It was the international UWC Day on Saturday the 21st of September, a day that celebrates cultural differences and the communities we are living in. Tampines House started the celebrations on Thursday the 19th of September with a big dinner for every boarder. Everybody wore their national costume - since I didn't have mine here I decided to simply "wear" the German flag. We had international food and a lot of amazing performances, including dances from Latin America and a Chinese love song performed by one of our grade 12s.
On the following Friday the whole school celebrated UWC day, we spent the first hours with our grade 3 buddy class and made some crafts together, even the smaller children in school were all wearing their national costume. Later on, the whole school had an assembly in the school's sports halls. The circus club performed a breathtaking show with many acrobatic tricks. We had some dancers performing dances from Iran and India and a Chinese piano piece. One vocal group performed our UWCSEA song that was written and composed by two students of the class of 2019. Since every student in the audience had learned the song in the week before, the whole crowd was singing along.
It was an amazing day, we spent some quality time with our 3rd graders and the community coming together in the sports hall reminded me of the unique and great place that I am able to be in.
One week later the whole boarding house made its way up to a beautiful little Indonesian island called Bintan. This weekend away trip was desperately longed for after the quite stressful first weeks of school. We stayed at a very nice resort with an amazing beach. On Friday evening we spent most of the time together as a big group, we had a little pool party and our usual tea time at the beach, later on, we split into smaller groups and played some fun games like truth or dare or never have I ever.
Saturday was pure relaxation. We went from the big pool into the sea into the small pool into the big pool into the sea, that was the whole content of our day. In the evening we had a very lovely dinner at the beach, everything was lit up by candles and nice music was playing in the background. We finished off the weekend with sitting at the campfire spending some time with the other boarders. Coming home on Sunday evening I was very tired and very very very sunburned but happy. I enjoyed the weekend a lot, I spend some time with people with whom I have never really spoken to before and the friendships that I already had become even stronger.