 St Aidan's CBS, Whitehall, Dublin, Ireland |
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| St Aidan's CBS, Whitehall, Dublin, Ireland |
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Over the Halloween break we completed our Cross-Country exchange trip with our American partners, John Burroughs High School. Mark Mckenzie, Ronán Bergin, Brian McGuire, Graham Mahon, Jordan Logue, Myself, Mr O’Neill and Mr. McCafferty headed for London 6 a.m. on a cold dark morning for an exchange flight to LAX. It was a long but entertaining 11 hour flight from Heathrow going a slightly round-about but educational way, flying over The Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and across Canada to eventually come down through the Rockies into Oregon then California. The first thing that struck us when we got off the plane was the heat, even though it was late October most days were no lower than 30*C. We received 101,000 welcomes from not only our host families but also the entire 2,700 pupils in the entire school who were waving Ireland flags and scarves and a great welcoming poster which I believe was painted by Celina. The next day we were up at 4 a.m. to run for 7:30 a.m. which wasn’t the best way to go about fighting "jet-lag", but being "St. Aidan’s men of steel", we ran our hearts out in the biggest High School race in the world, the Mt. Sac Invitational, with over 30,000 competitors fighting for the prestigious cow-bell which they give to the winners.
We weren’t quite good enough to snatch this fantastic prize on the day but did ourselves justice finishing 38 out of 2,652 schools in a gruelling race we had never ran before.
While we were there we attended school and cross-country training, which was a once in a lifetime experience. All the pupils over there get up at 6 or 7 to be in school for 8am.You then attended 5, 1 hour classes, and we agreed photography was our favourite, followed closely by U.S. History which was taught by the equivalent of the Mr. O’Neill of their school, a very vibrant, lively and educational class which you looked forward to every day. The classes such as Photography, Plane Engineering, Dance and Athletics are subjects which you can sit for their equivalent of the Leaving Cert., so each day at 2 o’clock we had the final class of the day, cross-country training, which was very tough in the heat but a great warm-weather training experience. We thoroughly enjoyed training with both the men’s and women’s teams (as their school is mixed) led by a successful Coach Peoples. It is down to this man and a fantastic group of highly motivated and highly friendly athletes, as to why John Burroughs always have and always will provide some of the best athletes in the state and indeed the country. After a typical school day we attended such sites as the San Andreas fault line, The Hollywood Hills and the beaches of Santa Barbara and Malibu. Of course you can’t visit ‘Cali’ without going to Disneyland where we spent most of Sunday and then that evening we went to a High School American Football match. I think its fair to say that everyone thoroughly enjoyed the trip and got a good insight into other peoples cultures as we were staying with families from Mexican, Columbian, Indian and even Native American backgrounds. We made many friends more female, than male it might be said, our Irish charm seemed to go a long way and many numbers, e-mail addresses and facebooks were exchanged. This is a trip that will never be forgotten and a big thank you to all who made this trip possible especially Mr. O’Neill and Mr. McCafferty who even rented a car for us when we needed lifts.
Senior Captain, David Murphy