Old Trafford. And of course we went shopping in Old Trafford.

The best part though was our visit to the theatre to see the Rocky Horror Show's 40th Anniversary Tour. Apparently, none of the teachers had ever seen it before, because their faces dropped when everybody in the audience was dressed up, and once the show started, they were not amused. They were terribly horrified by the whole thing but everybody else loved it!

The journey back was much less eventful, with a nice calm ocean!

PrettyRad

We also went to Krakow, Poland, last October. We left Waterford on the bus at 3AM and flew out of Dublin at 8. Upon arriving, we took a walking tour of the city, with no food in our stomaches, and visited the castle and the Old Town. We then had dinner and got off the tram at the wrong stop, leading to a lot of confused wandering in the dark. After stumbling along a dark river bank, our teacher asked a local for directions, but he just yelled at us in Polish. We got back eventually. We also did a cycle-tour of the city, which was terrifying, during which we visited the Jewish Quarter, The Ghetto and Schindler's Factory. We visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was incredibly harrowing but also fascinating, and we checked out the Salt Mines, which were magnificent (although I did have to share the tiny rickety lift with my history teacher and 8 others)

We also went bowling one night, and shared the alley with a bunch of British students who were living in Spain and were also on a school trip. Their teacherswere much more liberal and allowed them to buy alcohol, resulting in some very drunk teenagers.

We were given a lot of free time to wander about/shop/do whatever we liked, which was very nice, considering we were not allowed out of our rooms when we went to Manchester.