Hello guys,
again I have delayed this to the end of the month (except I noticed that I messed up the date the last time so I actually would have had one more day 😉 #IBLife). Tomorrow project week is going to start and I still have to pack and write a History Essay, so more or less I am not stressed at all (compared to my normal situation here). Leave start massively to turn colorcfall and fall, the woods behind the Student Village seem more and more like a mystic forest or near to Beijing because of the fog and the days are getting longer. I know that I probably geographically should have written shorter but that’s simply not true. There is more and more stuff you have to do every day. However, I learned to ‘not-do’ some stuff and try to not make things perfect, as it is simply not possible to.
What you probably gotten out of this so far is that Merlin has to do a lot and that he is complaining, but trust me, complaining sometimes feels reaaaally good 😀 . Overall I have to stay that I am most of the time very happy (except if there is no sunlight because I am usually having a down then) and this is due to the (still) amazing people which suffer with you together here, start to play Ultimate during lunch break, give you a lots of meaningful hugs when you need them, give you a banana (highly valued here) when you are having a down, gossiping about the IB and go with you for a walk in the woods. This is simply wonderful and I do not know what I would do with all of these occasions. Through that you really get a sense of feeling home here, Thank you to everybody that made that possible for me so far!! (As I know that some people from the Campus read my blog which feels very strange, especially if your Roommate reads your own blog out loud to you [Yes I mean you Ming :D]).
Apart from my regular life (yes, I know that it is bad to put something like this into a term like ‘regular life’ but I am too uncreative right now) lots of things have been happening. I don’t know exactly when I stopped the last time, but I will try to not double things!
I have been out of Freiburg two times now. The first time we went to an event in Stuttgart where Nobel-Peace-Price-Winner Kailash Satyarthi (he saved a lot of children out of child-labour in and around India, Pakistan, Nepal etc.). Right after school we took the 2.5 h drive from Campus to Stuttgart with our College Van, just to be there for 2 hours and then return. Probably it wasn’t the most productive time spent but still it was eye-opening for me and it showed me yet another time that there are so many things which have to be cared about, and also a lot about how much I don’t know. Still I think that I shouldn’t go into too much detail.
The second time we went with the A-Capella Group and our school nurse, who is very much into music, to an A-Capella Concert by the Swedish “Real-Group”. It was a stunning experience for me , I very much enjoyed listening to them and it made me really anxious about improving my skills and what we can do with our group. Both trips were nice for me, also because I think I needed to leave Campus to get into the “real world” again. UWC definitely is a bubble, and especially as school started now it is even harder to get out of that.
One other thing I want to mention is the Sustainability-Special-Focus Day we had here. It started with presentations by students about impact on- and climate change in their respective countries, followed by a group discussion (everybody had to represent a country, organisation, etc.), a ‘sustainable’ dinner (we had to pick a card whether we have to eat vegan [70 %], vegetarian [20 %] or meat [10 %] which obviously leaded to a lot of discussions and trading. After lunch we had two workshops and the big thing: The College Food Discussion. It was mainly about whether we want to have an overall no-beef-diet and the number of vegetarian days per week to have and things were getting really stressful. A lot of emotions were included, and we discussed over several hours, also a lot about how the voting system should work. In the end, we delayed the discussion to a later point (it still didn’t happen yet 😦 ), so actually like in a real Climate Conference. This helped me to understand why these Conferences usually don’t work and how frustrating this is, but also on the other hand how amazing it is that everybody tries to make it the most democratic (at least here on Campus) as possible. It also showed me that you can’t expect the same from people with different backgrounds, at least to an extend.
As I said, tomorrow I am leaving for Project Week (4 days of walking the Compostela [Jakobsweg]), followed by four chill days in Paris. I am really looking forward to both of it. I haven’t managed yet to write about stuff I really want to talk about, but I hope that I will get there. I also hope that you like the ‘moments’ section, because I think in Blog you tend to just talk about the major things which mostly don’t give a holistic impression of the time here.
So, enjoy the last days of sun if you are living in the Northern Hemisphere!
All the best,
Merlin
MerlinBoschCollege 