Double Birthday Party & Mardi Gras

B I R T H D A Y S



Since Eva’s birthday was the 26th of February, it was for sure that we would have a double birthday party together. After a long search for a good location, it was finally held at our friend Anna’s place. She has a nice and neat place, and we wanted to keep it that way, so since it was very snowy outside, we requested people to take off their shoes.



Our friend, who is a DJ, played the music of that night, making it a real dance party, which Eva and I have never held before. It was really nice, and good enough, as people still had the options to have conversations, or sit down, or write something on our poster, or go outside, or eat! We prepared cake with ice cream and fruit, but our theme was BYO (Bring Your Own), so we had enough to eat and drink.



Unfortunately the night had to end with an unfortunate happening. My friend could not find her purse, and I felt really bad about that. House parties in the States are like ‘Open Houses’, as everybody, including –or even those who are not invited, is able to come. Basically, that’s how I’ve been going to other house parties as well; hearing about it from others. But that’s something we wanted to avoid. Eventually, non-invited did get to hear about our party, so there were some people who showed up that night Eva and I did not personally know. Therefore I suspect them to have taken my friend’s purse, which is sadly enough, still not founded and thus simply lost.



Nevertheless was it an awesome and special party; Eva turned Quarter a Century and I am now Double Deux! We are suitemates, basically we sleep head to head with a thin wall in between, and she's my best friend here, and celebrating our birthdays together was something really cool and special.









M A R D I G R A S


The ‘carnival’ fest before lent, is known here as Mardi Gras. But because many roads were still covered with snow on the actual day of Mardi Gras, the fest was postponed to the following Saturday, the 24th of February, when the actual 40 days of fasting already took place.



It was a sunny day with a clear blue sky, as usual on my birthday, and downtown was packed with families, youngsters and every other inhabitant of greater Burlington, enjoying the music and decorated cars and trucks marching by. But basically it was like watching one big, life commercial block along the streets. The whole fest was sponsored by big companies, so the least they deserve was to have Burlington’s population of 20.000 to perceive only a glimpse of their company. I must admit I can still enjoy the philanthropic mindset and expressions of Ben & Jerry’s, but I detest seeing images of Heidi Klump on a huge pink truck passing by.



People were walking around with loads of colorful beads around their necks, because were given away and spread around. The idea behind it though was that a person would receive a bead for every time she or he would ‘flash’ someone, meaning showing a body part, mainly implying the breasts.



After 45 minutes the parade was over and he crowd got scattered, streaming into the bars and pubs to drink the day through. Dressing up and getting drunk, basically the same as back home. Now I just need to experience carnival in the Netherlands!

Debate Tournament

As I got involved in the UVM’s debate team, I knew I would have to put a lot of effort, time and energy in it. The concept of a debate team is something I have never heard of before, but as I heard and figure, it’s a great mean to develop and improve your speech and reasoning skills, and get deeper understanding of certain topics. Ideally your team would win during national and even international tournaments all over the country, but the main purpose is to have fun and enjoy.

During the preparation and practice debate, I realized I got myself into a seriously complicated game. I was overwhelmed, anxious and concerned. What if I would fail and lose? But the coaches and all other debaters were not worried at all: as long as I would have fun!



The tournament took place at Binghamton University, New York, a six-hours van ride away, and staying at a real American motel with diner along the highway was definitely an exciting part of it (including the sketchy red stain on the floor between the beds in our room!).





It’s really complicated, but this is roughly how it works:
The first debate starts at 8am, and takes about 1,5 to 2 hours. With breaks and lunch in between, we finished our day of four debates around 6pm. The debate itself takes place between two teams and one judge, and in the more advanced debates there can be some audience in the classroom as well. One team will be the ‘affirmative’ and bring up a case, while the other has to be ‘negative’, and come with a counter plan or something else. Bottom line is to convince the judge to vote for your plan, not necessarily on the contents, but on the way of debating.



Every team should be familiar and prepared with the national topics, which this year are desegregation, abortion, global warming and some others I forgot. The first 9 minutes is to bring up the case and read out ‘evidence’ on why the status quo is bad, and what the alternative plan is. Reading piles of paper in such short amount of time means talking in high-speed mode. It’s pretty ridiculous, because it’s just impossible to follow the speaker, and the speech thus becomes incomprehensible, although the ‘negative’ is allowed to take over and read through the evidence cards, if the ‘affirmative’ is done with it. This technique shows how the speech/debate is focused on quantity, rather than quality. There have been ‘negative’ teams who simply replied with a 9 minutes silence or dance to dispute the high-speed reading.

[Me and my debate partner Joe]

Debating at this tournament were universities mostly from the East coast. There were mainly Whites, and I could count the Blacks attending on my one hand, but there was a remarkable amount of Asian debaters. Maybe because academic debating is a known concept in Asia -at least China and Indonesia, as well?



Debating for me was funny, ridiculous, mean, bad, and friendly, but moreover simply overwhelming. We lost all our debates, but we learned a lot from it. When we were ready to debate our last debate the next Sunday morning, we turned out to have no counter team to debate against, and thus our first debate tournament was over by then.

Snow Days

After all those promises, I finally got to experience the real Vermont winter culture on Whatever-Day (right, Valentine’s Day). Because of the bad weather forecast UVM, and many other institutions in the Northeast of America, announced it officially as a ‘snow day’, and therefore closed their doors.



All day long, I was wandering around inside the L/L-complex, staring out all the windows, to gaze at the rushing blizzard causing piles of snow out side. I was, and still am, amazed and astonished about the amount of the snow, that had an average height of 1 meter. Because the roads and walking paths needed to be shuffled, some piles reached almost 3 meter!


[Our Marche Cafetaria]

The next day was another official snow day, although the actual snowstorm had already set down. Instead, it was a beautiful sunny day, and thus perfect to go out and play in the snow, without getting our face all soaked, as happened, when we attempted to go snow sliding the 1st snow day. Because only the main roads were shuffled, it was up to us, to dig through the snow. As someone who has never experienced so much snow before, I had great fun!