Guest Post on Angloville

Readers of my former blog, http://www.yourtravelwriter.blogspot.com, may recall a post about a group known as http://www.angloville.com. It is a company that offers a week or shorter periods of free room and board to native English speakers in Eastern Europe. In return, the Anglos must converse with locals who are trying to improve their English.

My friend Allie McGovern recently sampled this program in Poland and the Czech Republic and sends the following report.

"I spent back-to-back week-long seminars outside Krakow and a few hours from Prague. This program sounded too good to be true when I read about in Margaret's blog, but in fact it was as good as the Website promises. At one hotel we had a view of the snow-capped Tatra Mountains, at the other we stayed in a renovated castle in Bohemia. The food quality trailed off mid-week in both places, but no one left to eat out.

"The seminars were well-run by two coordinators in each locale. Every day we broke into groups of two, one Anglo and one local, and later into larger teams to role play, solve problems or just talk. The secret to the success of these seminars is that they bring out the English the locals already know and force them to actually use it.

"Most of the locals were mid-level professionals or owned their own businesses. The native English-speakers were mostly post-college travellers who were staying abroad as long as possible. They came from nearly every English-speaking country on the map. There was an age gap, a social gap and a status gap between the two groups, but by the end of the week this didn't seem to matter.

"For me, it was all about the locals. Especially in one of the seminars, the locals were particularly dynamic and driven to get the most out of their experience. Initially the locals hesitated to say more than the minimum and stuck to subjects they knew well, but by the time each of them gave presentations on a subject of their choice to the entire group, there was a sea change. Speaking about things of personal interest, they stretched their English and in some cases presented multi-media reports and involved the audience. What I'll remember most about Angloville is the laughter; in one of the seminars, most of us bonded at the first dinner and there was easy laughter around the restaurant thereafter.

"I chose the week-long adult programs; there are shorter programs and ones for adolescents. One guy had volunteered at Angloville 19 times, proof that you can come more than once. They also offer a TEFL program for new teachers.

"If Eastern Europe doesn't interest you, there are similar programs in Spain and Germany, through http://www.vaughantown.com and http://www.diverbo.com."

This sounds like a good way to visit some interesting countries at minimal cost and make some new friends. And I should point out that my friend, like me, is long past the usual post-college age.