IcelandFINAL

Welcome to Iceland. Before our guest arrived to Bolungarvík we had booked them a sightseeing tour around the Golden Circle, one of our most famouos tourist attraction.
First we had a short welcoming celebration, our guest were welcomed with short speaches and songs from our younger students. After an international introduction each country had their own presentation. Since this was the first meeting, the topic was „your country, your school“. The danish team told us all about their beautiful new school, which our students fell in love with when they visited Varda last year.
The luxembourgish team told us a lot about their schoolsystem, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and their tourist attractions.
We got to know the German schoolsystem and Hamborg the city. We found it very interesting that theyhave goats in their school garden, some of us had never seen goats before.
The czeck republic informed us about their school system and their most popular touristplaces.
Like the others the spanish team told us about their schoolsystem and tourist attractions. They also told us about some traditional spanish disches, like paella, which we love.
Finally told the Icelandic team you all about Iceland, our town, our schoolsystem and the most popular tourist attractions. Two of our girls were dressed in two kind of the Icelandic national costume to show you. Today we only use them on special occations but in the old days this was daily outfit for the women. They even milked the cows wearing this costume.
The headquarters of Innovation Center Iceland is in Reykjavík, but they have seven others work locations spread around Iceland. One of them is in Isafjörður. The innovation center offers support and facilities to start-up companies working on innovative business ideas. We got three staffmembers to come and give mini lectures about entrepreneurship and the Fab –lab. The teachers were invited to visit the Fab lab and see what they are doing there. The Center also helped our students later in the project and the group visited the Center to get more familiar with the idea of their job.
First our teacher Sossa came and talked about social entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many others. Then we split into international groups and had to create our own social entrepreneur. There were many great ideas about soical entrepreneurship. We created entrepreneurs who were going to change the school system in china, have some political influence in north korea and teach music to children in mumbai to help their selfconfidence. This work was very interesting and fun, especially because we got to know each other better and had to comunicate in English.
After all the hard work we also had some interesting places to visit. First we showed our guests the natural history museum wich has a large amount of birds and The museum is dedicated to SteinnEmilsson, a geologist that was for a long time the principal of the elementary school in Bolungarvik. His rock collection is the biggest part of the rock display of the museum. Next we visited the maritime museum. The museum contains a double 19th century fishing base, salt hut, fish drying area and drying hut. Among the pieces displayed there is the rowboat Ölver that gives a good idea of the kind of ships that were used for fishing in that time. In the museum are also for display all kinds of fishing equipment and various tools that were used for fishing and fish production in the time of the fishing base.The curator greets visitors wearing a skin suit that is similar to the one Icelandic sailors wore in that time and describes what is to see there.
Later that night some of the students went rapelling and had alot of fun. Other went swimming or visited our youth center, well there is not much to do in our small town during the winter time.
On the Wednesdaynight, we all got together in our community hall.Everybody took part in organising this evening. The town invited us to celebrate in the communityhall free at charge....
Our parents prepared different traditional icelandic dishes plus popular dishes.
Our parents alsohelped us cleaning and tidying afterwards
We had some entertainment, both former students and members of the Comenius group sang and played musical instrument.
In the end there was a disco which we think nobody will forget because of our famous Gangnam style dance which by the way made it to the Icelandic social media.Taking part in a project like this is very important for our small isolated town. It’s not always easy to travel to or from our town like the one of you who came to Bolungarvik November 2012 got to know and we always have to organize two extra days for the travelling to and from our town to Keflavik where the international airport is. But it is all worth it because the project gives us so much.
In the end we would like to show you a short video we have made where we talk to students, teachers and parents about their Comenius experience and which benefits it has to take part in a Comenius project.