February 2005

For Thinking Day this year Brown Owl asked us all to dress up in the traditional costume of a country we’d visited and give a little talk about it. Genie and I decided straight away to team up and talk about our fab day trip to France on the Eurotunnel train…

Genie’s parents had taken us on the train as a special treat and it was the most fantastic, amazing, super cool day ever!

Brown Owl said each talk should last no more than five minutes, but Genie and I were allowed 10 as we were doing ours together. Still, we weren’t sure we could cram all the exciting things we wanted to say into 10 minutes.

There was the train trip itself, trying to speak French, shopping and working out how much the Euro coins and notes were worth… Ten minutes just didn’t seem long enough!

Anyway, Mum said Genie could come back to ours for tea after school on Wednesday so we could plan what we were going to do. Genie really wanted to tell everyone all the French words she’d learned and talk about tasting traditional French food – including snails and frogs legs – at the hypermarket (that’s like a huge supermarket). Yeugh!

I just couldn’t decide what to say so Genie suggested I did something about shopping and French money.

Before we left England we had to change all our money into Euros. Most countries in Europe use them now so it makes it easy for people when they go abroad. But we still have pounds so we have to swap ours before we go.

And it’s pretty tricky trying to work out how much something costs. Mrs. MacTaggart – that’s Genie’s mum – told me that if something cost three Euros then that was about two pounds, but I still got a bit confused!

Once we’d written down what we wanted to say, we sorted out a few photographs to show everyone and some of our souvenirs to take along. Genie had bought a pencil sharpener in the shape of the Eiffel Tower – that’s a really famous tower in the centre of Paris – and I had a little pair of binoculars that showed pictures of France when you clicked a button.

Then mum came in with some squash and biscuits and said: “So what are you going to wear then?”

Oh no! We hadn’t thought of that! What was traditional French costume like? All the people there looked pretty much like us!

If you want to find out more about Brownies and Guides in your local area why not visit their excellent web site:

www.girlguiding.org.uk