It was an early start of 3am today, waking ourselves up with cold showers to get us going for the day. Bulking up with several layers and all wearing our much needed beanies, we headed to the Dawn Service at Polygon Wood and arrived at 4.30am. The ceremony did not actually start until 6am but we had to get a front row spot. The service started with the brass band coming through the hundreds of graves that surrounded us. Although an eerie feeling we very much felt touched by being there.
Josh Casey, James Markey, Sarah Nugent and myself had the honour of laying the wreath on behalf of all schools of NSW. Josh and I were asked on behalf of Darren Mitchell, head of Veterans Affairs, to lay this wreath at this brilliant service. I know Josh and I were both very honoured to be able to have this opportunity. Many wreaths were laid including one laid by Louise Halsey, from the Blakeney Millar Foundation, on behalf of the people of New South Wales. The service went for about 45 minutes, including welcomes by the New Zealand and Australian ambassadors, prayers from a local reverend, songs such as Amazing Grace sung by 3 female defence force personnel, the last post and of course the 1 minute silence. Once the service had concluded all guests were invited to take a cross joined to a poppy and place it on a grave of one of the soldiers. This was a touching moment as we placed them on the unknown soldiers of Australia. We were also provided with breakfast after the ceremony.
After the dawn service we took the bus back to our hostel as many of us needed some sleep, living off only 3 hours sleep the night before for some of us! So, from 8.30am till 11am we had time to catch up on some sleep or pack our bags as today was our last full day overseas!
At 11.15am we headed to the Technisch Immaculata Institut to meet up with our Ieper friends again. We started by having lunch in their school cafeteria, which was very nice. After that we headed up stairs and we shared slide shows about “Where We Come From”. This was very interesting and we found out many facts about Belgium!
When that finished, the teachers then explained our next task. This was a Murder Case and we had to solve it! We got into groups of 4; 2 being Australian and 2 being Belgium students. This helped us mingle a bit more with one another. In this task we had to walk around the whole town and we were given hints as to where our next clues were. We were giving 3 hours to complete it and it did in fact take this long to do! In the end we met up and gave in our final answers……. And…… not one group got the correct answer!! So instead of one group winning the prize we all shared a chocolate dog. Very Yummy.
Once that was over we headed back to the school’s gymnasium to have some more bonding time! The Ieper kids started by showing us their “traditional” dance which was lots of fun, and we shared many laughs and smiles. Then we had a bit of a sing along with Mr Rand, including songs such as ‘I Like To Eat’ and ‘Long Tall Texan’, this was funny as the songs are so silly! But we all loved it.
Then Andrew Wortes was asked to show the girls and boys his magical singing talent. He sang ‘The A Team’ and ‘Wonderwall’ which were both very good. This took us up to 5pm and this is the time the students finish school so we said our goodbyes and will be catching up with them again tomorrow morning.
We then strolled to our dinner at Ariane, a local restaurant. We also had tea here the night before. Tonight we were served a cucumber soup for entrée, and a creamy mushroom, veal and rice meal for the main. Dinner was very good. As we were all exhausted we decided to head back the hostel so we could pack our bags and have some rest time!
We are very sad that the trip has come to an end, but we are also very excited as we get to come home to little old Tumut or Adelong and see our much missed family and friends.
See you Sunday afternoon after our 22 hour flight and 5 hour bus trip to get home!
Brooke.
