Pre-halfterm Week

Hello everyone,

My apologies for missing my blog post last week---I do feel bad about this, and it's not much of an excuse, but the truth is last week I completely forgot and every time I thought about going to update it something started happening that delayed it even more!  So I will let you all know what's been going on for the past two weeks.

A great way for me to remember what's been going on is to check my past emails from my school email account.  The college has a pretty efficient system of communication where anyone can email anyone else in the school, or the groups of people to whom the email is relevant.  So checking back through my emails, I can see what I and others have been up to---emails are sent out about everything from a first-year vs. second-year basketball game (which was a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders) to Gender and Sexuality Focus Week workshops to Lost-and-Found emails.  There are quite a few of the latter, since everyone who loses something sends out a campus-wide email describing it and promising food for the person who locates it.  Food is the preferred currency here....if you want to ask a favor, chocolate always helps it along!

This past week was Gender and Sexuality Focus Week, which was an awareness period about homosexuality and bisexuality within the college and in the rest of the world.  Some people ran workshops with titles like 'What if your roommate is gay?' and had debates on issues like gay parent adoption.  I went to that debate to listen to what was being said, but the debate ended up being completely overshadowed by the group discussion we had afterwards.  Everyone participated, making it a strong exchange of different viewpoints, and I don't think anyone walked away offended because in general we all accept others' rights to their own opinions.  That's something I love about this place:  these initiatives work because we are ready to have an open dialogue with each other about any sort of topic.  I'm looking forward to more focus weeks in the future!

Checking further back in my emails, I see that we had a Disney Marathon in Morgannwg last weekend---that basically consisted of showing multiple Disney films and people from other houses crowding into our dayroom to catch a glimpse back at our childhood.  One interesting thing about watching Disney with international students: everyone knew the songs in their own languages!  So while I was singing along in English, Coral might be joining in with the Spanish version while Paula added German, and someone else sang in French or Chinese or whatever.  That was lots of fun.

I see from several extremely stressed 'lost' emails regarding missing USB drives that two weeks ago was the second-years' deadline for their Extended Essays, one of the IB requirements...it was a hectic week for them as they tried to pull it together, and missing USBs were a big issue.

Service has been going very well---we have been doing sessions for about a month now, and they are really rewarding to participate in.  I'm leading my first session on Wednesday---that means that I will make a plan for what songs and activities we will be doing at the session, as well as taking charge of the session while we are there.  Hopefully it will go well! 

There's only one week of school left before our week-long half-term break....a wonderful feature of the British school system that I know we all appreciate.  Dad and Katie are coming over, which I am very excited about, since I miss them and everyone else at home.  Some people who live close are going home, but others are traveling around the UK or Europe during this time.  Some are staying in the castle, but whatever anyone is doing it is sure to be a welcome break.  One of my goals is to catch up on sleep---we have all acrued a heavy sleep debt whilst here!

Finally, I'd like to say Happy Birthday to Susu and Papa John...hope you guys have/had great birthdays!  To everyone else at home, I miss you a lot and I hope you are all doing great.

Madi