This last week has been full of events with Orionis and I have had no time to update the blog. Therefore you can look forward to another long read today, as I will be catching up with this post.
Sunday, eight days ago, I visited the Van Gogh museum, which my colleagues had recommended. I took an audio tour and learned a lot about Van Gogh and his paintings. The museum leads you through a great storyline of Van Gogh's life as an artist and showcases a large collection of his paintings, drawings. The life of Van Gogh is well documented, because he wrote a lot of letters to his brother, Vincent. It is also dramatic as he gets himself into a lot of trouble by arguing with other painters, he becomes mentally ill and he commits suicide at an early age. I think I like the story more than the paintings. His style of art was ahead of his time and I admire him for being able to understand so much about art before everyone else, but I find the works of contemporary artists more interesting and relevant.
Monday, Orionis had arranged an event called Crazy 88. It is a game you win by completing as many crazy tasks from the list as possible. It gives me associations to American Pie: Beta House, I don't know if you've seen it... Anyway, I had a feeling that it would be fun, if we really committed ourselves to it, but otherwise not. So, I did my best to lift the mood of the group and have fun with the tasks, but it didn't work very well. I think there were just too many problems - it was organized poorly. If you ask me what the most crazy thing I did was, then I think you will be disappointed to hear that I didn't do anything worse than climbing a lamppost and get a little ride on the back of a stranger's bike.
Wednesday was much more fun. We had dinner in our group and everyone was there. That's 14 students in one student apartment. We had a traditional dutch dish called Boerenkool, which is the name of a cabbage used in the dish. The dish is made by mashing potatoes and Boerenkool together. It is served with brown sauce, bacon, sausage and apple puree. It's the type of dish you eat with your grandparents on their farm, but it's also had by students because it is so cheap to make.
I left for Friesland by taking a train to Baarn. Here, I met up with one of my group members who had arranged for his father to drive us to Balk, Friesland. When we arrived, we were greeted by the MoCo (the organizers of the weekend) and we got checked in and unpacked. As there was no dinner arranged for us, we then went to a snack bar and had fastfood. After dinner we all gathered in the main room and got an official welcome by MoCo. They told us to prepare ourselves to show ourselves to show our act (like everyone else we had prepared an act, which mostly consisted of making fools of ourselves for a minute). So we all got dressed up and went to the discotheque in our costumes. The Moco kicked off the show themselves with a great act. They were dressed up as captains and stewardesses, did a good choreography to some nice party music and they had the whole crowd cheering and dancing. Everyone had a lot of fun we all got to show our acts. In between each act the DJ made sure to play some music that got people dancing, so we didn't grow tired of watching the poor performances of the groups. It was great fun and we danced on to around 3.30.
My group, dressed up for our silly act
The next day started at 7.30, when we got up and did a little gym routine together. I don't mind that kind of thing, but some people were a bit tired from the day before. We also did a little race, I think we ran 400-600 meters. I won, because I like to compete and I'm not that bad at running. This gave us some more points towards the trophy and I was rather pleased with that. Then we had a horrible breakfast (I don't like dry white bread with ham and I had to drink a lot of milk to get through my sandwich) and then we went sailing. I got on a team with Derek (instructor), Thea (Finnish Girl from my group), Thalina and Rosa. Together we sailed in the Valk and we had a great time. The weather was perfect, sunny all day and 7 m/s. Two times we went past a cafe at a bridge, where many of the others stopped, but we preferred to sail instead. We had lunch on a little island in the middle of a lake (white bread again! What is wrong with you Dutch students?!). I don't think I can accurately describe how much I enjoyed the sailing, but I'll give it a try. I felt happy all over and gave compliments to Derek for being a nice instructor, I talked a lot (a side effect from being very happy I think) and at one point I noticed, how overflowing I was with happiness and decided to just close my eyes and enjoy that...
Back ashore the MoCo had something special planned for us in the evening. It was an initiation ceremony, executed in cult-like style. My overall impression of the event is, that it was very well executed, but I don't think I would ever arrange something like that myself. But you must see it in a context, because all student unions in Amsterdam does this kind of thing. The basic idea is that new members should be treated very poorly by the older members up until they complete the initiation ceremony and become full members. This is supposed to make them feel a sense of accomplishment for becoming a member and a strong connection to the other new members, who suffered the same pains. I had been warned on beforehand about this and I made sure to wear some clothes that I didn't care too much for...
First, they took us outside and had us march up and down the street in silence. They would shout at us like sergeants teaching us to obey orders without question and to stay silent, unless asked to speak. While we did this, I had a feeling that they were just stalling for time. There were only two MoCo present and they didn't really have anything they wanted to accomplish other than put us in the right mood. When we walked silently, in orderly rows back inside the main building we could see why. The whole place had been covered in black plastic bags, there were small candlelights everywhere and we had to sit on the floor in front of an elevated desk with three MoCo dressed in black robes. More Moco were standing around with water pistols in some rather sexy guard costumes (well, at least the girls looked sexy). Intensely dark music were being played, the type of music you would expect in a movie at an execution scene and MoCo and their helpers were amplifying the music by stomping the ground. The effect was stunning, and I must say I was positively surprised again by the amount of hard work they must have put into it, to make such a good execution in the end. After the music stopped there was a long, tense silence before the MoCo finally addressed us and started the games. Groups were called forth to compete against each other. Often the most brave would step forward and champion for their groups in the games. To mention a few examples, the champions did: showcase sexual positions and use them to pop balloons, drink beer out of a shoe, play a quiz game where you could only answer after smashing a cream bun (floedebolle) on top of a group members head and get their hair on the chest waxed off. If your champion, or sometimes your whole team, lost the competition you would be punished. Some of the punishments were: getting 'a pancake' meaning having the ingredients of a pancake mixed in your hair, getting your hair spraycolored (we got that one, green and silver glimmer)... I think you get the idea from these examples. It lasted for a couple of hours and I got a little tired of it in the end. The fatigue from not having slept much last night was also setting in. I was quite indifferent to getting punished or not, unlike some who were scared of it, so I didn't really stay emotionally involved and got bored. In the end we got our diplomas and got declared full Orionis members. Up until that point we had been called monsters. We then went on to party at the discoteque, I guess some people had a shower because I didn't see any pancakes that night, but my group went with our colorful hair and champagne-sprayed clothes. This night the event was a beer relay tournament. Unfortunately the DJ was less successful at getting everyone to dance in between the beer drinking matches, so the event felt too long. The good part was that we won the tournament, but there was a lot of confusion and the other team initially got declared the winner. Only later did it get discovered that we had in fact won. We were very proud of this and we also got some points towards the trophy. This night I went home early. It had already been a long day and I didn't really feel like dancing all night. The house was still locked when I got home, I guess I must have been one of the first, but I climbed in through a window and took a nice warm shower before going to bed. I fell asleep around the time my group members started coming home.
The next day I woke up feeling much better rested than the day before. We slept until nine and had some nice breakfast served, because the MoCo wanted to emphasize the difference from last night when we were still monsters. After breakfast I was ready to go sailing, but unfortunately it was very windy and the MoCo decided we should stay ashore. That could have been a good decision if they had planned something for us to do while staying ashore, but they didn't. We ended up doing a lot of waiting, spending a lot of time among ourselves and doing a few silly games. It felt like waiting for the bus to arrive and I guess it was. I think they should have let the experienced sailors have their fun instead or at least have a proper backup plan, but ok nobody's perfect. I still think they did a great job overall and I feel inspired to take some things home and see if we can make something happen in Denmark. The final thing before the bus arrived was the trophy ceremony. I felt confident that we would win, as we had won the notable competitions and we were also ahead before we came. However, we ended up in second place, behind a team with a somewhat different strategy for earning points. Points are also awarded for kissing and this team apparently did a lot of that, one of them even managed to kiss with a MoCo (that's a lot of points, you see). But even though we didn't win, I felt quite good at the ceremony. We got a special applause for winning the beer relay and the best thing... Do you remember the t-shirt I mentioned a couple of weeks ago? How I said: "I bet it will turn out great and end up as a famous t-shirt"... Well, I'm not sure if it got famous or not, but it won the best t-shirt award, so at least it got the attention of the MoCo (I'm proud of it, so what? It's my blog).
The end of a this great weekend was the trip home by bus. I had expected everyone to sleep, but in fact the mood was still good. We sang along to a few songs and had ourselves a little afterparty as the bus-driver suggested. I've never had such a cool bus-driver before. He was playing music for us and encouraging us to party. At one point we were in a queue, so he left his seat and went upstairs to talk with us. When the queue started moving he had to run down and start the bus again. We all said our goodbyes at the Amsterdam central station Sunday evening.
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