OUR DIARY By Dilan and Myriam

Let's start the trip ! Thursday, October 30th,8 pm, we've just arrived in Istanbul, wow ! What a huge city ! Looks like the United States, with those yellow taxis, the big roads and the big commercials everywhere in and around the airport ! The air smells already Turkish, we've just went off the plane and I'm feeling like a star, walking in those new streets, where everyone is looking at me, like if I was the only important person in Istanbul ! I can pretend being Turkish, fitting perfectly in the Turkish background, thanks to my Arab origins, but my fascination betrayed me, it's shown on my face that I don't come from there ! Sometimes I feel like a fool, looking at those new things that I don't know, like a kid in front of a new toy !

Actually, the real trip begins here, when we start discovering all those new things. I went there without any prejudices, but it's funny the way we can't stop thinking about the prejudices we made or we heard before coming, and try to compare with the reality ! The one who said that travelling is worthy for the youth and very useful for the mind's opening was the rightest one ! I just felt like I had to erase all I had in my mind, and re-learn to live, because I was with new people, and I don't think that If I make it towards my own habits, I will get on well with the new people there ! And that's the magic of the trip, when we go to know other people, we learn with it a lot of new others things, like the customs, the habits, the lifestyle of Turkish people for example... And we also learn how the people see us, see our lifestyle, and maybe, thanks to that, we can take a new look at ourselves, and think twice before making prejudices about everyone's way of life Myriam

A new trip to France! I had been to France before, earlier in my life, but this time everything was going to be different. I could feel that the weather was different since I had only come to France in the summer. My destination was different too. But that wasn’t it. I could sense the sun on the mountains and the clear air telling me how exciting this was going to be and knowing that this was going to be a new big experience made everything even more exciting. I got off at the airport in Lyon and got on a bus with all my friends and teachers. Everyone was very excited, not knowing how their correspondents and their families would act to us. The noisy group of excited high school students had suddenly turned into a herd of silence lambs. It wasn’t hard to guess why. Everyone was excited and worried that their familywouldn’t speak English and they couldn’t speak a word of French.

. Apparently, this wasn’t true at all. We could speak more French than we could have ever imagined. It was my first student exchange so I was worried that living with a family other than mine would be difficult and I wouldn’t be able to communicate. But all our fears in our thoughts just vanished when we saw our families waiting for us with searching, impatient eyes and they turned into happy thoughts of what we would do next when we saw their smiles and hugs. Living the trip ! Dilan

Second day in Istanbul, and I’m still excited like it was the first day ! I understand nothing at all, but fortunately there is the French and the English language with us ! Everyone of us was now in every family, and we were all impatient to see each other again to talk about how we felt the first time we went in the families ! According to our discussions, it was such an exciting thing ! Even if we were all scared at first about our behaviour in their home, if we behaved well to them… It was very cool because it was funny the way we tried our best to get used with the family ! We didn’t feel foreigners anymore, we even wanted to stay more in the end, the city was like it had been ours for a long time and the air became more and more familiar and we started knowing some places of Istanbul even if the city is HUGE ! Myriam

Living in Grenoble- even if it’s just for a short time… Here we are in Grenoble at last and with our host families. I felt very welcomed here from the first moment that we came here. The freezing air and the sun rising from the mountains make us realize that we’re in a different place now. It was the first morning and we met our friends in front of the school. We were all excited to tell our friends what we had done last night and what our observations were. We attended some lessons and realized that the school as well as the education system was very different from ours. The tramway that took us everywhere around Grenoble was fascinating to me. We only had to wait a few minutes for the tramway and it took us everywhere we needed to go in a very short time. Being in a small city was very relaxing to us. There was no traffic unlike Istanbul. The last day we had our good-bye party and we couldn’t believe that we were leaving. Time had passed pretty quickly for us. Dilan

See you Istanbul ! That’s it ! The trip is over, and to celebrate it, we had a very nice party in the Turkish school ! Well actually we showed them our defilé, and in the last part of the night we had a party all together ! They made us a special dinner, and when they said goodbye to us, it was very touching because it meant the end of this projet but fortunately, only the first part of the project ! We all promised to come back, with or without the school, to see Istanbul again ! Everyone has his own way of reaction, Everyone has his own time to get adapted ! Myriam

Istanbul-Grenoble, Projet Comenius