Sit back, make yourself comfortable and let us tell you that you missed quite a lot if you haven´t celebrated the first International village of 2017 with us in great style. As per usual, we gathered in the City hall of Banská Bystrica, this time on Thursday the 6th of April. It was just the time for SocialErasmus week, so we did not think twice about giving this event a beneficial touch and we connected it with an adoption campaign and donation for the stray animals shelter in Zvolen where so many of our Erasmus students love to go dog walking. The visitors of the City hall could see the pictures our students took during their last visit to the shelter and we collected quite a nice sum of money that the doggies and kitties will definitely appreciate.
The presentations opened with the British who, with the driest of humours took us a bit into their land and we also guessed a few very English words, that we are sure were not in English at all. You already may know about the spiders, snakes and other types of danger in Australia. But beware…not every mate might really be your mate. And you know what does Poland have in common with Turkey? They both made us dance a little bit to their respective national tunes.
Well, we all giggled as the French seemed to be confused about whether to sing their national anthem or not, but they did, as every French would be proud to do it. The Spanish introduced us to the very appealing concept of mañana, which is…well, we will tell you later. Now we also know that you can say anything about USA and still having the right to say it. Inka is the person to tell you something about liquorice. You don´t like it? Doesn´t matter. Saunas would make you want to stay in that cold country of Finland for sure. When you think of a country with some of the oldest flags in this world, then you are thinking of …a country with as much wild places as it can get. Want to get lost in a forest? In Latvia it won´t be a problem, that´s the country we are talking about! If you don´t know who has the fire in this global country game, think again. Maybe you will find Azerbaijan, the land of…fire! We are sure that Alfred Hitchcock was right about the Zadar sunsets. But apparently, Nikola Tesla was Croatian? Who knew that! Now we do. And you can mention Kim Kardashian when talking about Armenia, but of course, she is far from the only very successful human resource that Armenia gave to the world. Have you ever heard of Robert Kardashian? It´s not every day that you have the president of ESN Bosnia telling you about the multiculturality of his country. Maybe that´s why he is a part of this big family <3.
Last but not least, we were so delighted to hear the performance of Irena Dimova on piano and our long time foreign student Spas Kolaksazov on violin. They represented Bulgaria with some words and pictures as well, but the Bulgarian folk song they performed was a real treat. We would also like to thank Evija Daukste for singing John Lennon´s Imagine with her beautiful voice. And the last performance was by the folk dance group Urpín, who made us all step from side to side in the rhythm of cheerful traditional Slovak folk songs.
Truly a huge thank you to everyone who came, donated for the shelter, enjoyed the programme, performed, prepared the delicious food and mostly, who brought in their own view on their country and culture. It goes without a doubt that we can say everyone had a real blast.
