Blogs, Participant Stories

Jan writes from Doswell, VA where he works in an amusement park

Indeed, W’n'T is great thing.

(Jan is participating in the Work & Travel program with Self-Arranged Job, it’s his 3rd summer in America) Not only to make some money, but to meet some new cultures and ideas. USA is intercultural, as it is, but still one can found even more multicultural places. That’s why I keep coming back to same place.

I am working at family amusement park in Virginia. And with me about 300 students from all over world. Well, that is changing from year to year, but in general you can always found people from Turkey, Philippines, Ukraine, Moldova, Colombia, Jordan. This year up to 20 nationalities, I guess, and we all live in one dorm. Place sucks, but it was not always like that: I remember parties till 5 everyday and all that comes with them. This year rules has changed to worse, but if you wanna have fun, you’ll have fun. Simple as it sounds, there are people that came for fun, not for money.

Including me. I work as ride operator at small kiddie roller-coaster and 3 circle rides and I kinda like it. I can have fun while working with kids and I can work pretty slowly, not giving a hack what anybody say. I make decent hours, last 2 weeks was 97 hours. But they are people making more than 12 hours a day. Well, I better don’t care about hours – going sleep after 3 AM everyday is quite tiring, so I don’t mind if I go home after 6 or less hours of work.

We live in nice dorm, so-called prison, surrounded by nothing and a lot of mosquitos. And the most exciting thing we can do is going Walmart. Well, we got pool near, and they make trips for us: like Washington DC, VA beach, Atlantic city, NY and so on… Not bad at all. One can also rent a car, or have a good american friend with one. We also got ride-nights, where one can enjoy park attractions, grill days and so on. Anyway, you can go to park on your dayoff and ride all rides and waterworks.

Like everywhere, all depends on you: wheter you will have enough of hours, enough of fun, enough of whatever + some free tickets to park, who’s gonna visit me? ;]

[This is Jan's 3rd summer in America through APEX Foundation. He participated in Work and Travel USA with Job Placement during the first summer and now is participating in the Work & Travel program with Self-Arranged Job for the 2nd time. His brother participated through us 3 times too and his sister once.]