Semaine thématique (themed week)

One week out of every school year is reserved for a "themed week" during which each class investigates a topic chosen by their overseeing professor by: making presentations, hearing conferences, interviewing people, going on field trips, etc.

The third years always go on a trip to another country during this week. This actually caused some drama on Tuesday as a group of St-Michel students arrived late to catch their train at the Metro station in Brussels where they would have been in the middle of the terrorist explosions had they arrived on time. No one was hurt, and they are coming right home, but there was a fair amount of concern as news of the attacks came in with no news of our comrades.

My class's overseeing professor is also our geography teacher, and our history teacher tagged along to help, so our topic was "Fribourg in prehistory: the landscape and people" which cleverly combined both historic and geographical thematic elements.

Monday and Tuesday we researched different topics in groups and then presented them in front of the class for a geography grade. My group studied "mammoths in Switzerland". We got a 5.5, which was the highest grade in the class! Other topics included: "Ötzi, the ice man", "the man of Schnidejoch and the alpine passes", "the cavern bears of Fribourg", "the frozen landscape of Switzerland more than 10,000 years ago", and "rituals and prayers in Switzerland".

It was very low stress to work on our presentations all day. During breaks, we would all go to the deserted cafeteria and crowded together to watch chess matches between classmates, often with our history teacher moving pieces without invitation and giving funny comentary. One afternoon, he bought everyone in my class a chocolate milk. Wednesday morning we had a guest orator who works for the city of Fribourg and came to present some of the archaeological work currently happening in Switzerland to study prehistory, important past discoveries, and how our theories about the era continue to change. Our history teacher ended up butting in all the time, and gave so much commentary that he almost talked more than the orator, who got quite vexed by the end. Our history teacher is quite a character! I really should write a blog post just on him one of the these days.

Wednesday afternoon our geography teacher took us on a trip to see the lacustre village at Gletterens, which is a reconstruction of how we believe the prehistoric peoples lived in that location. Clovis had a disgusting can of conserved beef (a little like spam) that all the boys inevitably passed around to taste and made the whole bus smell like cat food. It was very funny!

When we arrived it was freezing cold, so we ended up taking shelter in one of the lacustre huts to eat lunch, and waited anxiously for the tour guide to come and teach us how to make fire. It was a curiously symbolic experience. The tour guide gave us a quick overview of the significance of fire in man's history, its uses, our theories about how it was originally acquired, and at what point it became universal. He then gave demonstrations on how we have created fire through the ages using pressure/friction on wood, pressurization of oxygen, flint and steel sparks, which various metals or rocks worked, which ones created light but not sparks and count not be used, and so on. He showed us which forest mushrooms, various plant fibers, and paper were best to light. Sadly, the Swiss fell all the dead trees and take good care of their forests for harvesting wood, except in wild life reserves where mushroom gathering is inhibited, so the giant, tree mushrooms can only be found in France. We noted all this for the cooking fire we would build the next day.

 

Afterwards, we all went into the field and threw lances (tir à la sagaie) with feathers to keep direction and wooden throw sticks to increase speed. It was easy enough to do moderately even with no arm strength, and very amusing! M. Morard, our geography teacher picked the best out of every round and had a contest at the end against them all to see who could hit the hay bale. The boys were going to win until Clovis threw his too far, and it went into a pond across the field. Everyone ran over to see as he took off his boots and waded in to get back his lance. He walked back like a Hobbit, declaring that he was more comfortable without his boots! We nicknamed him "Ötzi, the ice man" after our presentation.


The trip back required a long wait at a bus stop by a primary school, so when the limited adolescent patience had run thin, we ran over to the playground and messed around like small children until the bus came. We jumped through the shrubberies, climbed on the modern art, stood around in empty water troughs, got our presentation grades from M. Morard, went down the slide six at a time, took ridiculous snap-chat photos, and generally amused ourselves in doing nothing.

Thusday morning we met at the train station in Fribourg and then took a bus to Villars-sur-Glane where we did a little class shopping to get fire wood, fruit, flower, vegetables, sausages, marshmallows, plates, and everything we needed for our prehistory cook out. We carried it all to a picnic area in the middle of a forest at Moncor that was already equipped with a fire pit, picnic tables, and all the natural resources (except the mushrooms) that we needed to build a fire like the tour guide had showed us the day before.

Even with flint and steel, getting dry leaves to light was a lot harder than we had thought. We ended up throwing in a lighted match when our professor was not looking. (That about thwarted the only connection our picnic had with prehistory.) I think I was the only one in my class who had ever built a camp fire before, or had ever been camping, or had a pyromaniac for a brother, so my expertise was much more valuable than I could ever have imagined. I lead the boys in fire tending while the girls prepared their dough for pies at a picnic bench nearby. Once our fire was a healthy size, we broke out the cervelat (the honorary, national sausage of Switzerland) and found branches to roast them on. Someone lent their Swiss army knife, and they showed me how to cut the ends like a cross so they fold open when the sausage is cooked. By the time the girls had finished the crust for their pies, we had already had a satisfactory meal of roasted cervelat and marshmallows. One guy started on a vegetable soup with the expertise of an eleven chef and we all gathered around the picnic tables for a sort of sit down meal. This lasted until the raspberry pie had finished and all dissolved into chaos.

I did not think I could eat a morsel more after our afternoon of feasting, but then my class starting preparing dessert. Evidently this is a Swiss thing, because I had never heard of it before, but others with more experience may correct me in the comments. It is a banana with dark chocolate inserted into an incision down the middle, wrapped in foil, and put in the dying embers of the fire to cook for a few minutes before being taken out and eaten. It is surprisingly delicious!

At one o'clock everyone began to gather their things and head back down the trail to the bus stop. We wished each other a good Easter break (we now have two weeks off of school) and headed away in our various directions with much laughter and camaraderie. Everyone is so excited for vacation, but I am really going to miss all my friends, my classes, and spending my days in Fribourg.