1. 2nd meeting: London, UK 20-24/11/2013
Our second Comenius project meeting took place in London, England with a great help of our
hosts from Ranelagh Primary School. It was a wonderful five-day experience, led by our well
known project philosophy – making European space better, through dialog and exchange of
cultural richness.
Day 1 – arrival. We found a temporary home in Stratford, from where we visited daily our
host school, a primary school with the student age from 3 to 12 years old; that is up to the
level six. Since we come from high school, it was a wonderful opportunity for our teachers
and students to engage in conversation with the little one, who surprised us with their
confidence and eagerness to participate in the Comenius Programme.
Day 2 – official introduction to Ranelagh Primary School. We met their head teacher and
many of the teachers working with different level of students. After proper English
refreshments (tea and biscuits) we started our project presentations. Every school prepared a
PowerPoint presentation about their traditional food in autumn period, presented by the
students. We showed a great diversity between each country in preparing an autumn dish.In
the afternoon we took a wonderful walk across the Tower Bridge, with the magnificent view
of the Tower of London, before heading to a traditional British pub for some traditional food.
Day 3 – tour of Borough Market. The group visited historic food market where we could
sample many types of traditional English meal ingredients, especially home-made chutneys
and musters. Of course, there can’t be an English meal without tea – and we had an
opportunity to hear some interesting information about different types of tea from an Indian
tea producer.
In the afternoon we were surprized with a food tasting event that was organized in our host
school. We found out it was an annual celebration of cultural diversity amongst students, and
that their parents prepared all the tradition food. There were samples of food from Somalia to
Albania. It was wonderful to see so many people of different cultural and racial backgrounds
all joined together in such a lovely event.
Day 4 - tour of London’s top sites. We took the Tube to Green Park and from there walked
by famous places like the Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Downing
Street, Trafalgar and Leicester Square. We ended the walk by the London Eye where we took
a boat trip all the way to Greenwich. This part of London, famous for its Royal Observatory
and the prime meridian, was also the place where we tasted our first Fish and Chips since we
had arrived in London.
After lunch, we had time to visit Greenwich market with its craft stands and vintage clothing
shops. We even found a shop that sells home-made fudge, yet another English tradition. In the
evening, we had our last big dinner on Historic Brick Lane. There was Indian food on the
menu with different types of appetisers and different tastes of curry. Again, the emphasis was
on tradition Indian food, which has made a great impact on how the British perceive food.
Day 5 – departure day. We left London with the prospects of returning once again.

2. Report from the teachers’ meeting
Participants: 10 countries represented by their coordinators and/or teachers
Meeting agenda
1) Project development
2) Meeting in Hungary
3) Instructions about making a presentation
1) The project activities so far include: creating the Comenius Corner, making a poster
describing traditional food of each country, creating and working on the web page,
writing articles about our project.
Every participant is encouraged to work on their individual tasks, related to the topic.
2) Meeting in Hungary, set in March 2014, will be our third Comenius meeting.
The task for this meeting is to create a PowerPoint presentation about food
traditionally eaten in the winter holiday season. The emphasis is on the research, so
the students need to collect ideas from sources other than the Internet.
In regard to organization of the meeting, the groups will be staying in the school
dormitory for the whole time.
3) We were given some useful advice about oral presentations.
Colleague Petra Šala, math and IT teacher from Croatia, gave the group some useful
pointers about making a PowerPoint presentation interesting and fresh, in the time
frame we agreed upon.
Project coordinator,
Dubravka Štiglić, Croatia