Bournemouth UK

This review is dedicated to share my impressions with you about my visiting England. I have been studing in Kaplan International Colleage for 3 weeks in July. That was my first coming to UK  and I wanted to make first steps towards English culture, their traditions, conventions, lifestyle.

So I’ve decieded to spend a couple of weeks attending intensive course of English at KiCenter Bournemouth. In my opinion , if you want to visit England you have to  suffer a little bit and make a full revision of your vocabulary, grammar, work with your pronunciation in order not to stumble over words and to be self-assured. Having a good grasp of English you can definetely cope with Kaplan’s test easily and stay in a group of high intermediate or even advanced level:).

You will be studing in a group of 15 members and moreover – you will have a precise schedule of your classes and activites. For instance : if you have a general course – you are obliged to attend classes everyday (apart from Saturday and Sunday) – which last for half of the day, and for rest of the day you will have some activites (most of them are compulsory).

On Saturday you will have a full-day excursion on a bus – in my case it was travelling to London, to Bath, and on Sunday you woll have a day-off – so you can go to the citycenter with your friends or just do whatever you want. Kplan also offers an intensive courses, which I prefer more, whrere on Tuesday and on Thursday you will have clasess all day long (9:15  – 10:45 , 11 :15 – 12 :45 , 13 :45 – 15: 15, 15 :45 – 17 :15) .

In a nutshell, Bournemouth is a very popular city which attracts tourists’ from all over the world. Although, it’s situated just near English Channel it cannot be even compared with our Crimea’s climate and it rather cold and windy in Summer then bright and sunny… That because there is no steady weather in England and you can’t be sure that it won’t be drizzling after a few hours and you’ll just end up somewhere far from campus soaking wet.

Food in England is really not important issue at all!!! They don’t care about it. In Bournemouth University we used to eat pre-cooked meals such as potato with stew or beef. Not all of us liked it but I solved this problem by buying a cooking pan. After that I used to go on errand to shops like “Lidl” or “Tesco Express” or “M&S”  in order to have some ingredients to my meals:)))). Every evening I arranged a kind of a party in my house were I shared my cooking meals with friends. I considered it like a  quite a friendly atmosphere even if my mates were from different countries.

We were all in the same ship and have to “mingle” with different nationalities like Spanish, Brazilians, Swiss (depending on their destination they can speak German, french or Italian), German, Italian, etc. Although there were some Russians – there weren’t any Ukrainian at all. The bad point is that many of foreignors used to stick with their native friends everywhere. Maybe that’s because they felt uneasy and awkward having lack of practicing English.

That was a real nightmare for me to talk with some of them, cause for the first time I thought it was ok – but when I tried to chat about more difficult issues they were just starting to hasitate and close down. Plus, you after that I really felt that my speech was spoiling. I was really lucky to meet so many native speakers when I was playing tennis in near tennis club. You haven’t even thought that their pronunciation is different from what you could hear  listening in your audio books (they used to just utter some words, skipping some letters and having a fussy maner of speech). I gained lots of experience taking part in differnt types of conversations, discussions while I was on my training. I could hear their attitude to Bournemouth, discuss their food :), asking information about nearest interesting places, etc.  They really set a good example of a typical type of  the englishman.

But let’s come back to my campus life and studing there.

There is no doubt that you will be faced with a boring types of classes (like project making or studing vocabulary that you ‘ve already known) or there could be some activites that you just found a bit childish for yourself.  All I can say is that if you really desire to have some good practise of English and enrich your vocabulary significantly, and, of course, will consider it as an important deal for your future — you will reach a good result, and even keep on developing it to the highest level.

The same thing is about household and daily problems. As for these problems were  cleaners – who could just grab all my stuff from the table in kitchen. I also was shocked after shopping there cause every stuff their is quite pricy. They used to stay in a queue patiently one after another even at the bus stop. There are plenty of rules there – but  you will understand everything if you just have a look on their street’s – they are clean and roads are not as wavy as ours – they’ve got taxes for it and they’ve keep it on the same condition. I can’t really explain their mental feachers cause you should step in their shoes to be familiar with their behavior  – it ‘s so  inconsistent sometimes with their outlook that you can’t understand where you stand with them or what’s their attitude to you. They could just keep their problems to themselves and pretend that they are  contended with their present job, with their happiness. And this claiming can explain why they can be very polite in a shops, saying “I’m sorry” even if they are not to be blame, and be so closed and beetle-browed at home.

Dispite all of the negative things that I’ve just mentioned before, I ‘m pretty sure that England has some unknown magical attraction that make person to come back for no apparent reason in a future. I’m still astonished by it’s mighty and magisty. It is worth visiting.