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Published: December 2nd 2012
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28/11/2012
This Wednesday was the 2
nd annual ‘Titles’, and so in usual fashion we all arrived and got the party started. Pretty stock standard evening passed, and all the titles were given out to their respective new winners, the newies. A good afternoon was had by all, and despite staying a little later than normal for this quite special Rotary tradition, we all eventually got home fine.
30/11/2012
Waking up at 5am today, I was about to experience one of the true pleasures of spending an exchange year in Belgium. St Nick. Mention St Nicks to any student from Belgium, and you an eruption of glowing smiles and laughs, and enough stories to last many lunchtime conversations. So quite reasonably, I was ecstatic, and filled with a weirdly natural energy that without, I would have surely been unable to lift myself from my bed. Luckily Marc agreed, that as I was his son, he would drive he not only into town a ridiculous hour of the morning, but also pick me up from the after-party that all the Rheto students from the schools in Verviers would be going to this night.
Arriving in Verviers at 5:50am, I
waited for my mate Christian to come pick me up. How the morning played out was that we spend our day in our ‘tabliers’ (white doctors coats that you get all your school friends to sign), and walk around with cups, asking random people for money. For the students of the school, a failed donation would mean shaving cream, hair colour spray, and flour thrown at you. So bags full of supplies, and cups empty, off we went. The first place we tried we saw other students get stopped by cops, and told to move on. Imaginably, there were hundreds and hundreds of school students out to get money, so the possibly for us to block roads and intersections completely was a real concern for the cops. We found an intersection, and started our operation. You had to decide between certain approaches of personalities to adopt when collecting money from strangers. You could be the loud, obnoxious type that gets people to roll down their windows and notice you. You can be the outward beggar, just shamelessly demanding money. I went with a slightly more humble give-them-a-smile-and-rattle-your-cup approach. By the end of it, we had cups around half-full of random
pieces of change. One highlight I had was getting a lady calling to me, and handing me a small plastic bag full of coins. Thanking her profusely, I found that they were all 0.01 Euro coins. This meant despite the attractive appearance, there was realistically probably around 2 Euros in there. Not exactly a big haul by any stretch of the imagination.
So continuing back to school, we got a little more money, and gradually made our way back into the school hall. There was no school today, but instead we were putting a show on for the rest of the school – The SFX tradition for St Nicks. I was in one of skits, which we’d been practicing during our free time all week. I was a male dancer in a kind of showy dance, and with my other SFX buddies we put on a bit of a show I guess. During the morning we had one rehearsal, and then after we put on the first of two shows for the day, this one being for the 1
st, 2
nd and 3
rd year students. It’s hard explaining what the show actually was. It was the last parting act of
the Rehto (last year) students, and so there was a lot of games that they elected certain people (including teachers) to take part in, and all sorts of references to pop-culture to keep the subject fresh. It was awesomely well done, and you tell everyone had such a great time.
After the end of the first show, we went out to some café’s and had a few beers with the money we collected off the street with the other students. The atmosphere was incredible, and everyone looked crazy in their colourful tabiliers, dancing and standing around dressed up in all sorts of things. After lunch came the second (and last) show of the day, which was pretty much the same apart from the people chosen to come up onto the stage to participate in the game show remakes (as we were performing for the 4
th 5
th and 6
th year students this time). After this all wrapped up, it was tradition for everyone to go down to El Chicco, and spend the time between the finish of the show and the start of tonights party there. Meeting up with Jack, we ditched that place and went to the ‘apple bar’,
where I accidentally met the sister of one of the exchangers here in Belgium, who’s going to America soon. I’d met brother, who was soon to become a rotary exchange student when he goes to the USA next year, last Monday when I helped out serving food at a function for the new exchangers from Belgium. Her brother apparently told her about a kiwi exchange student that he’d met who was a bit of a good chap, and I guess she just put two and two together. So the were for a few hours, before we realised we didn’t have a lot of time before the party would be getting’ full. After a quick stop at a good ol’ durum shop, we were on our merry way on a bus full of students going to the same party. And some creepy old dude no-one knew that I guess was just coming for the ride or something.
The party itself was in the “Maison bois”, which is known for big indoor student parties, so calling Marc to come pick me up afterwards apparently wouldn’t be too much of a hassle. There would have been around 2000 people there, and we
were there until 2 o’clock, which is when Marc spotted me, and I fell asleep on the way home in the car back from the party.
2/12/2012
Today, unknown to me was when my family was going to celebrate ‘St Nick’, which is like a pre-Christmas kind of deal. As Florence rushed into my room at 9:30, trying to get me up I was wondering why I needed to get up, but nonetheless I got up, chucked on a shirt and headed downstairs. There, was an oversized fruit-bowl FULL of chocolate and lollies and all kinds of things. This was all apparently from St Nic, and as I unwrapped some awesome maroon skinnies, a blue silk-look shirt, and a ‘Superdry’ tee-shirt I realised that’d it also snowed outside that night. What an amazing day… After this it was a big ol’ lunch, with the typical ‘aperitif’ (sparkling rosee), coffee, and of course bucket-loads of talk about what’s coming up, and about St Nick in general. The rest of today was spend huddling up indoors, and enjoying the company of the whole family we rarely get together.
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