Thank you to everyone for reading, sharing and supporting Following the Equator in 2009. We sure enjoyed posting great stories, facts, tips and profiles about educational travel and the group leaders who make it possible.
We're already planning some exciting new things for 2010. Most of all, though, we want to hear from you. What do you want to read and see on this blog—more interviews with teachers, more amazing travel photos, more fundraising and recruiting ideas, more tidbits about the things to see and do on tour? Let us know at equator@ef.com.
As we look ahead to an exciting year of travel in 2010, we thought we'd take a quick look back at a successful 2009 and our 10 favorite blog posts of the year. Feel free to post your own comments below.
We Americans come from a big, powerful and influential country, to say the least. As if being a big (No. 3 in population) and wealthy (No. 1 economy) weren't enough, we've also managed to have a disproportionately large world influence culturally. It’s like Goliath becoming the planet’s most popular TV-show host.
It's long been too easy for us Americans to be content to gaze a bit too admiringly at our own navels when it comes to our world view; this dulls our appreciation of how much of our everyday lives is provided to us by other countries that are often half a world away.
As part of the 2009 Geography Awareness Week Blog-a-thon, hosted by National Geographic's My Wonderful World Campaign, this blog post required us to boil down, to a list of just 10, the things that Americans should know about their world. It seems to us that the best use of these 10 is to help close the gaps we may have in fully appreciating our daily interdependence with the wider world.
Imagine celebrating New Year's with the Moai on Easter Island or floating in the Dead Sea or snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef.
Many of EF's experienced group leaders won't just be imagining those dream travel experiences in 2010, they'll be living them.
EF's Teacher Convention Tours—offered through our Global Rewards program—give experienced EF Group Leaders unprecedented opportunities to explore the world's most amazing destinations with fellow educators.
There is still plenty of time for EF Group Leaders* to enroll on our 2010 convention tours. There are 10 different tours, including three over this New Year's, one in January and six next July:
With 15 EF tours and nine convention tours under her belt, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Carolyn Sanders, a physical education teacher at Bill Reed Middle School in Loveland, Colorado, has visited 40 countries with EF.
Besides traveling to every continent (yes, she used her EF Global Points to take a trip to Antarctica!), she’s also met some of her closest friends through EF.
In the Group Leader Spotlight, Carolyn recaps some of her favorite travel adventures and talks about how she and some other EF Group Leaders once created their own EF convention to Thunder Bay, Canada.
Cinco de Mayo will be celebrated in Mexico—and countries around the world—on Monday. The festive holiday honors Mexican pride and heritage, but it is not Mexico's Independence Day, which is celebrated on September 16.
Instead, Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Mexican victory—under the command of General Ignacio Zaragoza—over Napoleon III's French forces in the Battle of Puebla, southeast of Mexico City, on May 5, 1862.
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