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.