Madrid - our love

When the plane was taking off, we couldn’t believe in our luck. Madrid was the final destination of our flight. We got the chance to see this charming city due to our participation in Socrates Comenius Project.

We went for this journey to homeland of corrida with our English teachers Mrs. Wiączek and Mrs. Omachel, and a graduate of our school - Monika Zielińska. On the board of the plane time was passing really quickly and we landed sooner than we expected.

On the airport there were our host-families waiting for us. We lived in the centre of Madrid with a very nice family which came from the Philippines. We spent a lot of time with them talking, playing and sightseeing.

Many Spanish customs were really strange for us. They eat three meals: breakfast at seven a.m., lunch at three p.m. and dinner at eleven p.m. Vanessa (the girl whom we were living at) told us about her school rules to recall just a few: lesson lasts 50 minutes, you don’t have to change your shoes, you must write tests but you don’t have to be on the lessons.

After some time we went to Lope de Vega high school to see everything by ourselves. There in the school theatre we were really nicely welcomed by one of the teachers. Apart from us there were groups from other countries also involved in this project: Turkey, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Spain.

Next days we spent on sightseeing Madrid and nearest neighbourhood. We saw some beautiful places like: Palacio Real (Royal Palace), Retiro Park and Prado Museum (art gallery which displays works of art of many famous artists especially: Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco de Goya or Pablo Picasso). We also visited Segovia (a small town situated next to Madrid where we saw original aqueduct) and Santiago Bernabeu (the stadium of the most popular football team in the world). Can you guess the name? Real Madrid

One day we met the member of Spanish Royal Family. We were granted the honour to shake Princess Kristina’s hand. In this way she was raising money for the Red Cross.

During sightseeing we were speaking English with other students all the time. It was a good practice for us. Then we found out that teachers admired how fluently we can speak English. The longer we were in Madrid the less we wanted to come back to Poland. Everyone felt the same, but we had to say goodbye to Slovakian group already on Thursday because they had plane to Koszyce on Friday morning.

Our flight back was at three o’clock p.m. on Saturday. It was very difficult to leave our new friends but the hardest thing for us was saying goodbye to out host-family. Our flight seemed to be so long. We were at Polish airport at seven o’clock. There were our friends and family waiting for us.

Come back to school wasn’t easy and it still isn’t even now. We miss very much everyone from the trip and we hope to see them again. We send e-mails to them and watch photos almost every day. We will never forget these seven days when our dream came true…

Zuzanna Kuc and Karolina Goździkiewicz