Tilbake til Flekke...

Norway is chilly and dark. However, it was sunny in Bergen when we arrived. Bergen looked gorgeous...
Now I am back at school, swamped with homework, meetings and events. I don'T even know what to pick up to talk about. Today we had a special World Today on the recent earthquake in South India and there was a fundraising cafe afterwards. Tomorrow there is going to be a WT on The implication of human rights in real life. There is a British guest speaker coming and I am really looking forward to listening to him. Sounds interesting...
Send me sunshine...

"Smil til verden og verden vil smile til deg."

Pictures from Singapore

Singapore - October 5th - 16th

As some of you might know, Per (one of my co-years here @ RCNUWC) and I went down to Singapore for the purpose of UWC International Council - a huge conference, occuring once in five years. As the audience of my blog is quite diverse, I won't go too much in detail about the IC. Main points for UWC related people might be:

• new mission statement

• new college in Costa Rica (bilingual) in August 2006

• UWC-IBO initiative in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

• commitment to establish a college in the Middle East by 2012

• increasing number of short courses at UWCs

• many proposals for new colleges - specific aims in the area (China, Tanzania,etc.)

• more diverse selection processes in terms of socio-economic background

• LINK GROUPS (yay! :-)) -> more links between the colleges in order to strengthen the movement and not to be just a "collection of international schools"

The Council was extremely busy and I am sure I forgot to mention some stuff some of you might find important... either leave a comment or excuse me ;-)
The main reason why I am creating a new post is that I would like to publish some pics from Singapore. Again, my audience is very wide... So some of you might not find it interesting to look at pictures of people.. But I guess those pictures are important for some other of my friends.. Be tolerant :-)
But I hope all of you will enjoy the Singaporean sceneries.Although the pictures here are just a tiny mini fraction of what Per and I actually took... Wanna see more? Email me, visit me, talk to me.. see me at Christmas.. ;-)
Just to quickly outline what we did.
First five days were extremely busy - conference: guest speakers, workshops, meetings, discussions, a gala dinner in Shangri La hotel.. basically day and night in the UWC spirit of moving forward and developing the movement. Something extremely interesting for me and Per. And hopefully for rest of RCN, as we are going to give a presentation on everything we saw. :-)
After that we had a chance to spend six "free" days in Singapore. We went around, spent some time with people from the UWCSEA(United World College of South East Asia) and with Shyama's family (for those of you who are not RCN-related - Shyama is my co-year from Singapore and Per stayed at her place). I stayed first seven days with a Dutch family living in Singapore. All three of their kids (18,16 and 14 years old) are day students at UWCSEA. They left for holiday and I had to swap host families. I spent the rest of my time in Singapore with a girl called Indriana – Indriana graduated from Pearson college in 2002. The UWC network works perfectly... You come somewhere and people who don't even know you are so welcoming... Incredible. And by the way, we live in the world of randoms -> Indriana is coming to Prague in December – yay! :-) So, I will get to be the host this time.

Something about the UWCSEA

It's extremely different from all the other UWCs. I had the chance to meet at least one student from every UWC and we discussed the way the different schools operate. UWCSEA turned out to be by far the most controversial. It covers primary, secondary and high school grades. Most of the students pay for their education and attend a daily programme (that means they don't live together on one campus, rate of interaction is quite low compared to our Flekke bubble). There are only 40 scholars – 20 in each IB year. They live together in a boarding house together with 90 paying students. The school's location makes it incredibly easy to just go out clubbing or shopping. No doubt that the UWCSEA do great things in the region of South East Asia and even behind, but from the discussions with people who have experienced the other UWCs, we agreed that they lack a huge part of something called “the UWC spirit” and they are very exclusive in terms of socio-economic circumstances of the students.

But in the next post... Some pictures and short comments.

Enjoy! :-)

"Artifish"

Preparations for the International Council are finishing! Yay! Per and I managed to more or less the main presentation about RCNUWC. Being nice by leaving out the concept of bathroom parties and smokers' corner out (btw, smokers' corner has been cleaned due to the Queen's visit!). ;-)
I browsed through the quote list on the door of NH #103 and there someone asks:"Can you have fish in an artificial lake?" and then Erik responds:"Yes, then they are called artifish":-) It doesn't sound that funny in a blog, but I am sendin this to all of my second years who had Erik as their history teacher. He hasn't changed at all. And I don't believe any one else has.
Boris and I have been digressing from studying Norwegian - we looked at pictures from our homes. Boris saw a picture from my dancing lessons (when I was 15, still at home in CZE) and said:"You look good there, what happened to you?". That really cheers you up, doesn't it? :-)
And to add to the world of abbreviations, I am using KLM on Tuesday ;-)

Gratulerer med dagen!

Happy b-day dear college, happy b-day to youuuuu :-)
Today, the college had a celebration of its 10th birthday. A lot of prominent guests, and of course in the middle of everything - Queen Sonja...
Sounds good, right? well.. I love this tiny rainy spot on Earth (and so does Karina who's sitting here with me right now, btw it's 1:30 and we have been chatting, watching movies and eating for the whole evening... well it's our birthday as well :-)) and it drives me crazy to see that we have to behave so differently just because of all those guys coming over. Everything was sooo pretentious!
The only thing I actually really liked was the show in the auditorium, performing arts people are giving the best of themselves no matter who is sitting in the audience.
The Art room had to be cleaned, because the Queen was gonna come in. Clean art room? Since when???
Everybody was wearing their national costumes... Well, I don't have the Czech one so I decided to wear a traditional dress from Cambodia. Actually, I have a personal Cambodian first year, since there is no Czech I decided to adopt someone :-) Btw, the confused person in the picture is me running away from the cake-eating with Her Majesty. ;-)
On Tuesday the crazy Swede Per and I are off to the UWC International Council in Singapore. We still have quite a bit to do... but I am quite excited about going! I hope I will survive the flight and the time and temperature changes and also the responsibility lying on my shoulders... Cross your fingers for me :-)
Since Karina is falling asleep and having a sleepover is bad, we have to stop here :-)
god natt(norsky)/dobrou noc(på tsjekkisk)