Croatia

Is becoming a lovely place again.

Today we have had amazing weather, clear blue skies with temps of 35 degrees + BEAUTIFUL!

Today we’ve had a really good day, skype with Caroline to sort out when the summer mission people come out witht he kids klubs and everything. Then met up with Garret for ice-cream because he’s back from America, and talking about the 2 american edge girls coming down on friday, then met up with Matej for some more coffee and talks on politics and religion. Mental. So now it”s 20 past 5 and soon we’ll get ready for some dinner, then out to hang some posters about!

WHOS EXCITED?!

I am for sure, so much to do, more people to meet and amazing weather to keep it all going :)

I just hope those ruddy mossies stay away and the river goes down.

Placement cont

Just sent off my first few emails to some churches for my placement. I’m scared and excited and extremely nervous.

Fishponds email doesn’t work, no other way of contacting them, arrgh.

Man, who thought that an email could do this to you!?

But apart from sending off like 4 emails, i’m still looking for some churches in and around the Bristol area, so if you know any good ones, please message me and let me know the details so i can send them one to!

I need to keep my options open, yes?

departingmoo:

Hannah and i went out for a bike ride.

We headed for the beach.

Half way it started spitting

3/4 of the way it was really tipping it down.

We turned around and started heading back.

I looked down to see how wet my shoes and trousers were.

My trousers went see through.

I wasen’t impressed.

There were lots of people jogging and riding their bikes to.

Then, get home turn on my laptop to blog. Fail. Laptop is currently black and broken again. I havent done anything to it. It just hates me.

laaame.

June 14th

Today has been a pretty busy day!

After we woke up after another stupidly hot night, the American girl’s went off to their croatian class, hannah went for a quick walk and I finally sorted out the mishap with UCAS again! Anywho, we did our morning shop and the moved the American girls into their new apartment! if you’ve been to Croatia, you will know where Rupa bar is, they live on top of there! It’s a dead scary but cool apartment with big windows and a little bit of it is actually outside, but inside. We then headed to Charlie and Barbs because they have decided to move to Gradiska. Bing the lovely people we are we went over to help Barb with the cleaning. Hannah hoovered like everywhere, and i spent like an hour in the bathroom cleaning it, for some odd reason. I like cleaning bathrooms. 

After a sweaty time there to, and about 4 mossie bites later we came back to the apartment to start doing the community meal where Emily, Amanda (the american girls) garret and Kim came over and Hannah made the best ever sweet and sour chicken ever! we didn’t even need to use sauce from like a bottle, hannah made it totally from scratch! it was amazing, we then had muffins for puds and 2 very very very competitive games of rapidough of which hannah and i won one and then garret and hannah one the next. mental!

they have all elft now, and i’m still pretty shattered watching blue crush on TV.

There is now only 3 weeks and 3 days until summer mission starts which is totally exciting!! We’ve already started drawing and sorting out the activities for the kids klub.

woopwoopwoopwoop.

Banja Luka

<from left to right: David, Belinda, Sofija, Hannah, Me and Chez with a Bulgarian Flag>

So Hannah and I with Chez gallivanted off to another country a few days ago (which actually all we had to do was walk 30mins across a bridge and then catch a 2 hour bus) to Banja Luka.

We went so that we could make some initial contact with some others out there (David and Belinda) as when the Bless summer missioners come out were planning on sending like 4 to 5 people out there for a kids klub. 

This initial contact was amazing, like both David and Belinda and amazing hosts, people, everything! Fun loving bunch of people who are really working from the heart. 

So we met some other Bosnian people there and had our own little mini tour of the place which was rally good to know about some of the history. One of the funny things though it just seemed like almost a replica of what we have here in Brod:

Croatia                                            Banja Luka

Betsy                                      Belinda

Garret                                     David

Small church                            Small church

Fort                                        Fort

Big River                                  Big River

Garret lives way up some           David also lives way up some apartment
apartment 

ha. it was pretty funny.

But over all Hannah and I came back with some major buzz from that place it’s amazing!! Like i think you have to be there, see it and almost experience it to understand.

Anywho. It was amazing. Were already planning on going back maybe the end of this month or the beginning of the next so we maybe do some planning and things :)

Also. you can check out Belinda’s blog to see what she gets up to in Banja Luka

Last week

HELLO.

SO, the past few weeks has been pretty epic. Like when i say epic, we haven’t been like totally doing something every minute of the day but pretty much were doing almost something every day if this all makes sense. 

So, Monday was our day off as per usual so we did our shop. Normal Monday. On Tuesday we had Children’s home in the morning and before that we had Croatian. I wasn’t feeling too well so I stayed at home while Holly and Hannah went to the Children’s home. Apparently they tried to marry Holly off to one of the kids who live there. Mental. Then later on in the evening Gabrijela came round to talk to us about school. Remember that time when we had the most dire day ever at the Disabled place, and then we met a bunch of amazing people after it? Well one of them was Gabrijela, and she seemed super keen for us 3 to come into her school and help her with her English classes, going into different classes for different people earning different stages of English, and then possibly put us in their newspaper website everything. So we met with her on Thursday and we started off in one of her classes.

So now in total we have been in Gabrijela’s classes around 4 times with around 20 students in each class. Then also, word got about the school that we were English and some of the teachers found this rather interesting. So another English teacher came up to us and introduced herself as Ivanka and she teaches a lower grade of English compared to Gabrijela. The other English teachers nick named her Miss daisy, because thats what her name means in English apparently, but she doesn’t know that. So then we have been to a total of 5 different English classes with her, and she also had around 20 students. So lets do some maths:

4 x 20 = 80

5 x 20 =100

100 + 80 = 180

180 STUDENTS WE HAVE MET OVER THE PAST 2 WEEKS
( actually it’s 160, one of the classes got repeated today… still, its a mahooooosive amount of people) 

flippin mental. 

We have done pretty much the same things in each of the classes. We will sit down in-front of the class, or Miss Daisy made us sit in a circle, which was way more intimidating. So we introduce ourselves, why we are here, what our hobbies are, small things like that., then the classes aim would be to ask us a few questions back, of which they would write an essay about. The more they know about us, the more points they get. So here are a few of the repeated questions we have had:

- ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ (this was tried to be censored by the teacher, but still fell out of the pupils mouths.)
- ‘How old are you?’
- ‘What do you like about Croatia?’
- ‘Why are you here?!’
- ‘What is your favourite type of music’
- ‘Can I have your phone number?’
- ‘Where do you come from?’
- ‘What are you doing tonight? Can we go for coffee?’
- ‘What is the night life in your home town? Have you been out here yet? We can take you if you like?’ 

 So on and so forth. So it can get a bit tedious sometimes, and a little boring, but the way i see it, is that we are making more and more connections with people, possibly building relationships and everything else. It’s pretty awesome.
Gabrijela did say to us though that she has never seen her class of boys been so giggly and acting like little girls before, and apparently they are all asking when we’re going to come back. Ha. It’s pretty cool, a bit weird, but it gives us something else to do :)

So our plan is to keep on going for as long as they need us. And i have probably forgotten alot of the things that i was like ’ :O imma blog it.’

WAIT. one of the kids in the class was wearing a top with the ‘Durex’ logo on it, saying ‘Durex CONNECTING PEOPLE’ we all had a bit of a crease at the front of the class. ha.

Anywho, thats it for now, more of an update later :)

xx 

i just remembered something else. In Miss Daisy’s class, the second lesson she brought tea and cake which was cute. tea was minging though. We were like, what sort of tea is this and they were like it’s a small red berry thing. And we’re like whatttt?! And none of us can think of what it is, so if you know let us know yes? So we never have to touch it again. Plus in Miss daisy’s class today i said ‘i generally can’t be arsed’ and they looked at me like i was more foreign than i already am, i then i had to correct myself by saying, ‘I can’t be bothered’. We have come to realise that Miss Daisy has a umm… ‘special’ way of teaching. We think she makes stuff up in english and we just have to nod along with it ha. PLUS. The last few times we have seen her, first she had a ‘I love London’ bag and today she wore a black top with a sparkly purple LONDON across it. i have nothing to say about this. Nothing at all.