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Published: March 25th 2012
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14/2/2012
Today, I was going with the drama students of class 5 and 6 to Malagne, A place where we were going to stay for the next 3 (school) day and practice our drama for the Spectacle during the Gospel show in a few weeks time. Alain very generously picked up the tab for this trip, and also drove me, Colin and two of her friends all the way down there right in the middle of a Wednesday. When we got there, the first thing I noticed was how freaking huge this building was. Seriously. It had 4 stories, 3 of which were underground, and it was all complete with huge dining rooms, 500 rooms and heaps of conference and random rooms. That night we did a few rotations (each rotation was an hour long), with different students and teachers in each rotation to mix us up a bit. Dinner rolled by, (which wasn’t too bad actually) and afterwards, we had the longest, most boring lecture in probably the entire world history of extremely boring lectures. Part of the problem was that the guy was talking in French, but it seriously went on for around 3 and a half hours, and I didn’t understand a thing. And I couldn’t mess around on my ipod or anything. I was stuck. And it kinda really sucked. But that came to a close, and we messed around chatting for the rest of the night.
The next day we pretty much just did the same thing, except we broke into our classes and focused on our plays. During this I didn’t have a lot to do, so I spent most of the time just relaxing to the max.
And the last day (Friday) was the day we actually did our rehearsed plays. Because I didn’t have a part because I pretty much cant speak French correctly, I just sat back and watched the others do they’re thing. Some of them were so funny, even though I only caught part of the dialogue, others were really really boring and serious, but I guess you get that. The drive home I had to put my guitar into the back of someone elses car because our one was full. This resulted in waiting for 45 minutes for the car to find us once we got home, and a lot of worrying on my behalf. But it came back, safe and sound.
16/3/2012
Tonight Chris and I went to a party called Champagne Showers at the very same place we have our rotary meeting every Monday. Must be a well used local events centre or something. It was straight awesome, saw my friends from school which was cool because I don’t tend to see them out a lot in the weekends…
Anyway, Chris had a bottle of Lemon ‘Petermans’ that we shared, and I had a small bottle of Vodka that went around. The DJ was okay, but played WAYY tooo many pop songs and shit, so to enjoy the music, you kind of had to be drunk.
18/3/2012
Today, was the day that we had to rehearse the coming of the president of the rotary international, which means we had to be at a local cinema at 9. We initially got lost (Jack and I), and we later found out that they mysteriously changed the address of the gig from the Verviers Hotel to the cinema. But no problem, they were right beside each other. We were basically assigned jobs, like setting up flags and carrying food inside before the majority of the students got there. Then once everyone was there, we rehearsed holding umbrellas in the air, and waving around these clappy-clappy things that would hopefully impress the pants of the head of rotary international. This was to lead him into one of the cinemas, where we would then go back and be assigned a flag. Everyone of course was fighting to be able to hold their countries flag, but I just had to get it, and ended up with the massive privilege of being able to (on next Thursday) carry in the NZ flag.
After all the rehearsing, we were all pretty parched, and decided to go to Jacks hometown (Wilkenradt), and join in on one of the last carnivals in the country at this time of year. We decided before-hand to take the risk, as normally between this short train journey, it was uncommon for trains to check the tickets. However if they did, we may have faced a 60 Euro fine. But we’re poor exchange students, so we took it. Luckily, there was no check and we merrily made our way into the distant booming carnival music when we arrived at the Welkenraedt station. It was a really great one I think, one of the highlights was seeing a massive NZ float, and men riding a giant Waka, with the sound of a haka booming from the speakers. I was just full to the brim with pride. Here I met one of Jacks mates, who ended up taking us back to his house, and feeding us and topping us up with beer and schnapps. I just adored the hospitality, and who can resist Nutella on break when you’ve had a few to drink ?. Also, turned out the daughter of this family played the guitar, and has an acoustic nylon-sting that was eventually brought out. How I love how many people have casual guitars lying around their house…. Actually love it. So I pumped out all the normal Belge anthems, “I’m Yours”, “Wonderwall”, “3 little birds”, and of course the favourite, “Apologise”. Everyone loved it, and I kinda felt like I’d given back a little to what they gave me which felt good.
But we got back on out way after that little lunch, and Carnival was still in full swing. We found Claire and a few other exchange students we didn’t even know were going which was sweet, and we found a sweet place to catch all the things that was thrown off the carts (lollies, chapstick ?!?, popcorn, biscuits, masks..). We then spent half an hour just revelling in the magnificence of carnival season. But all good things must come to an end, and since we were all pretty tired, we decided to ditch, and we all caught our respective trains home.
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