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Modern Languages
With each passing summer, there appear to be ever more foreign students in Brighton, here to learn English, walk around with yellow rucksacks, have their eyebrows pierced, make friendship bracelets, and eat microwaved shepherds pies provided, via Iceland, by their host families who receive up to £100 per student per week. They add ten minutes to everyone's bus journeys, as they fumble for the pass that's been stuffed into the bottom of the yellow rucksack, and they walk in the middle of the cycle lane, perhaps believing that the large bike logo emblazoned there is an example of early Banksy rather than information.
And I love them being around, not because I receive £100 per week, but because they bring a slowness to the place that's welcome. They've got no particular place to go, they're feeling groovy etc etc. They also take me back to the far less satisfactory French and German exchange trips that I experienced as a schoolboy. When I was 13, fifteen pupils and two teachers went to France in a minibus. Fourteen pupils and two teachers met their host families at the school the french kids attended. One pupil was put on a train and had to go to Paris on his own, where he was told to look out for a lady wearing a beige coat. This was the mother of the family, who were on holiday. Except I - for I was the one - didn't know what beige looked like, and the Gare Du Nord was deserted by the time I found her. It was an awful stay; I was ridiculed because I didn't know what the bidet was for, I had to wee into a bottle during a ten hour drive because the father wouldn't stop the car, and the younger brother punched me because I laughed when he told me that French pop star Claude Francois had died trying to replace a lightbulb whilst standing in a partly full bathtub. My schoolfellows, meanwhile, were all hanging out together, smoking and attempting to buy french jazz mags whilst I dolefully holidayed miles away with ma famille. Finally, with a day or so of the trip remaining, I was reunited with my school friends. A group of us went to a shopping precinct, and as we stood on an escalator, I spotted an attractive woman. I was over-excited, I hadn't spoken to an English person in a fortnight - which meant I hadn't really spoken at all - and I blurted out to my pals 'She's got great tits!' 'Yes she has' said the woman 'And she's English'
The following year, my brother went to Italy on a school trip and was allowed to borrow our dad's camera. When the film was developed, every picture was of piles of dog poo with small union jack flags stuck in them.
Anyone else done anything nice on their (Foreign exchange) holidays?
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My Formative Years
were spent in Brighton and I loved the fact that the language students were there, doing exactly what you describe. This was in the Seventies and Eighties, so some of them from my time are probably grandparents now. Brighton always sagged a bit when they left to return home, having not picked up much English as they'd spent all their time with their fellow country girls & boys. So what? They'd had a great time, for the most part.
I worked for one of the big language schools for a while. I do hope that the host family vetting procedure is better than it was as there were some families who were there for the handout and not interested in the hosting part of the arrangement at all, though I'm sure mobile phones and YouTube has gone a long way in making sure standards are better than in the past.
When I was 14 I went on an exchange trip...
... to France for 2 weeks and stayed with a family in Joinville-Le-Pont, near Paris, who had only recently emigrated from Portugal. The family comprised one set of grandparents (Portuguese only), parents (Portuguese and a smattering of French, no English) and the 14 year old son whose English was a bad as my French. The other son, who was around 19, was living in Amsterdam and came to visit while I was there, and his English was probably better than mine!
Upon our return my French teacher had the temerity to tell my parents that my French hadn't improved at all and the trip was a complete waste of time! Ooh, you should have heard my dad. And then I got a slap for telling my teacher that at least my Portuguese was better than his.
The one consolation was that I met Danielle. Ah, Danielle!
we get exchange students in Worthing
I always think they must be very disappointed. We were in Bournemouth last weekend. Full of olive skinned students having a great time on the sandy beach. What a contrast!
Don't knock
EF (Blue and White Rucksacks) kept me in work and Swedish chicks (Only Joking Mrs Crout) for many a summer in Brighton.
@wayfarer, was that the one you worked for ?
Yes!
I mainly worked for Educational Tours, taking American & Canadian high school kids around Europe but I did do work for the language school every now and then.
The company was pretty dire but the people that made it work in spite of that were great. Happy days.
Nogent-Le-Rotrou
A town in northern France famous for it's nuclear power station, the father of Christophe, the young lad I was staying with, being a worker at said plant. Sadly, this was the very early eighties and there was no opportunity to reference Monsieur 'Omer Simpson.
We bonded over Back In Black and Breakfast In America; bought petard, lit them and threw them at each other; and fought a running battle with Christophe's older brothers over the rights to a rotten punt in the river running past the back of their house.
Ah happy days.
Suprisingly, in the third week I found myself dreaming in the French. This was something of a revelation. Unfortunately, the trouble with immersive language learning is that once you stop, you get rusty quite quickly.
C'est la vie.
Torquay 1982
Too many tales to tell...but definitely a culture shock in many ways.
We didn't see much of our hosts, just the au pair they hired to look after the six exchange students they had signed up for.
We all had our own keys and could come home ( or not ) any time we wanted during the night on any day of the week. So we hit the disco's more or less every night for one solid month, great times!
But the food was appalling ( the only students who weren't complaining about the food were living with an Indian family ). And we had very little money. And we had to pretend to be from Germany ( I don't know what movies the English boys had been watching, but their ideas about Swedish girls were very shocking to a bunch of rather innocent 15 year old girls... )
Between signing up for the trip and going there me and my friend had of course drifted apart but fortunately we both found great new friends on the trip and could avoid each other most of the time.
Did our english improve ? Most definitely. We were fortunate that we lived with two Danish and two Norwegian girls and though the languages are similar they had really bad accents that we hardly understood and they couldn't understand our swedish either.
So we spoke english with each other all the time.
I only wish that I hadn't let my friend pick the town...I think she wanted to go there because of the palm trees. Bad choice!
Mensi, just to say
I'm really enjoying your threads. I love the way you write.
Thank you so much!
I really appreciate that!
seconded
!
Saint-Lô, Normandy, 1976
My first French exchange was as a 14-year-old. Saint-Lô is a grey, concretey place in Normandy that had been razed to the ground in the War. Luckily, my exchange partner Jacques and his family were very nice. I played football with him and his mates on the estate, and in the afternoons we had crêpes with nutella on. My bed had one of those long bolster pillows like a huge sausage that the French seem to favour, for some reason.
We kept in contact for about 15 years, but then lost touch, as my French started to wane. Jacques went on to become the presenter of an arts programme on regional television in France, while I went on to lead a ... rather less glamorous life. I can go on the YouTube now and watch him doing his TV presenting thing. It's all rather strange. Still, a nice guy. Très sympa.
Alsace -Lorraine Early 90's
I think we were about 13 (3rd year) and we went on a double decker coach, I remember listening to Alana Miles " Black Velvet" and Kon Kan and possible Snap's the Power if that helps carbon date this. The teachers had the brilliant idea of wine tasting and also of letting us buy a bottle or two for our parents. Naturally we cracked open the very sour white wine on the top deck of the coach (whilst singing a rude version of Amy Grant's Baby Baby) and then had to cope with the adverse effects at a bird show in the afternoon (buzzards, hawks doing a display which involved dragging our rucksacks into their water troughs).
The rest of the trip was no less chaotic as we decided on mass that we hate our sandwiches provided by our hosts and threw them out of the skylight of our coach. Unfortunately they hit the windshield of the car behind who reported us to the police who tracked us down and held our passports, sent us on our way until the end of the trip to collect them. We did get to see Robocop by mistake though and I got taken to the quarry by my host family (others went skiing).