Year 5 - British International School Al Khobar: April 9, 2011

After yesterday’s adventures, an early start this morning was again on the cards as we had to pack up and leave the seaside. At 6.30am this morning there was the most amazing sunrise over the adjacent hills, but there were very few students to see it. After breakfast, we packed up – despite every room claiming that they had absolutely checked and there was nothing left behind, we managed to collect a vast array of things left behind. Mr. Gikas was particularly pleased to be reunited with his belongings too!

Wow! Our arrival at Epidaurus

Our first journey this morning took us to the theatre at Epidaurus. There was a collective “Eugh!” as Ahmed ran off the bus to puke in the bushes (in fairness it was a winding road) followed by a collective “Wow” as we rounded the corner and saw the auditorium for the first time. It’s some kind of holiday for Greek students at the moment and so all of the attractions today were full of noisy students – not ours! – but we still had time to get four of our group up on stage to sing “Under the Sea” to general acclaim. Sadly, Noura was too shy initially to repeat her success with “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from the recent Junior production, and by the time she had drummed up the courage the moment had passed as the stage was taken over by another group.

A modern tragedy - BISAK singers

From Epidaurus we continued to Mycenae, first of all to the Beehive Tomb (Atreus’ Treasury for the classicists). Jacob and Valerio managed to incur the wrath of an Italian tourist by scraping their feet along the ground, churning up clouds of dust - fortunately they didn’t understand a single word of the tirade he directed against them! From there we headed up to the citadel of Mycenae, entering through the famous Lion’s Gate. When asked what animals we thought were depicted there, Ruben very astutely volunteered “Elephants” (Have a look at the picture and you’ll see why we laughed!).

What no Whitaker?

The weather today has been fantastic – sun cream was definitely needed – and by the end of the tour of Mycenae stomachs were clearly rumbling, so we proceeded to a modern temple of food, where we ate baked lamb, salad and ice cream. Mr. Whitaker rolled out of the restaurant, having gone round scavenging food from the children’s plates. Mr. Gikas did his best to comply with various requests for plate smashing entertainment by dropping one which rendered the whole restaurant silent – both Simon and Daniel went one better by actually dropping and smashing glasses.

Our theatre team

Suitably replete, we had a quick stop at a local pottery making factory where we saw a pottery demonstration – Kush was pulled up to help show how the Cup of Justice worked, and he was obviously so good that the shop nearly ran out of them! We had a final stop at Corinth to see just how far down it was from the bridge to the canal – a mere 80m. Sadly the bungee jumping place adjacent to the bridge was closed and so we didn’t get a chance to send Ms. Naidoo over the edge (although she might argue that’s exactly what the three male teachers with her have been doing all week!). A final ice cream stop, and then back to Athens where we were reunited with a variety of clothing and other items that’d we’d left two days prior (Mr. Gikas was grateful to be brought together again with the flip flops he’d left behind - they were the first items out of the bag!).

Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus

This evening has been spent with a “Greek Week Quiz” – children were split into teams and had to answer a variety of questions with letters of the alphabet as the first letter of the answer. Mr. Whitaker compered the evening, but he did surpass himself earlier in the evening when the teachers were setting the questions. “What’s a type of column beginning with the letter I?” Mr.Whitaker: “Doric?” Some of the children’s answers were slightly spurious, in particular for L where the answer should have been ‘locust’ – we had ‘l-grasshopper’, a ‘lotus’, and a ‘limping grasshopper.’ When asked to use an adjective beginning with ‘v’ to describe their week, we had the following: ‘vonderful’, ‘valuable time,’ ‘varied,’ ‘very awesome,’ and ‘vigorously amazing.’

Beehive tomb at Mycenae

So that’s it. We sang happy birthday to Daniel in anticipation of his birthday on Monday, and now the children are all in bed, staff are slowly chilling and we’re all looking forward to a bit of a lie-in tomorrow morning (Valerio asked why we were getting a lion). We fly from Athens at 2.00pm, and despite the fun we’ve had we’ve 30 children looking forward to a hug from Mum and Dad tomorrow evening. See you back in Saudi!