Tea Giornelli e Isabel Fasano 2C LL
In March, 2CLL together with 2BLL, after a flight of a couple of hours, landed at Manchester airport equipped with passports and umbrellas to spend the long-awaited study trip in England. The destination was Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, the quartet that drove our grandparents’ generation crazy and that still, to the sound of Michelle and Penny Lane, makes us young people sing.
For those who don’t attend a Linguistic high school and are not familiar with the English geography, Liverpool is a town in the west caost of England, at the mouth of the river Mersey and surrounded by the Irish Sea.
At our arrival we were welcomed, as in the most traditional common place, by a pouring rain that didn’t almost left us all week.
Never the choice of bringing raincoats, umbrellas and rain boots was more apt!
At first some mini-vans took us in small groups to the different houses that would host us throughout our stay. In this roulette of accommodation we were very lucky because we were welcomed by lovely families who pampered us like relatives. Living in families made this stage even more interesting because we had the chance to get more in touch with the English culture, learning about new habits, often different from ours. Any exmples? There you have dinner at 6pm, you live in pubs or bars a lot, you eat peculiar dishes such as fish and chips, meat pies with mustard, experiments with pasta or a creative salmon with chilii…
Our houses were not in the city centre but in residential areas, so we learnt how to organize ourselves with bus lines, tickets and schedules, an experience that for many of us was new and stimulating.
During the week we attended a language school and we had lessons taught by native teachers. We regularly met during the lunch breaks at Mc Donald’s where we compared the contents, often unusual, of our packed lunches prepared for us by our families.
The city, which became famous thanks to music and the Beatles, still has a lot to offer: the centre is huge, the navigable river allowed us to have a mini-cruise and inevitable are the references to the famous band through statues, pubs and the famous Penny Lane.
There were many activities organised by the school: we visited Port Sunlight, a lovely
Victorian village that housed workers from a
soap factory, we went to Chester, which is
famous for its Roman walls, Manchester,
with its Gothic Cathedral, and we visited the
local museums. But it wasn’t just a cultural
trip: we played bowling in a super colourful
bowling alley, we challenged each other to
minigolf and many of us went trough
their savings shopping in the streets of the city
centre.
At the end of our trip we got back to Milan full of experiences, with a more fluent English and with many memories that we will always bring with us.
What will we remember in particular? The excitement of the first day in England, the emotion of getting to know our new families, the view of the city from the school windows, the bus trips to the city centre when we were still half asleep, the escapes to Starbucks and, above all, the rain that proved our constant adventure companion!!