When we arrived to the school in the morning, one guess where I headed first...? You guessed it, the coffee shop! :) The below symbol is painted on the wall in the coffee shop and is their symbol for the name they've given the cafe - Eagle and Child. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and the other "Inklings" (literary enthusiasts in their academic literary discussion group) often frequented a pub in Oxford, England called Eagle and Child, which is where the name for this coffee shop came from.
After everyone arrived, we put our luggage in one of the rooms and headed to a Slovak folk dance lesson given to us by a few of the C.S. Lewis students. It was so fun to try out some of the steps and do our best dancing to traditional music.
After the group danced, they called for some MA volunteers to try some of the more difficult moves with one of the knowledgable Slovak dancers. First up was Ethan - I could say he volunteered, but more accurately we all encouraged him to try it out. What a good sport - he did a great job!
And next up was Drew - look at those smiles! :)
And Lexi finished up our class with a cool move where the girl jumps up on her knees on the guy's (flat, table-top like) upper thigh... I think it is harder than it looks! Since Lexi is the resident dancer, we were pretty sure she could handle it. The Slovak student in the picture assured Lexi that he wouldn't drop her. Great job, MA and Slovak dancers - impressive and lots of fun to try out something new!
Next we went to get ready for our long awaited assembly (which they call WICK) presentation to the C.S. Lewis students about Minnesota and Minnehaha. We brought some gifts from home to throw out to the crowd while we spoke, which I think the students listening to our talk thought was pretty cool. And note the random spoon on the table... Beck was talking about items "famous" to Minnesota, and one of them was Spam. He brought with a can of spam, had a volunteer come up to the front, and we opened the can and had her try it in front of everyone... and she kind of liked it!! 😝 Thanks to all at home who donated these items for our presentation - we appreciate it!
I think there may have been a tiny bit of nerves before we started, but we were ready...
This student speaking in the brightly colored sari (I believe) is originally from Pakistan and is a student at the school, and she was moving to Germany with her family over the weekend and wanted to say thank you and goodbye to all of her friends. So, she spoke for a few minutes before we started our presentation. It was heartwarming for me to witness how thankful she was to have that community at the school, and how all of the students gave her love right back. I think that is similar to the community we have at Minnehaha, so I loved seeing that at the C.S. Lewis School too. Our schools really do have many similarities!
Here's a panorama shot of the area we spoke in... the whole student body was there to listen, I believe it is approximately 500 or so students plus their teachers.
I think our presentation went well and was well received. We talked a lot about MN/Twin Cities culture, including the life around all of our 11,000+ lakes (that's one of the trivia questions we asked and threw out a "prize" to someone that attempted to answer... how many lakes does MN have?), sports, some famous musicians and actors to come out of MN (for example, Bob Dylan, Prince, etc.), our vibrant theatre and music scene, MOA (of course we couldn't forget to mention that place), and more. Towards the end of our presentation we spoke about MA - past/present/future. We showed pictures of the building before August 2, 2017, pictures after the explosion occurred, pictures of Mendota where we are now, and pictures of what the new building will look like. Since we welcome C.S. Lewis students to MA every fall semester, we thought they might like to especially see the pictures of what the new school will look like. After the WICK presentation was over, we had a few students come up to us and ask more questions about Minnehaha, which was nice. We were told by the administrators at the school that although they offer several study abroad options to their students all around the world, the MA opportunity is usually the most popular, with 25+ applicants every year. We are happy that people want to come over to join us and be part of our special community!
After the WICK presentation, all of us headed downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch. I snapped this photo on the wall of the past graduating classes at the school. It's cool to know that there are two people in each of those pictures that attended MA in past years!
Before we left the school we had one last activity planned - to attend a short lecture from one of the highly-regarded founders of the school. He talked about his life, which is interwoven with the history of Bratislava and communism, and how he came to dream about and start the school. Ask your student about it when they get home - it was a powerful story, ultimately one of love and dedication. One example of something he shared was that when he was three years old, his father and all of his family, including himself, were sentenced to death because his father resisted the communists. I got chills when he told our group that - wow, what a powerful story!
Here we all are heading out of the C.S. Lewis School with our luggage, walking to the city bus station that will take us to the bus terminal where we'll catch the same bus back to Vienna that we took last weekend to get to Bratislava.
Our new friend Peter and old friend Megi walked us from the school to the bus stop. We all had to give Peter a big hug to say goodbye. We had just met him a few days earlier (and ironically, he had just begun his job at the C.S. Lewis School a few short weeks earlier), but we felt like we had known him for a long time - that's how well we connected with him. He was a constant presence with us throughout our visit, and we were so very grateful for all of his warm hospitality and excellent wayfinding - we couldn't have gotten around town (and to Budapest) without you, Peter - thank you!
Beck wanted me to take a picture of attempting a European cheek kiss with Peter to say goodbye... so worldly, Beck! 😉
Riding the city bus to the Bratislava main bus terminal...
We made it to Vienna! Next stop, our home away from home the next two nights... Anyna Apartments. We had two large apartments (we had originally rented one XL apartment with many rooms that would sleep all of us, but that one turned out to not be available for our stay), so we broke into two groups in the same building (one adult in each apartment), just a short flight of stairs away from one another. The apartment has a full kitchen (which we all went grocery shopping together to stock up on breakfast food - fun) and three bedrooms each - very comfortable, affordable, and great for groups or large families.
Since it was nearing evening and dinner time, and we knew we'd be going into the Vienna city center all day Saturday, we decided to go to a large park area called Prater. It is most famous for the ferris wheel in the park (called the Weiner Reisenrad), and we were looking forward to exploring the area, having dinner, and possibly going on the ferris wheel. It was constructed in 1897, and from 1920 to 1985 it was the world's tallest ferris wheel at 212 feet high! For perspective, the London Eye is over double that height at 443 feet tall - whoa!
We split up in small groups to go and find some dinner, and we stumbled upon this roller coaster themed restaurant (sticking with the amusement park theme). It's a little hard to make sense of the below two pictures, but essentially all the metal railings make up a big roller coaster inside this restaurant. You order your meals at the table on an iPad, and then a few minutes later your food (including drinks with a cap on them) come directly to your table via a robotic roller coaster car! It was pretty cool and crazy all at the same time. We hardly saw any human workers there at all - everything was automated and robotic - a memorable experience!
We decided to go on the ferris wheel and I'm so glad we did - it was a really cool view of Vienna at night! I tried to get a few good pictures of the view at the top of the ride, but since it was evening the lighting was bad for my camera. But you can imagine Vienna all lit up at night - it was really beautiful!
The car next to us was a dining car... the long banquet table was all set up with white linens, plates, silverware, etc. Can you imagine eating your dinner in a ferris wheel car? I can't. The ride was extremely quiet, slow, and very smooth though, so I bet it would be a fun experience. We also saw another car set up for a business meeting. Ben suggested that we come back some time to conduct a business meeting on the ferris wheel... we'll see if we can make that happen in the future, haha.
Lookin' good! Ben was pretty happy and proud of himself for finding such a cool hat as a souvenir. :)
And the final three pictures are from our evening Uber ride back to the apartment. We had some pretty funny and silly moments on this ride! The driver didn't speak English well, but offered me a piece of gum and asked me to please take a selfie with him, all while Elsie, Lexi, and Ben had a good laugh in the backseat. I think we were all pretty tired and in goofball mode!
Saturday we have plans to spend the day in the center of Vienna - we are looking forward to a wonderful last day together on this very unique and special 2019 MA CFE trip. Stay tuned for Saturday Vienna pictures to come before this blog officially wraps up...!
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