African-Middle Eastern Week

My last national week ever. It's so sad, because the next National Week is my own, so I won't get to participate in it. It was fabulous though, a great week to end on.
It started out with a phenomenal poetry session - the best I've ever seen. They brought blankets and pillows into the lecture room and created a warm and cozy atmosphere, and served Turkish tea, and then started reciting the most amazing poetry - so powerful, so full of emotion, so beautiful... and they did something no one else has done before: they sang some of their poems, and the combination of music and poetry was gorgeous.
The taster session was great as well, it rivaled the Italian one, because though it didn't have as much food it had much more varied and exotic foods that made up for it.

And they had Arabic/African music playing, so after eating we all danced and danced:

(The Israelis have the craziest hair ever, especially when they dance!)


The next day we had the "chill-out session" when we relaxed, drank tea, smoked nargille, got massages and face masks, and generally calmed down.
And then the show. Oh so much fun.
I was partnered with Honza, and we went as a camel:

There were some other really great costumes as well:

Marco as an African Warrior


Ridhima and Joe as street beggars


Eduardo as a Jew :)


I participated in the show, doing a skit with Nevin on the cultural differences between America and Palestine. e.g. How she literally drinks Tabasco sauce, and is shocked at short skirts, how I'm not allowed to touch the Koran and how (the crowning glory of the show) we dress differently to go swimming. She came out in a full body suit, looking like a deep-sea diver, and I came out in a bikini (in front of the whole school! AAAH!). It was fun, though I got teased mercilessly afterwards.
The skits were funny, the dances were beautiful, the raps were great. And there was one really profound dance/sketch that was serious; when four people came on stage representing four major issues: Julie as a drug addict, Eitan as a prisoner, Ansally as a prostitute, and Elroy as a disabled person.

It was really touching because it reminded us that the problems that we always hear about in African and the Middle East are actually universal, that everything they have, we have as well, but to a lesser extent.

On a more upbeat note, the next week is Native Speaker Week, the one I've been waiting for since Balkan Week, oh so long ago! I'm so excited for it, we have such a great group and such fabulous ideas, it will be the best week ever!!!!

EE Show

Friday was the EE show for which we were all very excited. We kept seeing first years doing strange things around Duino, hearing loud music coming from the basement, coming up on conversations that stopped as soon as we got there, and other tell-tale signs of an upcoming show.
Our invitations were interesting - mine was, "the hairiest hair model", for example, and some others were, "The Most Colorful Butterfly", "The Scariest Mummy", "The Most Romantic Boy"
(that's Nyamka, who does a surprisingly good impression of a romantic boy...) etc. Toni (Finland) was "The Strongest Vodka", of course:

I had a violin lesson so I didn't have much time to prepare a costume, but I cornrowed half my hair and then made a row of buns in the middle and left the rest down. Slightly uncomfortable in the crowded room, but whatever.
Their show was great (not better than ours though, we still have the UWC record for greatest EE show ever :) haha) the theme was "GuinnEEs Book of World Records", hence the costumes.
They had a lot of songs with changed lyrics, like "Let It Be" turned into, "The EE" (as in, "there will be an essay, the EE....") and such, and some crazy record stuff, like a competition between a first year, a second year, and a teacher to eat the most pasta, drink water the fastest, peel an apple without breaking the skin and transport a raw egg from one bowl to another using chopsticks.

They had a great skit about the EE (Evil Essay) tormenting us poor second years who would rather be partying or drinking coffee. They/we finally defeat him by finishing the essay on time and have a great big party. Yay!

But now Axel, the Swede who played the Evil Essay, freaks me out - anyone would if he looked like that!

There were also some very sweet skits, like the paper dance where they came onstage holding pieces of paper to form out sentences like:

And at the very end they all came on stage with the name of their EE friend taped to their...ahem...bottom and invited us onto the stage to dance and hug and congratulate.
this is my EE friend (Lorenzo) and me:

They also made fantastic cake for us, which was a wonderful idea and I need to find the recipe because it was insanely good, even the tiny piece that I got and shared with my EE friend.

And afterwards Lorenzo took me to Old Castle for the first time. By strange coincidence he happened to be present at the conversation early in the year when I said, "I've never been to Old Castle, so now I want to make it a special occasion - I think I'll get my EE friend to take me when I finish my EE." So after the show he said, "So, are you ready to go to Old Castle?" I was so surprised that he knew what I was going to say before I said it!
But Old Castle was fantastic, so beautiful and ancient - it's 11th century they say - to think that we had this in Duino all this time and I'd never known...
So the EE show was fantastic, in all its elements, I love our Primi!!!!!

Vienna

Last weekend was 'Long Weekend'’, our 4-day vacation. After much trial and tribulation, manindecisionns and revisions, and a lot of looking at flight/train ticket prices, we decided to go to Vienna for three days. The group consisted of: Vanessa, Nidhi and me (the Weird Sisters)

and our first-year male companions, Nidhi's primo, Shashank, Vanessa'’s boyfriend, Bar (Israel), and my adopted primo, Lorenzo.

When we got to Vienna, we met up with my co-year, Leah, and Andrea from Brazil. So this is all of us:

We had a fabulous time. We left Saturday evening and took the night train to Vienna. We didn't get much sleep, but that was mostly our own fault, as we stayed up most of the night talking and laughing and watching a movie. When we got there, we made our way to our hostel, the Blue Corridor (you can imagine why I chose itJ), deposited our bags, and went out to explore Vienna. We went to the Schonbrunn palace of the Hapsburg emperorsgapedawped at beautiful rooms and paintings while listening to the commentary on headphones, enjoying making a running commentary on the commentary in whispers.

Then we went to the Stefansdom Cathedral, the cathedral I had marveled at last year when I went with Street Performance. If anything, it was more awe-inspiring and more beautiful than before. We sat there and looked around and talked about the art like good Art History/World Cultures students, pointing out the differences between the gothic and baroque styles and how it differed from the renaissance style of the Venetian churches we had just seen and generally feeling very educated and prouourselves. Then.Then we went to meet Leah and Andrea at the Opera house. When we finally got there, after walking around the entire city of Vienna looking for the Opera (it turns out that the first building we found was actually the correct one, but we didn't recognize it from the back, so we walked all around the rest of the city to finally come back and realize our mistake), we sat in line for tickets again, this time for Carmen. After 2 hours we ended up with almost exactly the same spots as last time, which was really cool. The opera itself was fantastic. I love Carmen! All the music is fantastic, even the minor melodies, and the performance was awesome. The sets so real you couldn'’t tell where the stage ended and the backdrop ended, the costumes were of brightly colored swirly gypsy skirts and Toreador capes, and the actors that you into the story without even needing the subtitles on the screens on our seats.

The next day we went to the National Treasury, an amazing collection of insanely expensive stuff, from beautifully embroidered cloaks to ornately carved reliquaries to portraits of the Emperors and their families. My favorite was the huge sapphire, cut in such a way to reflect as much light as possible:

In the afternoon, we split up:– some to the Freud museum, some to go shopping, and Lorenzo, Shashank and I to go to the Kunst Historische Museum. When we got there, Shashank learned two new words in German: "Montag Geschlossen" (Closed Mondays). Aahrg! We sat and fumed for a while, but then decided to go enjoy our day somewhere else. And you know what? we had so much more fun than we would have had if we'd gone into the museum.

If I write it down, it'll sound dumb - we walked around Vienna, laughing about German, we almost went into an Italian church until we realized we lived in Italy, we sat on the steps of the Parliament building, we walked around a garden somewhere, and we went to an Esperanto museum. You may think that an Esperanto museum is about the dumbest place imaginable, especially when it's one small room that documents the history of a well-intentioned but useless language, but it was so much fun!! Lorenzo and I could basically understand the signs in Esperanto if we worked together, and we played pakman with Esperanto grammar and had fun with the interactive maps of where Esperanto conferences were being held around the world. They had to kick us out when they closed, and we walked to the meeting place planning a Project Week to learn Esperanto in a host family somewhere far away.

All together again, we went out to dinner at a bar called "The Centimeter" and had a wonderful dinner that came in a wheelbarrow which we all ate out of. Before we ate, Lorenzo proposed a toast, and said, "To the person who helped organize this trip and made it a wonderful weekend, to a great friend, and a great EE friend, Anika." I was so surprised, Lorenzo was my EE friend? I squealed and jumped up to run around the table and hug him. Suddenly it all made sense, the fact that he never wrote long letters was explained by the fact that I already knew everything he might write, having stayed in his house at the beginning of the summer while getting my visa. And having a face to put to those wonderful gifts he gave me was so nice!

Then we packed up and got on the train, sadly leaving Vienna behind. Once again, we stayed up all night talking, and when we got back to Duino we slept all day. Or rather, I slept half the day and spent the other half of the day feeling sorry for myself and wishing I was back in Vienna. But long weekend was over, and I had other things to look forward to...like the EE show!