It´s the last morning of our ten day trip, other than the final travel day home. I woke up early, I suppose it´s because I´m excited about the day. When I called Tallon´s room to wake them up for the trip to the flea market, they elected to sleep, but I tried to be convincing that they shouldn´t miss a thing. I´m hoping to see them at breakfast. We can sleep when we´re dead. Speaking of sleep, I´m a girl who likes 7-8 hours per night and I´m finding 5 works fine here. Maybe it´s the fantastic Spanish coffee!
I want to mention how terrific this trip has been as a bit of an endorsement for EF Tours. I traveled with them in the mid-90´s as a teacher and a couple of things have improved. Our hotel in London was very good, the one in Madrid excellent. The one in Paris is another story, but since it´s my only complaint, I´ll leave that for the evaluation. The food is much improved since my previous tours, I´ve really enjoyed every meal.
When we lead a student tour, one of the things that EF provides is a tour guide who´s with us the whole way. Ours on this trip has been Alexandra L. and she´s been absolutely fabulous. Her sunny attitude and easy spirit have helped set a good atmosphere. She´s also very accomodating and I never get the feeling like she wants to rush away when we have free time. In fact, she most often spends it with us. The thing I like best about her is that she really listens to our students and takes a sincere interest in them. Sounds like the same thing that makes for a good teacher, doesn´t it?
I think it´s a very good sign that we´re all talking about where we want to go in 2009 (Italy!), and we would definitely travel with EF Tours again. I´ve said it many times in these posts, this has been a non-stop, exhausting in a wonderful way, trip. I´m privileged to have come to know some of our students much better.
I stumbled upon this post while looking for *anything* positive about EF. I am heading off to my first Orientation Convention next week and taking a group of students in the Fall.
The feedback I’ve heard on the ‘net has been awful and I was starting to panic. Glad you had a good experience. No matter what anyone says, I’m really excited about my tour.
Your post is timely. I spent about 3 hours on Friday helping our principal locate and take down an imposter profile on MySpace. It seems to have been set up by one of our students and was pretty mild, but still distressing.
The more I worked on it, the more I thought, “here is a teachable moment,” for all of us — adminstrators, faculty, and students. Whether we interact on the web or not (and more and more of us in my building are, thankfully), we all need to find ways to work together and resolve conflicts in ways that leave everyone bigger, more educated, and more literate.
Heh 🙂 I still reckon that you’re only getting a very small % of readers commenting!
I have really enjoyed reading these posts! I am glad that there has been talk about another trip in 2009! That is a trip I really want to be involved with. So glad everything went so well. I look forward to talking to you and my students about their experience and looking at all the photos!
See you soon
Carol
What a Trip I have never had a desire to travel over seas but after reading the blog I think I ‘ll have to reconsider-2009 huh?Glad everyone had a great time but can’t wait to talk to courtney in person(I even missed our daily texting. Welcome home Everyone!