A Productive Summer Abroad: My CTR Experience

September 9, 2012
By: Ozel Rowland

Walking through the cobbled streets of a place I’d just encountered, I was soaking up the romantic atmosphere that is so typically presented in the racks of postcards outside awaiting tourist shops. Pink-stoned Renaissance town houses complemented the warm tinted skyline and rustic artisan bakeries and boutiques sidelined the streets. Secret passageways entwined in the nooks of the district. It was all so beautiful. I was enjoying my first day here in the Old City of Lyon with my new found friends who I’d met a couple of hours before.

We were exploring, or conducting some research, if you like, ready to embark on a 3 week travel writing project with City Travel Review. Our mission, after all, was to produce a travel brochure.

City Travel Review is a small, independent company that offer study/gap programmes combining creative and travel writing with language learning. Madrid, Berlin, and Edinburgh are just some of the locations their projects take place. It’s perfect for budding writers as well as anyone wishing to brush up on their language skills and discover a new culture. It also generally makes for a productive summer.

During weekdays we would have French lessons. We had a few organised group trips like a tour around the city and a trip to the Euro News HQ, but really the project was about  writing about our own experiences and gathering our own research on Lyon. So we explored, we wrote, but most of all, we had fun and with the help of a small team of professional writers and teachers we were guided on how to produce our articles successfully in the style of a travel writer.

The 3 weeks had flown by and by the end of the project all our hard work had virtually materialized into the form of an e-book.  It was a proud moment for all of us.

So what can I tell you about Lyon? Well it’s the second largest city in the France, the Gastronomic capital of the world, and with its rather diverse historical and topographical setting, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The rest you’ll just have to read in the brochure!

Au revoir!

Website sourced: http://www.citytravelreview.co.uk/