Le Premier Mai

(written 4/30/15)
In the canton of Fribourg, the first of May is a holiday a little like Halloween! The children go knocking on doors in the neighborhood, and receive candy. However, it lasts all day, and instead of saying "trick or treat" with scary masks and costumes, they sing songs amidst the spring flowers. Quite a difference!

When the first of May falls on a week day, the children have a holiday from school. The schools teach songs in class that are prepared for May first. Many of the children that came to the door today were carrying their music class folders and sang songs with friends or siblings like little choirs. Wait! Today? April 30th? This year the newspapers announced that the children would exceptionally be visiting the Saturday before (today) so as to let the community have a call-free Sunday. That would certainly never happen for Halloween!

For the first of May, people prepare a bowl of candies the way we do for Halloween, but most also keep a bowl of coins. Unlike US dollars, Swiss francs are still coins at 1CHF, 2CHF, and 5CHF, so children often receive the equivalent of two dollars from every neighbor. Tabea told me that when she was a little, she would get up to 100CHF! Adults chuckle about how when they were small, May first was their source of revenue for the entire year.

We did not have many visitors this year, but Monika said that normally there are around 70 children every first of May, which is pretty impressive considering the size of our village! She spent the morning tucking "cailler branches au chocolat" into dough and baking them to make "pains au chocolat" which is popular snack in France and Swiss Romande. She also prepared a bowl of coins, and a box of little paper books about Jesus to give to the children. All this we kept by the front door. I was in the living room writing for most of the day, so when Tabea and Monika left, I took on the responsibility of listening to the children singing!

Elise did her rounds in the morning, and Tabea and I accompanied her. She was pretty shy at first, but each time she sang she got more and more confident, and all the neighbors were very nice. She got 51CHF and 23 candies in two hours, including the time the time that we stopped to visit with everyone that we called on. Conversations are just so Swiss! We had a great time running through the village, and I think that maybe next May first I will go singing through my neighborhood in French and see if I can get 50 dollars too!

Just Checking In! :)

School Life:

Up at the crack of dawn!

Where is everyone?

Oh.... That class was cancelled today...

Lunchtime silliness! 

The best test I ever had to take!

"Heat the room, not Switzerland!" Close the chezing window!

...but it is so beautiful outside!!!

Whew! Caught the train ten seconds before departure!

Best seat in the house! ;)

Choir Life:

Guess who has a concert coming up?

We doooo!!!

Guys, the rehearsal is starting...

Welcome my nest after practice!

Springtime:

Ma cour du college

...en fleurs!

Ahhh, spring rains!

Wait! It's the end of April, and it's snowing again!

 Doing Great!

Will be back home soon!

Tour de Romandie

Today while I was at school, an important bike race passed right by my house! There was a lot of media coverage, security, and even a van that passed out flags to all the spectators before the cyclists came by. On the flag that Elise is waving you can see the "Tour de Romandie" which means "the tour of French-speaking Switzerland", and "Raiffeisen" is a Swiss bank that sponsored the race. My host family gave me a flag afterwards and it is now proudly waving from my coat rack! In the second photo you can see the cyclists with my house in the background! I have tried riding a bike up the hill to my house before...so I know that these guys are incredible! The third photo is a map that shows the first step in the race which took place today. See if you can spot Siviriez, our neighboring village!

Rencontre de Jeunesse

The Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the 22nd of April was the "Rencontre de Jeunesse" or "RJ" youth conference for christian teens (mostly evangelical) from all over French-speaking Switzerland. There were even church groups that came from France and Italy! A lot of people brought sleeping bags and stayed the whole weekend. The event took place at the "Espace Gruyere" which is a giant building in Bulle (named after the region, not the cheese) which normally functions as an ice rink, but was transformed into a concert hall by the army of RJ volunteers just for this weekend!

 A large part of the building was reserved for stands selling food, christian brand clothing, christian music, christian books, game experiences, and stands working to bring awareness to their various organizations. There was a blow up bouncy castle, a mural painting in progress, numerous photo-shoot setups, a bandstand with live music, courses to try out a new electric, 2-wheeled skateboard/scooter, carton-tower building contests, chin-up contests, and even a nurf battle terrain! I loved looking around at all the people that were there. There were everything from good christian, country conservative types to some shockingly eccentric or even goth kids that all found their place and felt welcome at this conference. I ran into many people I knew from Friday night youth group at Oron, and even someone from choir!

I had a great time running around the conference with Tabea and our friends from youth group! We explored all the stands, ate french fries late every night after the last worship concert had finished, got into the crowd early to run through the aisles and reserve seats right up front, danced and sang to the worship songs we knew, and spent the whole weekend filled with all the positive and spectacular energy of christian youth revival!

There were messages throughout the entire conference addressing everything from initiating evangelical healing to sexuality. We heard testimonies from giant evangelists from all over the world. The most impressive by far was an eccentric American named Tod White who shared his incredible transformation from drug dealer to fearless messenger of God. I benefited from hearing all his messages twice: in English and then French. There was a speaker from Quebec who's accent was not only an adventure to try and understand, but frighteningly catchy.



There was a lot of silliness at the conference! We were treated to a faked interview with a pair of guest llamas, a jingle that instructed us in the usage of the RJ hashtag, dances lead by our hosts dressed as tetris pieces, and impressive beat-boxing skills by our guest speakers. I guess that is just the way you catch the attention of three thousand teenagers in a concert hall!

The concerts were always something powerful to witness! Their setup was spectacular, especially considering that it had all been brought there and constructed on top of an ice rink! There were a million gorgeous lighting affects that came from I don't even know what, suspended from I don't even know where, and distributed all throughout the conference. There were semi-transparent, drop-down screens where they projected testimonies and videos to absolutely fill the hall with the message of the conference. I became frequently distracted by a mesmerizing video

camera that swung out across the room on a long, operator-controlled arm, and sent its footage to four, giant screens up front. Screen time was shared between this fantastical piece of equipment and an army of black-clothed reporter camera carriers that dodged in and out of the musicians onstage and the audience below like paparazzi agents.

The music was awesome! We were even honored to have our own youth group worship team on stage for most of the concerts, selected out of all of the other participant churches!

The beautiful photos above were taken by the photographers of the conference, but below is my small, video contribution which will prove to you all that I successfully protected by hearing throughout all the concerts with a pair of styling earplugs! PEACE!

Weekend at Geneva

Once upon a time...

It was rainy on Saturday morning when I took the train to Geneva. It was around two hours of gorgeous, green, Swiss countryside and grape vines boardering lake Geneva. This is my favorite rout by far, especially with the cozy, grey sky and raindrops pattering against the windows. I arrived before our meeting time, so I went exploring around the station, climbing every staircase and peeking around every corner. The morning was pleasantly spent in a cute, little cafe with my exchange student friends Isabelle, who lives at Geneva and comes from Sweden, and Yash, who lives in Swiss Germany and comes from India. We laughed, caught up, drank tea, and looked at the photos that Isabelle took on her class trip to England.

After that the sun came out, so we took to parkouring all over Geneva to find touristic points and food. We were too distracted by being ridiculously silly to know exactly where we were going, but I don't think I have laughed so much in my life, and the other tourists certainly had no lack of entertainment. The fountain was being refurbished, but we visited the reformation wall, le parc des bastions, the UN building, and most of the city in the process. At noon we ate kebab, the Swiss favorite in exotic and inexpensive street food (which was delicious!), and then had the best ice cream ever at a fancy little restaurant next to the lake. The kebab man got to know us pretty well by the time our Kebabs were finished, and took to Switching between English, French for Isabelle and I, and German for Yash. The little park birds nearby our picnic spot benefited from my generosity with small fry morsels, but there came such a crowd that Yash started to get claustrophobic and we had to chase them off. The people-watching there on the parc bench was quite something, and I am sure we contributed to this a great deal! By the afternoon we were so worn out that we sat down on a bench in the shade with the martini-drinking couples of Geneva, and dozed until Yash had to go to the train station. (See our end-of-day selfie above!)

I spent the night at Isabelle's host home. The drive through the neighborhood was bordered by old, stone walls pouring with green plants, and overhung with the bows of trees. There were blooming lilacs and cute gardens everywhere! Her host family was very perfect and very chic, but her home felt more like a cage with it's speckles, white walls, hard, modern lines, and compete lack of individuality or personality. We Skyped with her family and Sweden and stayed up until midnight watching a recording of a performance by Gad Elmaleh, a French stand-up comedian who is absolutely hysterical!

It poured all day Sunday, so we visited the red cross museum! There was a lot of metaphoric art and many interactive exhibits that I loved. It showed what the red cross works to accomplish today and how that has evolved throughout history. Disaster relief, reconnecting and establishing communication lines between separated families, fighting for human dignity and rights, supporting abused people, finding justice for crimes against humanity, and general super-humanitarian efforts were given plausibility and evidence throughout the day. There was also an art gallery of impressive images that drew attention to cruelty and conflict in the world. They were both magnificent and devastating. Luckily, running and laughing to catch the tram in the rain lighted our hearts, and a hot chocolate and soup for lunch warmed my soul. The little boulangerie where we finished the day was so cozy and lovely, but the rainy train ride home through the spring countryside was calling. When Monika picked me up from the station at Romont, I really felt like I was going home, and I was so glad to find it as warm as ever as my entire host family and my host grandparents gathered around the table for dinner!

Sending love and hugs to all those back home!