First, I have to say that the whole excursion was an unforgettable and fun experience – but it would not have been that much fun for me if it hadn’t been for the group dynamics. Probably everyone of us had been on a trip with a tourist party or a school class before. The experience you often make with events that involve a bigger number of people is that everybody gathers in little clusters of maybe four or five people and sticks with the same people for the duration of the whole trip. The result of that is that you often don’t even know the names of most of the participants. When we had the two pre-excursion meetings in May and in June, everybody seemed excited maybe saw a couple of familiar faces but basically kept to his or her own friends. The meetings were fun, you talked to some people you didn’t know before, but still I would never have thought that the group would work out as it did.

When we started from Siegen I was surprised that there were actually a lot of faces I hadn’t really noticed before. Naturally on the way to York everybody still performed the usual “group-formation”, but already the first night at Halifax Halls made everybody grow a little closer and during the next days it seemed as if everybody connected with people they didn’t know before. Of course not EVERYBODY took part in EVERY activity, but there were always some of us representing “the Germans in Yorkshire” whether we were exploring the North Yorkshire Moors, visting the Bront?s, dancing at “The Gallery”, or singing (or rather bawling) our heads off on the bus or the ferry. To me our group was the best it could possibly have been, from the “average student” to the student coordinators, to Cathy and Phil. Round of applause for ourselves!!