Sara-nading the World: Day 6 - An International Dinner

I woke up super late today. While the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Institute is amazing, it's incredibly difficult to smush a time of such productiveness and fun into one month. And I'm a little tired, but I'm having too much fun to care. Maybe I'll start drinking coffee.

Anyway, after a mad dash to wash myself and go to breakfast and then to the announcements, I went to class. This class was taught by Dr. Alessandra Von Burg, and is called "Citizenship and Conflict". http://blogs.bftf.org/classes/citizenship/ Essentially, today we were able to go around and discuss various methods of citizenship and the social movements within the populaces of each country, which took quite a long time. Afterward, we split into different groups and began to serve as leaders of fictional countries to practice the ideas of compromise and democracy. I'm currently the president of the country "North", which is an authoritarian regime stooped in poverty. Go figure.

But I think the negotiations worked fairly well! Tomorrow, we'll be writing a resolution to the resolutions to see if we want to build alliances (and YES, we do, in order to expand our trade routes). Shout out to Denada from Albania, Gabriela from Bulgaria, Alvaro, and Richards!

Lunch, I think, is always one of the more fun events during the day. Even though we're rushing to get between classes and such, we always have funny little instances that occur that brighten the whole rest of the day.

Richards is eating 5 plates of food. The American Dream has been achieved.

For example, my friend Lorik pulled out his wallet. To a ton of money. I'm not going to say how much, but it was a lot. His reasoning? "Where else would I put it?"

Lorik... Just because we are at the Benjamin Franklin Institute doesn't mean you carry around multiple Benjamin Franklins...

Molly from New York? Euros? That's my girl.

Classes resumed, and basically negotiations between countries occurred. I can finally understand why discourse in Congress seems to go nowhere sometimes. Because while I may try my best to move forward on a point, there will be obstacles. And quite honestly, some of those obstacles are unexpected. For example, there sometimes are cultural differences or personality differences in between some of the fellows that I'm noticing. Today, there were constant tiffs between some of the fellows between rival nations, and it was quite uncomfortable. I didn't realize that some of the fellows would take simple questions so personally, and as a non-confrontational person, I hated it. But in the end, I think we're almost to achieving the ideal state for the "North".

Last, but definitely not least, was the International Dinner. Some of the recipes submitted by my friends were selected to be prepared. Those that were selected prepared a course (appetizer, entree, dessert) for all of the fellows. It was delicious. In the great words of my friend Victoire, "I'm too scared to try new foods because if I fall in love with it, I will crave it for the rest of my life." And that is quite true. I will want some of these foods for the rest of my life.

And afterwards, those that didn't prepare food (namely me), helped clean up. And even cleaning up was a simple pleasure that I will not forget. We ended up singing songs from "The Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins" as we scrubbed away, swept, and folded chairs. And afterwards, we played basketball/soccer/football/volleyball with a bouncy ball that had lost most of its air. Some of the boys remarked that I was a great weight for weightlifting. Go figure. Again. And some of them decided to go ahead and practice. Go figure. Thrice. But all in all, it was a beautiful time of different foods and different cultures coming together for a literal celebration of diversity.