As most of you know, within my Rotary District here, there are many possibilities to travel. As long as you complete an online travel form and receive all the permission, you can travel. I have written a post about the different possibilities to travel as well as the rules in the past. There is also an option to travel and visit another exchange student. Before Eurotour, I never really took advantage of this. I went to visit one of my friends one time, but I know that a lot of Exchange students had been visiting each other for the whole year. This past week, my friend Daniel from Colombia came to visit Nick and I. He lives in Poprad, Slovakia; therefore, it was definitely a long journey. We hosted him for five days and we had many fun adventures!
During the week, Nick and I showed him the area. We went around Rakovník and around Rynholec. We walked a lot and we showed him a lot of our favourite places in our town. On Saturday, we had a very active day. It was wood cutting weekend! This meant that there were a lot of big guys at my house ready to cut A LOT of wood to dry over the summer. My host sister had two of her friends at the house as well and our job was to collect the chopped wood and stack it in the shelter. For me, this was not something too fun…because this is something that I’ve done a lot before. But for Daniel and Nick, it was extremely fun! After lunch, and one shelter full of wood, we decided to go on a walk. We walked to a nearby village: Lany. It’s 4km away, but the walk was very beautiful. Lany has beautiful gardens and is known for its beauty! We walked around and met up with one of Nick’s classmate that lives in Lany. Afterwards, we went back and chopped more wood until dinner. The next day, we went to Křivoklat castle. This is somewhere that I had been at the beginning of my exchange. We walked around the castle then went and walked through the forest and nature park. Monday, I had a school trip to Prague with my class. So I brought Daniel to the train station and said goodbye before the trip started. It was a very nice visit!
My class often goes on trips to Prague. I wasn’t sure what this trip was, but it turns out that it was the blind exhibition, which I’d already been to. It was interesting to do it again! Then, some of the students left and the others (including myself) went to the Faculty of Biology. Here, there was a small museum about evolution as well as bones and mummies! There was a lady that presented a lot of information about the exhibitions. I was very happy because I could understand the majority of what she said. Although she spoke in very academic and scientific terms, I could understand the idea of what she was talking about. It was a very interesting because they had skeletons of different primates. They also had the skeletons of different types of people. There were (for example) the skeletons of “giants”, very short people, and different male and female skeletons. We also saw some bones that had deformities as well as different skulls that had been broken or injured in some way. It was very interesting!
During this week, I will just go to school. Some of my classes and classmates are going on a school trip to Budapest and Bratislava. I’m disappointed that I can’t go, but on Thursday I will leave for my third Orientation meeting with Rotary. This is the only meeting that has Inbounds and Outbounds mixed. We will be doing a lot of team building activities as well as talking to the outbounds going to our countries! I am really looking forward to this meeting!
Recently I’ve been feeling really detached from Salmon Arm…not really sure what’s going on! But I’ve seen a lot of photos of flooding. I’m thinking about you all and hoping that everything will be alright. I wish that I could be there to help!
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