School Visits in Holland
The third year of our project began with school visits in the Netherlands before the start of the Second International Conference in autumn 2005. As there is no Dutch school in our Theme Group "Youth in Relation", we were invited by Joyce and Suzan from Alkwin Kollege, Uithoorn, and their teacher Michel Heemskerk to spend a few days with them and to visit their school.
Lukas und Marco
Marco and Lukas 		Lukas and Marco, who had been elected by their classmates to represent PORG Volders, were quite surprised to find a school with over 1300 students. Indeed, the two brand new buildings, Banana 1 and 2, resemble the new annex of our school a lot more than our 300-year-old building. We could take part in some lessons and were shown the state-of-the-art equipment of the school – and we could see how many bicycles are parked in front of a Dutch school!

But those days included a lot more and really showed Dutch hospitality at its best! Here some comments from the two boys:
Marco, "Joyce and Suzan did a great job organizing such an interesting programme for us. Visiting their school, going to the windmills, seeing typical Dutch villages and the fascinating city of Amsterdam – they arranged a perfect stay for us, which is even more impressive as they had no backing from their school! Thank you so much!" Suzan, Celeste, Laura, Joyce
With Suzan, Celeste, Laura and Joyce at the reception of Alkwin College
students from Italy, Austria, Netherlands
A French lesson with students from Italy, Austria and the Netherlands 		Lukas, "When I was told that I could go to the Netherlands because two other students had dropped out, I could not believe it and was very happy. Now that I am back home, I can only say thank you to my host family: you have a big heart and made our stay a magnificent experience by showing us so many things of Holland. The only thing I could not get used to during my stay was the weather which kept changing every minute..."
The days with Joyce in Zevenhoven also gave Lukas and Marco the possibility to work out a presentation for the conference at Noordwijk later that week.
Sightseeing
Sightseeing with the teachers 		Together with Celeste and Laura from our partner school in Turin, who were staying with Suzan close by, they planned the necessary steps to show the findings of our Theme Group.
A power-point-presentation was developed and a nice poster, both giving an impression of what had been achieved by "Youth in Relation" since the last conference at Salzburg back in 2004.