This year the Youth Travel Circle (YTC), in collaboration with St Aloysius College, gave a number of college sixth formers the opportunity to travel to Germany.
This two-week holiday was certainly an unforgettable experience. We Maltese together with about 60 other students from various countries, were residing in an ancient castle at Oberwesel, overlooking the Rhine.
Various activities, workshops and games were held daily in the castle such as a "Hollywood Night" and "Images of Our Nations."
On "Hollywood Night", students were asked to act out scenes from any favoured films or plays. Awards were later given to the students who showed above-average talent. Here, the Maltese featured prominently and made Malta proud.
"Images of our Nations" was a more formal activity whereby the students from Spain, Russia, Poland, Germany, Egypt and Malta gave the others an insight into their different cultures. A disco was organised every evening by a different contingent.
Different workshops were also set up with the aim of enhancing creativity. These workshops included the making of boomerangs, objects created out of papier-mâché, photography as well as the setting up of a newspaper.
Apart from various indoor and outdoor activities, we were also taken on different excursions to places like the spooky Rheinfels castle at night with its very low, narrow, dark and humid passageways and Cologne which is renowned for its very high Gothic cathedral. We also visited the 2,000-year-old town of Koblenz, which has picturesque landscapes of the Rhine and Moselle. It is surrounded by four low mountain ranges and also offers cultural monuments and historical buildings truly worth seeing.
We were also taken to Germany's oldest city, Trier, which boasts of being a bishop's seat as well as the cultural, traffic and economic hub of the state. Trier's has about 100,000 inhabitants.
My favourite excursions (apart from visiting the shopping malls) were those to Boppard, where we boarded a cable car for a striking view of the area from a height, and to the Haus der Geschichte. This is a highly compelling museum displaying contemporary German political, social and economic history from the end of World War Two to the present, detailing everyday living conditions and important aspects from the world of art and culture.
A big thank you to the organisers of this trip and may other youths be offered the same opportunity in the future.