Halloween

It's Halloween!!! Well, almost at least. I am very excited since it is my first real Halloween.

But I have experienced many many things since the police let me back into my house after the bomb threat two weeks ago. I have never heard anything about it, if it was real or fake, nothing online or in the papers...
I am almost at the end of a very busy second recruitment period. We had infosessions for students who want to go abroad with AIESEC last week with great turnouts, most of them don't want to go immediately (which is fine with us) and a lot of interviews this week. Yesterday I had seven interviews non-stop. Four hours long, all on my own. My head started to hurt really badly after a while. Luckily there is a bar on the same floor as our office so I could go and relax with a beer after :D. We also had some very important appointments this week: the most important one was with the coop-department of the university, that sends students on internships as part of their studies. We found great enthusiasm on their side for AIESEC and its services and I hope for a successful cooperation in the future. For when I'm gone...the thought of me being gone is very present in my mind these days, not only because I miss Europe but also because I want to ensure sustainable success for AIESEC here and not have everything fall apart in the future. I have made manuals, will make even more manuals, given trainings, will give even more trainings and everytime I want to do something for somebody now just because it is faster I pause myself and say: come and watch. Very interesting...and I get more and more patient :) Now I only have to find myself a good successor as VP OGX (who I think I have already found luckily) and the LCP elections have to bring a good next LCP who carries on the positive change. It would make me a very very sad person to see that all my work was for nothing. If any of you have more suggestions on how to ensure sustainability, please let me know.

I also finally have a life outside of AIESEC in Guelph :). Last week it was Dollar-Beer-Night in downtown Guelph so we went to party. I discovered the cocktail "Alabama Slammer" which has made it onto my list of favourites. Originally because I thought they put Ketchup in it (after some dollarbeers), discovering only later that it was actually Cherry Sauce. It is still very delicious. I was at 5 different pubs/clubs whatever they call those here and was almost back in my Danish party mood, when at 2 am: You have to go home now!!!! I was very angry. How considerate of the Canadian Government that they send all their citizens at home and ensure they don't have enough time to get drunk. I don't like that. Especially because they don't seem to care about the people that live downtown and that might be slightly disturbed by the fact that a huge group of drunk people is standing on the street and making noise in the middle of the night, whereas if they could stay longer they would not leave all at once. The partying people make the choice themselves, the sleeping don't. But yeah, whatever. I just go out more often then :P That's exactly what I did last weekend. On saturday I also went to a three-hour long Restorative Yoga workshop. Very very relaxing. And that's a good thing in these busy times.

Tomorrow I am going to a symposium on Corporate Social Responsibility to network and get free food :D and after that I put on my fairy costume and go do "Trick or Eat". The concept is the same as what children do for Halloween to get candy, only that students in Guelph go from door to door to collect food cans and other food for the food bank so it eventually goes to the poor people. I like the idea. After that I am going to Pat's and Justin's Halloween Kegger (still with my fairy costume, I hope it doesn't carry the unlucky charm of the Helly Kitty costume). It is the first kegger I will ever go to, so I am very excited. I learned that a kegger is a party where there is a keg of beer and everybody drinks from it. I bought Sprite so I don't have to drink pure beer and...most of you know what happens :P Especially after I heard the stories from their last kegger. Carlos still has some mopping to do I think. And then on saturday morning I have invited all my Guelphfriends to my house for my pancake-massacre breakfast. I have been in Canada for 2,5 months now and not had any maple syrup, so it is time for that. And maple syrup gives energy which keeps warm. The Canadian winter is coming slowly but surely. It is snowing sometimes, the snow doesn't stay but is getting colder and colder. I am still biking though, but I got over the novelty of my helmet and always forget to wear it :(

Truly exciting Guelph

All good times come to an end and so did my nice chill-out thanksgiving weekend. Hard work had to be done, because we started to recruit students to go on AIESEC internships last week. Unfortunately Brett didn't nominate a "director of recruitment" in time and so I was still in control of everything, but contrary to the september recruitment I had many many helping hands and the future director of recruitment helped out a lot. Still, on tuesday we didn't have a space booked to set up our booth, the flyers weren't ready and I had to do everything last minute myself. When on wednesday morning during the Executive Board meeting everybody came up with more brilliant ideas what we could do for recruitment even though I was busy all day just doing the things that had to be done I was very close to a complete freakout. I have troubles imagining a bright future for AIESEC Guelph when I'm not here anymore, so making all my work sustainable is what I am working on most. My Outgoing Exchange Team is working brilliant, the girls are so into AIESEC that they skip classes (I have to interfere :D) and they will be running for Executive Board next year. So maybe things will change.

Anyways, on wednesday night it was time for us to to the most traditional Guelph-thing: paint the cannon. There is an old cannon on campus next to the University Center and tons of students walk past it every day. It is a tradition for different clubs to paint it, but that can only be done during the night. And you have to guard it before and after, otherwise another club can come and paint it over. So, at 5 pm we started guarding the cannon so we could paint it later. Heather guarded it during our meeting and then we hung around it untill 11, danced some AIESECdances and Elyssa made nice garbage bag dresses and shoes for me and herself. In the attempt to carry buckets of paint from the office to the cannon, I poured half a bucket of paint into my backpack :) Of course I know that it is not a good idea to put a paintbucket that has been opened before upside down into your backpack. I am just not clever enough to transfer that knowledge to my specific situation. Whatsoever, before I did that, I put my phone and camera into a nice small blue bag, so I could fish that bag out of the paint and phone and camera were fine. Most of my stuff was and even my backpack is now, because it was waterbased paint and I washed it. Only my Economist is not. But there are always casualties.

We painted the cannon, first white, because it was orange and black from the night before. Unfortunately we had the water-based paint and since it was raining, it all rained off again. We waited for a while and when it seemed to stop raining we painted white again. But it didn't really stop, so our art was threatened to be destroyed again by mother nature. To prevent that, we just sprayed yellow spray-paint on top of the white. During the night it didn't look very pretty, but we were far beyond caring. We sprayed our message on top of that and then, at 2 am, decided to leave it at that. It was raining, we were cold and not really convinced by our piece of art. Instead of staying out in the cold to guard it we all went home to our warm beds.

So when I arrived to campus the next morning and saw the cannon was still painted with AIESEC things and actually looked quite nice, I was very happy. Together with the hardcore new AIESECers I carried a table outside and put signs into the lawn and set up our roll-out banner and then we just sat at the table. People came by all the time to ask what AIESEC was about and how they could go abroad and we collected 50 emailadresses. I didn't expect that at all, since I secretly find sitting at a table all day with some signs around a bit lame, but apparently that works fine for Canada. After being out in the cold all day I was frozen at night and got a bit sick :(

On friday I had my very well deserved day off from AIESEC, or at least from AIESEC in Guelph. I slept in, did laundry, went for all-you-can-eat-sushi-lunch with Whitney and then went to Toronto. As the last time I went, driving into downtown I felt happy about being here. Liking the place, the people and just enjoying. Crazyness. I went to the Induction Day of AIESEC at Ryerson University and told them about AIESEC, the international structure, history and my experiences. That was fun and after that we went out for drinks. I brought Brause and we had nice Wodka-Brause shots and we also went to a Diner that had Chocolate-Baileys Milkshake. That is definitely a nice thing to have. I stayed with Cesar, my friend from Mexico who is in AIESEC and we slept through half of the saturday. Saturday during the day I went shopping and finally got myself a winter jacket. And some other nice things. I was planning on going to the Madonna concert in Toronto saturday night, but unfortunately my dear friend Carlos, who was guarding my ticket, was not able to find the tickets. Very very very angry me. I had fun times with Cesar, but still!!!! How often do you have the opportunity to see Madonna? And reasonably priced tickets? Aaaaargh...

For some reason I like staying at other people's houses, so I also stayed there saturday and went back to Guelph today in the afternoon. And I was sitting on my bed, watching Grey's Anatomy, when the police bangs simultaneously on my door and my window and tells me to leave. There was a bomb threat in my building!!!! I firmly believe this is because I complained to my Toronto friends that Guelph is too boring. Last time I extensively complained I had to get up at 6 in the morning because of a fire alarm. I have the feeling that I should stop complaining. So I grabbed my computer and my hard drive, since those are the two things I under no circumstances want to be in an explosion and left the house. I went to the police station for a bit, but got bored very fast. I didn't bring my power cord and also no other entertainment. I visited Brett at Tim Horton's, but I also couldn't distract him all the time. So I went back to my house, which was still evacuated and told the police I had to get my passport. They were like "I have to tell you there is danger and I don't advice you to go in, but I can't keep you." So I hurried into the house, got my power cord and now I am still at Whitney's, too lazy to leave. Of course there was no bomb, so all the trouble was just for keeping me entertained for a while and warning me for not complaining anymore.

Turkey Dinners

As announced earlier, I travelled to Cobourg (that's the way it is really spelled) on thursday night. It is a cute town with 18,000 inhabitants right on the shore of Lake Ontario between Toronto and Kingston and it is home to Rebecca, my Vice President of External Relations. She lives in a big house with a pool that looks just as the houses in the Northamerican countryside that I know from TV. I was very happy staying in a big, clean house and sleeping in a comfortable bed.

On friday Rebecca took me downtown, to the beach and to Walmart. Every stop on this journey was special. The Walmart because it was, like everything in Canada, sooooooo huge and had everything one could need. I think I could live in a Walmart store. The rest of the day we watched makeover TVshows and prepared the food for the night. Because Rebecca's dad is working on sunday they had their Thanksgiving Dinner on Friday. 32 relatives arrived in the late afternoon, bringing more food. I was introduced to everybody, but I wasn't the only international guest. Rebecca's uncle's family has an exchange student from Finland living with them. I exchanged some views over Canada with her and spent the rest of the evening talking to the aunts and uncles about their jobs. One uncle is a funeral director, the other one has an apple farm (which I consider very Canadian, so I was particularly interested) and the other one builds roads. After everyone was stuffed with turkey, mashed potatoes and pies the relatives left and Rebecca and I went to friends of her boyfriend's parents. They were having a dinner party and were quite drunk when we arrived, so we had fun times. One of the guests was originally from the Netherlands and opposite to most Canadians who claim they are Dutch he actually spoke Dutch. What a nice opportunity to speak Dutch, especially because his Dutch is as messed up as mine at the moment. On saturday morning I played Wii Fit with Rebecca and her Mum. That was really cool and made me miss my Wii. I'll get one if I ever spend more than half a year in one place. After lunch I took the train to travel to my second Thanksgiving destination. I enjoyed travelling by train very much. The rails first go right along Lake Ontario and the scenery is very very beautiful, with all those trees (very Canadian) which are changing colour at the moment. Unfortunately my camera's battery was empty all the time and I didn't bring my charger, so I couldn't take any pictures of anything. Whitney and Rebecca took some, maybe I can get them. Back to the trains...they also have power plugs for every seat (not as in Germany where you have to span the cord along other people if you dn't happen to sit at a table). The trains also have wireless internet and are quite comfortable, so I had a good time. The only not really ideal thing is that you are seated in a car according to the station you are leaving the train at. I understand that they need a way to organize their passengers, but it is not really convenient leaving a train when everybody else in your car does.

Arriving to London, Whitney, my Local Committee President picked me up and took me to her parent's house. Their house exactly looks like the ones we know from American series playing in the suburbs. Double garage, pool and a beautiful garden. We had dinner and then went out to a party at the Penthouse of Whitney's High School friends. Everybody was in town for Thanksgiving and excited to see each other again after a long time, so nobody really paid attention to me. Finding that weird at first, I was very happy after a while just relaxing in the massage chair. The party was over at 1.30 when everybody went to the bar, but since bars close at 2 am, we just decided to go home. On sunday we took a walk in a forest close to Whitney's house. It was very nice, again I was amazed by all the beautiful colours of the trees. After a little nap some of the relatives arrived (we were only 11 people this time) and had a nice dinner. Whitney's sister announced that she had bought a house and was pregnant, so everybody was very excited about that. I had more turkey and other nice things and I learned a new Canadian dish: Apple Crisp. Apples with crispy things on top, very very yummy. After all the relatives left we just sat down doing AIESEC work for five hours, being very surprised when we found out it was already 2 am. Today Whitney took me for a ride downtown. We walked through a nice park and had a coffee and went to a very nice store called skirt. I found a really cute cardigan and after we decided that we could cut my hair ourselves and I can save the money for the hairdresser I bought the jacket. So no freezing in Canadian winters for me. Then we went to a "Hot Yoga" class. The room temperature is...I don't know how high but very hot and everybody is just dripping sweat. But because of the heat I was much more flexible and I enjoyed it a lot. I was surprised how the room didn't smell. Later Whitney cut my bangs and it looks really good. I am happy. After another nice dinner, a shower in a clean bathroom and some more AIESEC work I am now going to sleep the last night in my comfortable bed. Tomorrow at 6.15 (bah bah) we go back to Guelph. I want to stay here!!!

AIESEC crazyness

Dear non-AIESECers: this piece contains a lot of insider information, explaining it all would go beyond the scope of this blog and probably also confuse you even more than only this does. I hope that after reading this you can still take me serious in the future.

I find myself very very exhausted after a great conference this weekend. Friday afternoon I went with Alison the racecardriver and one of our new members to Hamilton, where this year's Ontario Regional Conference was going to take place. It was hosted by McMaster University. Why would you call a university like that? Somehow it doesn't transfer the image of high-quality education to me, but whatever...together with Brett and eight of our new members we went there on friday, staying at the Crowne Plaza downtown. We were just about to leave for the opening plenary when we realized we didn't have the right version of the dance we would use to present our Local Committee and had to adapt our dance to the version we had. Which was actually a huge success, because we won the award for the best rollcall!!! As I experienced before in AIESEC Canada, winning things in Conferences always gets rewarded with booze in one or the other way, so when we were at a nightclub later that evening, we got a bottle of wodka to celebrate our success. Very very nice. The party was fun, unfortunately, as always in Canada, we got kicked out of the club at 2:15 because it would close. Why be so reasonable??? The bouncers also marked Gelaine's hands with two big black crosses, because she is underage and was not supposed to drink in there. That looked sooo funny. After the official party we had an afterparty at the hotel with some uninvited Russian guests who showed up in their underwear and attracted security attention. For once it weren't AIESECers causing complaints in the middle of the night at a hotel!!!

Getting up at saturday morning was hard, but not as hard as in other occasions. I had a long day of interesting sessions, I didn't really learn anything new (since this was my 10th conference not very surprising), but I got a bunch of new perspectives on things and I just enjoyed being there. Our new members were awesome and involved and participating and dancing all the time, which made Brett and me feel like proud parents. On saturday night there was a banquet, so we all dressed up nicely and had a fancy dinner and danced for some time. There was of course a huge afterparty at the hotel again, which I unfortunately missed because I went to my room to change, got into a very interesting discussion with my roommate from Indonesia and her friend from Korea and then passed out on my bed. Considering the details I've heard from the "never have I ever" - game the next morning it is probably better for my peace of mind that I missed it. And I also was fully awake and functioning, which is a good thing, since I was running group sessions on what a CEED is, how cool it is to do that and telling people what exactly I am doing. That would have been hard if I have been in the same state as at NOGX. To finish the conference we watched a small movie which I'd like to share with you:



After the conference our whole delegation had lunch at the mall, where we decided, after discussing the highs and lows of the conference to scare some people and perform the chair roll-call in the middle of the food court. It was a Brazilian saying illustrated by gestures and judging from the gestures it was x-rated. We did that, I took a video (it's on my facebook) and after that we left quickly, since people gave us very funny looks. Unfortunately Alison forgot to take her purse with her and when we were back at the hotel she realized and ran back to the mall, together with Alexey. He arrived before her, but the bag wasn't there anymore. Also people were giving him funny looks and repeated some of the hand gestures we made before. So he went to the security guard, who had taken the purse in right after we left. Apparently our little perfomance seemed like hexing it and people were afraid. Alexey, half-russian and a member of the Canadian army asking for it 15 minutes later also didn't really help restoring our image. But whatever...

I got home at five, exhausted but very very happy, read my sugarcubes and got even happier and now I am back in Guelph everyday life, which is as busy as always. Unfortunately I am still exhausted, so I better go to sleep. A lot of things have to be done and this week is shorter than the others, because on thursday night I am going to Coburgh with Rebecca, our VP ER to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family and then on saturday I go to London to my LCP's family's Thanksgiving. Finally, exciting times ahead again.