School trip to Venice

December 14 – 17, 2006

In brief this is what happened… 26 upper sixth students (year 12) 3 teachers (Fi included), 2 GAP students, 3 ex-students and 2 randoms (Davo included) on a History trip to Venice for 4 days and 3 nights.

Fi and Davo’s main task… (since they don’t know a lot about the history of Venice) look after the students when they go out at night because they are free to drink, smoke, whatever!

Ingredients for a disaster trip OR a bloody good time?

Result…

- One kid left his passport on the plane on arrival to Venice.

- One kid got busted for drugs by sniffer dogs, but then his bag never came off the plane, lost forever, he evaded the police.

- One group of kids got the wrong water taxi from the airport and left for the hotel with no teacher and without the name of the hotel.

- One kid fell into the canal on the way home from the pub.

- One kid turned 18 and his parents gave him a fair donation to help celebrate it… it went to a bottle of absinth and rounds and rounds of shots, tequila, sambuca, cowboys, etc, etc.

- One kid came into the pub going, “Davo, Davo, you’ve gotta come and help me, this big dark Italian guy just punched me in the face, look at my eye, it’s swollen, Davo, Davo, you gotta come and help me get him!” What actually happened was he was going around asking the other students to punch him in the face, and then he would punch them back. One kid, pretty well built, hit him and dropped him!

- One kid decided he’d give Davo a new nickname – Davo Supremo Extremo.

- One ex-student and the other random got engaged.

- One gondola driver capsized his gondola which meant that our gondola had to rescue him.

- One group of male kids decided they’d have a competition to see who could kill a pigeon on the last day. Luckily no veterinary skills were required and no pigeons were killed.

- One female kid decided she needed to bring about 30kg of luggage, included 6 pairs of shoes.

And the grand finale… how Venice was flooded…

- One kid, who doesn’t drink, had one too many glasses of wine over dinner and got absolutely plastered. He was escorted home to the hotel where he was put into the care of a completely useless gappie (although we didn’t realize how useless he was at the time). Useless gappie put the kid in his room, locked the door and then went to bed for the night. Hours later water was seeping through the roof of the second floor, out the corridor and out onto the street below, because the kid had passed out in the shower with the tap running. One senior female teacher had to knock on his door for 20 minutes to get him up and he answered the door completely starkers. All the towels available in the hotel were used to mop up the mess inside, but the gallons of water covering the pavement outside were left to drain away into the canals of Venice.

It was the best school trip we’ve ever been on and we can’t wait for the next one to Madrid.