The red trail? It’s the fastest way! – or what I have learnt in Ireland.

Translated by Maja. Translation fixed by Dawid Pieper

Hello!
Tomorrow. Tomorrow? Have you actually believed that? Really? Aren't you realists? Who were, please admit in comments! Who knew that whole week would pass before I wrote this post? 🙂

Anyway, sitting in our little house where we will spend nine days of our family vacation, when it's sunny outside the window and different weather isn't expected, although it's already evening, it's easier for me to come back to our wonderfull, rainy Ireland.

I kept you, dear readers, in suspense, while I had been nodding off in our bus with my headphones on. After we arrived in the town it turned out that Konrad, Pole who works in Northwest Academy, is responsible for our group. To our surprise he greeted us in our mother tongue. Taxicabs took us and our luggage to the houses we were going to spend the following week in. We were divided to pairs and one trio and all of this teams were taken charge of by one of so called hosting families. They gave us food, place to sleep and chance to talk and we were obediently going on lessons and workshops.
And those lessons are exactly what I will tell you about at first and then, in next entry, about being at home.

Taking into consideration that I was in English speaking country only the second time in my life and the first time in Northern Ireland, it was understandable that I had some concerns. One of them was accent. It's obvious no places are the same and, of course, in Derry I expected more Irish words. Derry is the fourth biggest city in Ireland, after Dublin, Belfast and, if I remember properly, Cork. Of course, that's if we consider Ireland as one country with its' northern part, administratively in UK. I must admit my next biggest anxiety was about my complete incomprehension of history. Until I went there I seriously had dah no idea what it had been with all of this conflict. I knew that certain part is separated from the rest but when, why and to what extend? It was a mystery for me. And it was the first think I've learnt there, they repeated it to us like five times. First during our Saturday trip through Belfast, the second during workshops on history of the town at Wednesday afternoon and then on Thursday on our trip to watch murals. Murals, incase some one didn't know, are quite big paintings on the walls. Murals in Derry and in Belfast as well usually show scenes from "The Troubles" – that conflict between Catolic society of Ireland and Protestants being simultanously for the union with the UK. It had lasted long and hadn't looked pretty. A lot prettier was an end of the conflict when both countries communicated, knowing that they had reached the pont when they couldn't defeat each other. So there had been no sense in being at an impasse.

A lot of readers asks me what the typical day on this trip looked like, so let me describe. We got up quite early, but not so early, because there, dear children, lessons begin at half past nine. Usually we had three hours of English for a start, then the lunch break lasting till two A.M., and then from two to four of five different workshops.

The biggest part of our lessons was speaking and working in small groups. Job interviews with role playing, preparing our opinions on law in different countries, asking and answering questions on any subject, all of this stuff was smaller or bigger project to do as a team. We even had this task twice, to go out on streets and ask people questions which we made up or got from out teacher. One time, during a survey like this, we had stopped an other teacher from the Northwest Academy. We neither have an idea that she works there nor she is Polish as well. We had talked to her for about five minutes, asking different questions about justifications of her answers. It only turned out like "aaaah, yeah, I'm from Poland!" when we finished our formal conversation. OK, I've got no more questions. You will witness that our taks has been completed!
An other interesting exercise was selecting punishments for crimes. There were pictures or describtions of situations when some one has done something and we had to say, how the law should punish them. But, not so easy: jail, fine, nothing, warning… If jail then for how long? If fine, how much? All of that had to be included. What's more, during one of the lessons our teacher – Meghan prepared a list of popular slang words used in Ireland for us to learn their form of the language, different than British. It matched her accent very well because Meghan comes from Derry, had been studying in Derry and, I must admit, it was possible to hear it. 😉

Now shall we get back to our workshop and additional amusements. I've already told you about workshops on Wednesday and Thursday but what's more? On Monday there weren't typical workshops because instead of that we had orientation tour, so they showed us where the shopping centre in our town is and which places in the school we are or are not allowed to stay in. In the evening we had our first leisure activity and it's only then when the fun has started. It was Irish dancing lesson. They must be very fit, those citizens.

On Tuesday there was a music workshop. In the major part it included a rhythm exercises like repeating something or so called "calling and answering", so some one plays one thing and you play an other. After the break we had something like songwriting session, learning how to write a lyrics based on our connotations with different words. You write the word on a piece of paper and pass it to the person sitting on your left. Then you write down your connotation to the word you got on a different piece of paper, one of these papers you pass to the right, an other to the left. As far as I remember there were some of these exchanges and then our papers were divided by colours. We had pink and green pencils, so we had pink and green group. Then we had to rewrite a lyrics of any well-known song, using drawed words. We were made to gread laugh when doing this.
Madam who was our workshop leader on this music workshop said something great at the beginning of the lesson. Working in groups, any activities involving team work and, especially, activities causing laughter, boost empathy in people. Actually, in the beginning of this workshop we had tasks like passing small beanbags around to the rhythm of the music. Beanbags were falling out from our hands, some one was late and didn't pas it forward, an other one did it too fast, finally we were ending up with six of them on the one side of the circle and with none of them on the other. And really, none of us could seat there with straight face. And if you started laughing at least all the tension between unknown people would disappear automatically. Because you already had to do something together. The same effect comes up when you get small wooden sticks and you have to repeat more and more difficult rhythms, drumming different patterns n different parts of surroundings. You make mistakes in the same moments, you keep on dropping sticks and and you are in a mess in general. That's for a start. But it let you forget that you met each other three days ago. I find this workshop satisfying.
Apparently, this woman who leat our workshop one day had this with about thirty children, about seven or eight year old. The principle is that she gives these sticks tho the first child and they're passing them around the circle untill every one gets them. Giving these sticks back to this big bag is done in the same way. She told us that in that day those children were giving these sticks back, they were passing it, and passing, and passing, it lasted for about two minutes, there were a lot of them, so OK, but it might be an exaggeration… Finally the leader showed that to their teacher and asked: "what's going on here? It's impossible that they can't collect this stuff a bit faster". It turned out that one of these small boys were sitting next to the bag and succesively taking the sticks out. Do you think no one noticed? All of them knew! And that's a solidarity!

On Tuesday evening we had something called Quiz night. I didn't know it's such a popular game on the Islands, they love those quizes. Apparently you can see notices like "quiz night organised every Thursday!" in pubs. You can come and play. Questions were from different categories and even in one category range of knowledge was quite wide. For example in music category you can come across things like: "name all the members of the beatles", "say what song Adele got Oscar award for" or as well "where Bieber was born". Most of us knew the answer for last question and I've got a theory that is a pure contrariness. On the begining every one was thinking that he's from the USA so every one has deliberately learnt by heart that he's from Canada.

On Wednesday and Friday evenings were spent with hosting families but on Thursday we went bowling. Despite my concerns I wasn't that bad at it, my result wasn't the last one there. :d Apart from talking about the game, between our turns, at our table were a dialogues about not wasting food. To make long story short I can recap our conversations in words: "professor, would you like a chip? Professor, eat it, shall you? We will burn all of these calories off in a moment! Professor, eat it, you know we must finish it, how I'll take it back home?!"
We ended up walking around all of Polish tables so every one can help theirselves.

Now it's time to tell you about our trips and to explain you the title of this entry. This title is relatet to our trip, which took place on Sunday, our second day in Ireland. We went to the place called Giant's Causeway. But, it's more boring explanation of this events because the legend tells us that this causeway was built by local giant named Finn when he had been going to Scotland to fight with Scottish giant – Benandonner.
Finn has done a great job what I could observe with my schoolmate – Hubert. By the way, big thanks to Hubert for taking a duty of guiding me which duty could be very demanding, especially when we walk on rock formations. Exchanging our opinions on our trip in general, about awful weather and fantazy books, we walked along the track, not paying attention if we walk with our group or not. Finaly we decided that when as they go left, we go right and we went on. The way was quite difficult, I remember that when we find normal stairs, made probably by human, we had to stop in our way up to catch our breaths. After arriving the top and walking there for few minutes, we chose to get down. And that was a mistake. Hardly we took one incorrect step on a wrong track when something weird happened. Our audioguides which we hat got at the entrance started to scream, shriek, vibrate, display different unknown codes, in short words: they freaked out. We warily drew back suspecting that GPS had gone out of its' mind and those little devices had thought we went out of track, poor things. By now we don't know what this crazy alert was about. We went back to the starting point wet and cold but happy. What's interesting, we only discovered it was red trail (the difficult one) when we went out of it. Great! Even in this case we finished before the rest of our group! :p

On our way back home we visited a place where one of the "game of thrones" scenes had been filmed but I don't remember which one, sorry. I know that there was a long, long road with high, gnarled trees, this place is hounted, you know…?

And on Friday we went to see two forts… You know my attitude to history so, if you're interested, then ask and I'll maybe check in which forts we were. The only things I remember from these visits are there're a lot of stairs, a lot of walking and it was very windy. Sea and mountains at once, it always do the job. However, in one place we came across two cannons. We did some work in order to check if cannons work but we cannoned of a sad fact that they didn't work. Although they didn't work, they did the job so we took a few pictures with them.

During all of these trips we could observe beautiful sights and make good photos, that's not me, and experience this beautiful, Irish weather, that's of course me. With our weather you will never be bored!

And that's probably all I can tell you about our lessons and activities in Derry. Ach, no, my apologies, there's one more. Nobody will make me believe One Direction is only for small girls. I was in the pub and it went on! And something for buskers' fans, I want to report that they are in Derry too. Kamil, we're going there!

OK, so I'm finishing this entry and I want to assure you that the next one will be here tomorrow because it's done, it's only fixing itself right now.

Best regards