Our Grand German Adventure

Just to have everybody on the same page, we lost our first round against Germany 1 with the resolution THBT human cloning should be allowed (as you already know), we won our second against Hungary with the topic THBT marriage is not a life sentence with us as Opp, third round against LGH with the topic THBT a childfree lifestyle is a responsible choice as Opp, fourth round against Friedrich Abel with the prepared round THBT that colonialism is a crime and compensation should be paid to former colonies , the fifth round against Serbia with the resolution THBT advertising around schools should be banned, sixth against Hoderlin with the prepared resolution THBT monarchy has no place in our modern world, we lost our seventh round against Israel when we were Prop for the resolution THBT human beings should not be sent into space, and we won our following round where we were Opp against Parler with the prepared resolution THBT North Korea has the right to develop nuclear power.

We became incredible friends with most of the Hungarian team and the Israeli team and Serbian team and with our student guides, who changed each day, and showed us around the region and brought us to our host schools every day around 8 in the morning and left us around 8 at night or so. Every day we had packed with tours and activities and then debates and then wandered the Christmas market and went to restaurants or to our houses and prepared there and debriefed about the day then the next morning in the Lessing-Gymnasium cafeteria, Elisa, our amazing chaperone, would tell us what she thought about the rounds we had the day before and had taped and we worked out what we needed to work on and who were our major opponents and what we needed to do to win that day.

So that's the update for now, I have Social in about fifty minutes and I'll go read over my Bio textbook for that time.
I'll get everybody else to update too and see how this blog develops post-competition.

Bye for now!
Michael

Hi all! I'm having issues with their keyboard as the y is not in the same spot as our's are back home so Kate will type instead because she has a similar kezboard
Similar I don't know... I would go more with different too!

On the plane was fun. While on the flight we made friends with Ahat - aka Emilio (according to Elisa and Mike). He was a very cute 3 year old sititng in front of them. By the end of the flight he ended up on our laps. His mother was worried for a bit, but as she had another baby I think she was just relieved we babysat him :) We taught him to High-5 then pound, which was entertaining. He wasn't verz clear on defininitive articles, so everyone was Lisa, and Georgeanne was because she had no shoes, and he didn't either. Logically.

So we all arrived, with all our luggage, and we were all met by our hosts, which is in total nothing short of a miracle.
Long flight, but we bought expresso in Frankfurt, so it's OK.

The one rather entertaining thing is that they assumed Erin was a guy and so had great plans to make her and Mike share a room... didn't work out too well. So Mike and Erin are together in the same family that hosted Will and Josh last zear. They were dissapointed that we weren't as musical! They had people over for supper (raclette - melted cheese etc, very yummy)
I went over last night to socialize because my family is about 500m away from Mike's. It was fun! His host mother speaks spanish, so it was a verz multi-cultural evening.

My host family is very nice. I'm learning German! So far I have road, trée, knife, fork, spoon, and other happy nouns figured out. (that last sentace took a reallz long time to write as randßom tings kept popping up!=)

They speak a fair amount of English. Not as good as MC, but we get along with gestures and a dictionary. (speaking slowly and loudly, as I said I never would! )

Mike's famiy has very good English. Georgeanne is very far away in another village (beorde), as the hosting people from the city of Stuttgart appear to be from a massive collection of villages.


Back to Mike because he's bored perching on the stairs.
The computer is in a fun corner at the top of the stairs with the roof slanting with a sky-light just at the right height for mz head so I'm not decapitated.

So we had our first round today around 2pm at Max-Born-Gymnasium school, after opening music from the students playing first big band music and then two piano and panflute duets then opening comments from the MP equivalent of the region and a representative from Stuttgart (said Shu-gart btw) City Hall. Then they gave us the resolution THBT human cloning should be allowed and we were Prop against Germany 1, apparently one of the hardest teams we'll face. Drum roll please.................We lost. But it was close. We defined human cloning as theraputic cloning, essentially the cloning of tissues and organs. I wanted to be ballsy about it and just go with full human cloning but we decided to be reasonable and define it that way. We were worried about narrowing it down too much but it turned out that everybody else defined "human cloning" the same way but unfortunately it quickly became a "definitions debate" with the Opp standing against the cloning of humans over all, saying that it would be equilavent to a "genetic photocopier" which would deny individuality and the specialness of humans as people whereas we talked about the need for this technology (my somewhat explained point that was pretty good but not greatly presented but something to work on, eh?) and the benefits of stopping a blackmarket in organs to make up for the lack of current organ donation and availability (Kate's point) Georgeanne was an awesome third speaker and Erin was our dutiful cameragirl. On a side note, POIs are allowed to just be statements, the Israeli judge (who's really good at giving comments and criticism and as we learned at the Festival of Nations is crayz...wait, strike that and reverse it.... there you go...) told Kate in the post-round comments as she asked the Germans if they had actual questions when they stood up and made speeches about why we were wrong...
But they're really fun and we enjoyed the round over all. We lost over all by one point on about 250, a symbolic gesture to show how generally close it was. Arg at definition debates.... Team Canada, Dylan, Erica, Kirsten and Andrew, won as Opp so that was happy.

Then we had food and merriment and then the Festival of Nations where we learned that all Central (Eastern) European countries' representatives think they invented an alcoholic beverage that one guy admitted he stole from his father's closet...

On the train back after the country presentations Erin and Kate and I were talking to one of the guys on the Israeli team about Canada being really big and how we're apparently "America' little bitch" according to somebody who told him to say that. We found that funny coming from the country that benefits the most from the US weapons and technology it receieves but that could be just our Canadian perspective talking.

Random fact: it seems you never drink non-bubblified water here. We've only had essentially Perrier water by another name and wine and loads of tea and cappuccinos and apfelsaft (basically pure apple juice). Even at the school we had two ,75 litre bottles of this "Eiszeit Quell" water and three cups.

Um. So that's a taste of Germany so far. We've made friends with a random child going to Karachi with his family, Emilio, Andi from the Czech Republic (especially Erica who loves him) and one of the guys from Israel. Germany is essentially awesome and I love it here.

That's all for now, we'll see if other people update some time soon and hope life in Calgary is going well. Just a quick gloat before I (Mike) sign off for the night, as it's ten to eleven currently, CBC's website tells me it's -23,7 degrees Celsius right now back home. We're looking forward to about 13 tomorrow and it's actually too hot to wear my winter jacket that I took because of the weather back home. Hehehe. That was mean but somewhat necessary.

So I'm off to bed and we'll be talking to ya sometime soon!

Hugs from Stuttgart (Nellmersbach is where Erin and Kate and I are and all the others are in other villages around the immediate area of the S-Bahn, the Stuttgart and area train.

Bye for now and wish us luck!!!

Mike (on behalf of all other Germans for now)

# posted by Cohen @ 1:02 PM 16 comments

the teddy bears have their pic-nic! Coincidentally, we're leaving on a plane to Frankfurt in about seven hours from now. It leaves at 5:45 in theory so we'll see how that turns out.
I'm officially excited. The question "what the hell are we doing?" comes up quite often when I think of our soon to be real adventure but I'm so looking forward to it and it'll be awesome.
I'm off to finish off some Bio homework and be excited.
Until later and I'll try to update when we're in Europe.

Bye for now!
Me.

We talked about the monarchy and its continued place in our modern world this morning and we're doing nuclear power in the DPRK tomorrow. We're getting there and we'll have cases and know what's happening very soon and packing and freaking out about many little or not so little things will ensue tonight and the days to come.
Hooray for fairly meaningless updates!

Until later!
Mike

We now have one case.
We received the draw for Stuttgart this weekend and thus have been able to prepare the sides we need to, which is very wonderful.
As previously mentioned, we do now have a fairly functionable case that we're filling out further in the next day or so for the resolution This house believes that colonialism is a crime and that compensation should be paid to former colonies.
We have this resolution as our practice round Tuesday after school in M. Poirier's room if you want to see what tonight amounted to and we'll talk to you all later!

Bye for now! (5 days)
Mike

Hi all. This is the first post for our blog for our trip to Stuttgart, from the 24th of November to the 4th of December. Erin, Georgeanne, Kate and I are going, along with Erica on the other Team Canada.
We'll try to have somewhat frequent updates about our situation and how Stuttgart is and hopefully loads of pictures when we get back.
So yeah, that's all for now. Thought we should have a blog to serve as a vicarious outlet for people and to let you know how we are without having long group emails.

Until later! (9 days!)
Mike