Presentation 'Once when I was in...' - 'England'

MY JOURNEY INTO MEANING: THE MEANING OF MY JOURNEY

When I was young, I thought it was a normal custom to go on holiday to the Veluwe in summer. The Veluwe is one of the most afforested areas in Holland and my parents loved it to be among the trees. I found our holidays very boring; every day we had the same program. We went walking, cycling, fishing, shopping and swimming. Especially the cycling tours were awful and after the first ten kilometres my sister and I always started to sing: ‘A tall tree, a small tree, a tall tree, a small tree, tree, tree…’, to my parents’ great annoyance. But every year, I survived the holidays and went back to school, relieved.

When I started the Athenaeum 4 class at secondary school, I had an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. This was the year of the England journey! Because I had never travelled abroad before, I didn’t know what to expect and I thought it to be very exciting. The trip was planned in May and in March I already started with my preparations. And not only me; my classmates did the same. We checked our identity cards and some of us made a new one, only for safety. We were champions in buying new bags: ‘you really need a solid one, lots of space in it, good safety, many zips’. Every two weeks we bought a new one and after two weeks it again turned out to be unusable. Our parents had gone mad four weeks before the date of departure, but we were in a state of upper suspense.

Our travel to England was a school travel, so we had to do some exercises for our study. The underlying subjects were of course English, but also Art and Culture. Two weeks before we left Holland our teachers started to explain the purposes of the journey and we got our travel books. We spelled the travel program and decided that there was little free time and that we had to work really hard to do all the exercises which were in the reader. But we were not discouraged and the time of departure approached.

But one week before, real panic broke out! ‘What do they eat in England?’ was the frustrating question of one of my classmates. ‘Do they have sprinkles for my slices of bread?’ asked another. ‘What about their evening meals’? ‘And do they really eat bacon and eggs for breakfast?’ At once, everybody called the journey in question because of these questions. How could we survive without sprinkles for our bread or with something indefinable for evening meal? And our English teacher made us really upset: ‘Yes, boys and girls, it’s bacon in the morning, pepper for evening meal, damp bread for lunch…’ Sprinkles for bread? They even don’t know what we mean by that.’ The first tears appeared.

Our parents, never been in England, knew the solution for our problem. ‘Take your own packet of sprinkles with you and eat Sultana cookies for lunch. If your evening meal is disgusting, ehm… well, maybe you can bake pancakes, or buy potatoes and endives anywhere.’ The sprinkles and Sultana were OK and we started to buy lots of it. But the evening meal remained a problem: how could we influence our host family to cook ‘normally’?

We were very nervous when the great day came, finally. In the very early morning - six o’clock - we arrived at school. We inspected and slashed each other’s bags - too small, too big, too heavy, too many zips, etc. - and we checked for the last time if we really had our identity cards and copies of insurance papers. We got on the bus with plumbed feet and waved a little bit pitiful to our parents. Would we ever come back? And would we really survive without Dutch food?

However, when the bus was in the neighbourhood of Calais, we became calmer. The boat trip to England was beautiful, and we were really enthusiastic when we discovered the first glimpse of the chalk-cliffs. Some of us became seasick as a bad presage, but our whole trip was too excited to pay much attention to it. We arrived on the other side and were surprised when it turned out that cars really drive left in England! It seemed that we all had thought that was a book story or fairy tail, because the first ten minutes there was total silence in our bus. Maybe we all thought that we were going to hit Dutch drivers, driving on the right sight of the English road…

Our first stop was in Canterbury, where we visited the old and beautiful cathedral. We had to do some exercises in the cathedral and we went inside, armed with bloc notes and pencils. We had to make photo reports too, so we had digital cameras with us. A few seconds after our entrance, a uniformed lady came to us. ‘You are not allowed to make photographs in this cathedral, except when you pay for a ‘photo button’. We were staggered, but we went to the information point to get a button, because we wanted to make photos to show our Mum and Dad the striking parts of England. But a great frustration was waiting us. The woman behind the counter told us a button charged 2 pounds! Our Dutch mind converted this price to guilders and the result was shocking: nearly seven guilders! We decided not to buy a button - ‘Dutch people are economical, aren’t they?’ - and we went into the cathedral, still discussing this daylight robbery. Because we needed our photographs, we underhand take some; constant looking behind us if somebody was watching us. Our photos were a bit dark coloured, because we couldn’t use the flasher of our cameras…

After viewing the whole cathedral, hearing the story of the Black Prince and Thomas of Beckett, we went to the coach park in the centre of London, where our host families were waiting. Resigned, we took our place in the right cars and drove to houses of the families. The first night, we couldn’t sleep at all. We were thinking about how the breakfast should be and we checked thousands of times if we really brought our sprinkles and Sultanas with us. The next morning we got toast with pasta for breakfast and in fact, of course we didn’t admit it, we were a bit disappointed. But the relief dominated.

During our week in England we visited all the famous sights, like Windsor Castle, the Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, the Claremont Landscape Garden, the Victoria & Albert museum, the Tower of London, we sailed on the Thames and of course we watched the changing of the guards. And some of us dared to say, while watching the guards, that such kind of a ‘puppet theatre’ doesn’t exist in Holland… Every day was an adventure, because of the unknown factor we were faced with. What shall the food be? Are the English able to understand our broken English? Every morning, when we met each other at the coach park, the first question was ‘What did you eat? How about your Sultana stock?’ Our lunches were beautiful to see: white bread sandwiches, with lettuce, tomatoes, and slices of cucumber. But there was also something on it we couldn’t place: it was no cheese and it was no sausage: it seemed to be a combination of those two. But after a few bites, we decided not to eat our lunches: the bread was damp indeed, and the cheese-sausage combination tasted awful. London’s homeless were very glad with our visit.

Of course we enjoyed the sightseeing element of our tour and with great enthusiasm we did our exercises every day in the cathedrals and museums. But, strangely enough, our enthusiasm became bigger when we found something ‘Dutch’ in England. We were able to talk for more than an hour about a car with a Dutch registration number and while shopping in Oxford Street we bought things that were all ‘a little bit like it is in Holland’. We stumbled at the high prices and our total of purchases was low.

But the high point of our journey came nearly at the end. It was on Thursday that we visited St Paul’s Cathedral and after that, we rested a few minutes on the stairs in front of the famous building. The sun was shining - very special, most of the time it rained - and some of us closed their eyes as if they would take forty winks. But then, suddenly, a loud cry reached ours ears. Some of the other students stood at the bottom of the stairs and they were waving and shouting at us: ‘We have discovered a McDonalds! Come and see!’.

Sleeping was over, and we ran down the stairs. In a couple of minutes we reached the McDonalds and we ordered fifteen Mc Flurries. They were twice the price of the Dutch Mc Flurries, but we didn’t mention it. We were all laughing and the atmosphere felt comfortable. We ate our Flurries slowly, enjoying its taste. When the paper cups were empty, we built a ‘Flurry Tower’ and made photographs of it and of each other, sitting on ‘an English McDonalds chair’. We left the McDonalds with a spiteful feeling, but also very, very satisfied.

During the way back to Holland, we had a retrospective view on our journey. We discussed the sights we visited, but most of all we discussed our host families, the awful food, our decreased stock of Sultana, the English lack of sprinkles, the high prices in Oxford Street and of course our McDonalds visit and the Flurry Tower. And then one us expressed our feelings in one simple sentence: ‘How nice would it be, to eat a meal with beans, potatoes and a meat-ball, all cooked by my Mum…!’