19. Angloville 1: the dumpling days

Angloville is a company that runs immersive courses in English, specifically for people who have a goodish grasp of the language, but need to improve their confidence, fluency or pronunciation. So you spend several days with them, do various exercises, and English is to be spoken at all times. Simples. As a way to do some volunteering whilst on the move around Europe, it sounds great.

So we sign up for two weeks and trolley off to High Tatras, in Slovakia. We’ve been offered a hotel room which we’ve decided to accept, as our friend Dory will be turning up on Thursday from the UK. She’ll have OUR RV, Georgie, all to herself, and can recover from her fairly strenuous travels in peace.

Hotel Montfort

What a place. What a view. The ‘chalet’ next door belongs to the President. Our room is great, the bed is comfortable, and the blinds are good and dark. We have a balcony with a view of the Tatras (and foxes skipping over the lawn from the woods), and the pool, spa, and a games room are downstairs. Well, colour me happy.

Day one – Sunday

At one pm Steve and I are in the lobby, as the bus pulls in. There are a lot of people as two groups will be running in tandem: an adult group and a kids group. We’ve offered to do either, but they say we are WAY TOO OLD to work with the kids – cut off age for volunteers is thirty-five. So that’s us told.

We mill around and introduced ourselves to people. I actually feel a bit shy, but Steve is off like a Cuban Ambassador. Every time I turn around he is animatedly talking to another pretty woman. So, after a few fairly stilted conversations, I go and join him and am introduced to The Blonde.

‘Oh my God, this is crazy, right?’, she gushes, with a sexy accent, and at a speed that I didn’t realise was possible, especially in a second language. We may have got her entire life history in about twenty seconds, which is some achievement as a lot of the words are ‘fuck’. But she is fabulous, and I adore her, and we get on like a house on fire.

At lunch we are instructed to sit at mixed tables – two native speakers to two programme participants – and afterwards we are given an intro to the programme. As I walk into the room wearing my swanky lanyard (always wanted one of those) I’m told I’ve already been requested as a mentor. Oh yes; by whom?

‘There’s my mentor’, yells The Blonde, with a dazzling smile, and actually jumps out of her seat as if I am George Clooney covered in chocolate.

Steve gets allocated Mr Muscles, a physiotherapist with a shy demeanour and a good sense of humour. A promising start, I think. Bang on.

One-on-ones

A large part of the week consists of fifty minutes conversation, on various topics, with a single individual. My first is easy as I have Mrs Fit-and-Fabulous, and the topic is all who are you/what do you do/why are you here/what do you hope to achieve? and then it is dinner time.

Day two – Monday

Mentor meetings

The first exercise every morning is to spend fifty minutes tutoring our mentees. They are all required to give a presentation on the coming Thursday afternoon, and so the first order of business is to decide on a topic. It can be anything they like.

The Blonde wants to talk about what she’s learned in her life, (‘I was very stupid young girl, so fucking stupid, you know? But now I am smarter’) in the twin mediums of speed-talking and pop songs. Fine by me. We rehearse Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fu-un, and Queen’s We Are The Champions. I teach her It’s Been A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles (‘who?’ she asks) and we find a way to squeeze in some Jessie J. This teaching lark rocks.

Group work

The day’s schedule of one-on-ones and group activities gives us a break just after lunch, but then carries on until 7.30 in the evening. In the group work we have to imagine ourselves shipwrecked on a desert island, with only a specific selection of tools washed up on the beach to help us. Do we stay on the island or try to build a raft?

My group opts to leave, another group chooses to start a new community. The Blonde’s group decides to stay – but be very depressed about it. So much so that they call their patch of rock, The Island of Kill Yourself, and it features a particularly high cliff that is the designated place for kill yourself.

Dinner

By dinnertime everyone is starting to flag. Lunch was a weird soup that genuinely looked like dishwater, followed by one chicken drumstick and a teacup of rice: none of your five-a-day fruit and veg here. We’re all looking forward to a really good meal.

On the table are small glasses of some pinkish fruit juice with half a dozen bits of tinned fruit cocktail dolloped in. I peer closely: the strawberries (?) are a mauve-grey. I down that in ten seconds and wait. Eventually my plate arrives and on it are five beige-coloured things the size of plums, sprinkled with – yes, it definitely is icing sugar.

I’ll say that again: my main course is sprinkled with icing sugar.

I cut open the beige things to find, I don’t know – possibly rhubarb, or some kind of jam? I eat one, and am none the wiser. But they’re not very nice, and I can’t eat any more of them, and that’s it – meal over.

I look over to the next table. One of the volunteers is a highly educated and intellectual guy who speaks five languages. He is also a vegetarian. And I don’t eat desserts, he tells me, looking very hungry and rather dazed from the strains of the day.

And then I realise there is uproar all around me. The Blonde is absolutely appalled at the quality of the food. She is paying a great deal of her own money to do this course, and she’s embarrassed that her country is showing itself in such a bad light to the native speakers.

And she isn’t alone. Nearly everybody is complaining, especially the younger lads. Not enough protein is a big problem with regard to energy levels – especially for the young people who have a much more active course. The lack of fruit and veg is also causing it’s own difficulties.

Meetings go on all night, and we are assured that something will be done about it. Steve and I head off to our room and ransack the mini-bar.

Day three – Tuesday

Food is the topic of the day. All day. Discussions are still raging and emails are flying back and forth to Angloville head office. Most of the participants have threatened to pull out, and demand full refunds unless they are given decent food. We’re just volunteers, so don’t have much in the way of bargaining power, but it seems they are taking it seriously.

We each get a mail saying that from now on, the portions of meat will be increased from 130g to 150g per person. Well, be still my beating heart.

And there’ll be fruit bowls.

And even sandwiches if we need them (though we never see these).

We are also encouraged to consider that the local cuisine will obviously be unfamiliar to us, and to give it a try before passing judgement. My judgement is that it seems to be the locals that are the most pissed off about it.

At lunchtime, The Blonde and all the other participants who’ve complained are segregated off into a private dining room. They have food from the very nice hotel menu, complete with wine and beer and anything they want.

I’m not sure who is to blame for our obviously penny-pinching menu – the hotel, or the Company – and I don’t really care. People do their best, and sometimes they fuck up. That’s life. But it must be said that the people with pull get really good food that week.

We are still in the dining room, though, when they bring out bowls of fruit. We have to fight our way through a stampede of teenagers to grab a kiwi fruit and an unripe banana. The Intellectual is given a tuna salad. When he says – again– that he is a vegetarian, they exchange the tuna for a bowl of iceberg lettuce with two olives – two! – and a piece of feta cheese the size of a Xmas postage stamp. Well, that’s him sorted then.

Day four – Wednesday

By now, we’ve all adjusted to the routine and have started to make some  good friends. The food has been a little better and we’re feeling much more rested. So we decide to walk to Poland. As you do. Apparently, it’s not far away, possibly two or three miles, and some fresh air seems like a good idea.

We’re nearly there when we discover a little shop, just twenty metres from the bridge that forms the border. And in that little shop are all the essentials that the locals need, i.e. booze, and lots of it, major stocks of Haribo, some crisps, some fags, and a lot of products made from cannabis.

Mrs Fit-and-Fabulous introduces us to the local tipple, which is a kind of brandy made from tea. I think Tetley’s are missing a trick because this stuff is lovely. And can be up to 72% proof. It’s called Tatratea and I’m drinking it now, as a matter of fact. If my spelling goes all to pot, that will be why.

So we never get to Poland, but giggle and weave our way back to the hotel in time for another crappy lunch.

Negotiations and telephone sessions

As part of the programme, there are several structured exercises that are likely to be the most useful to the participants. For Negotiations I am paired up with a rather voluptuous woman with a permanent smile and bedroom eyes. Ever so nice. She is given instructions to ask me for a raise, while I’m instructed to offer incentives, and other bonuses instead. Thus the negotiations ensue. The Voluptuous One kicks off: –

‘I vant more money. You give me.’

Me – ‘Well I’m afraid I’m not authorised to offer more than another ten thousand. How do you feel about that?”

‘No!’ Wait, what? Where’s that smile gone? ‘I vant twenty thousand. You give me now.’

‘Er, how do you feel about more holidays and a bonus-scheme linked to performance, with a review in two years?’

‘NO!!!! I VANT MORE MONEY. YOU GIVE ME! I AM PERFECT.’ 

You get the gist. This goes on for some time, and then I fire her. The Voluptuous One says this is fine, as she’ll just go and work for our competitor across the road.

I fare no better in the Telephone Sessions. These are conversations held back-to-back, so that the participants get no clues from your facial expression. The scenario supplied is about a child being disciplined by the school, for cheating on an exam. My job is to phone the parent and call them in to discuss the action to be taken.

Of course, I’m paired with Supermum. Her response: –

‘My child would never do such a thing, I can’t believe it, you must be wrong.’ Puts the phone down.

So I really need dinner to be good.

Dinner again

And it’s dumplings again! Oh whoopeedoo.

This time there are more of them as we’ve been promised bigger portions. And these are filled with poppy seeds, so a black sludge forms across your plate when you cut into them. Honestly, I can’t even manage one this time. So I crack. I grab the proper menu and order some Bruschetta and get it stuck on our bill.

Steve sees me eating it and tells his neighbour, ‘Oh, my wife will share that with me’. No, she bloody won’t, get your own. Don’t know if he does. Don’t care.

Day five – Thursday

This is the day that everyone does his or her presentation. The Blonde and I have made masks, which I hold up at appropriate moments in her story. I have it on tape, so if anybody wants to see how brilliant she is, and how I completely mess up by picking up the wrong ones, just ask. But I am very, very proud of her.

Steve’s chap, Mr Muscles, does a demonstration of physio on The Intellectual. He gets a bit carried away by the interest of the audience, and keeps showing more and more poses and holds. At one point he has his finger jabbed into a pressure point on The Intellectual’s neck, and is searching for the right English words to describe how this allows the muscle to loosen. However, he takes way more time than is comfortable, because, after a while, The Intellectual’s eyes start to pop a bit and he keeps saying OW! louder and louder. The Voluptuousone, also a physiotherapist, moves her chair closer to the front, ready to intervene if necessary.

Party time

That night, everyone is in a great mood. My friend has arrived from the UK and is playing foosball with Mr Muscles and The Blonde.

The Voluptuous One is steadily filling our glasses with wine, and having a nice chat with Steve about his recovery from his heart bypass, twenty years ago. At one point, she rips his t-shirt up and runs her elegant fingers over his scar, checking out his levels of scar tissue, (so she says). Then she suddenly notices his nipples had gone hard (the room is cold, ok?), and shrieks with laughter. I think it made her day. Might have made Steve’s too, I’m not enquiring too closely. Later on I’m so drunk I try to open Georgie with my car keys for nearly ten minutes.

Day six – Friday

On our last day we have a few one-to-one sessions, some feedback paperwork, and lots of sad goodbyes. It was a fabulous time and I count myself very privileged to have been there. These are just some of the guys who made it great.


1 Like