LENTILS FANCY SALADS STUFFED PEPPERS PASTA CON POMODORO OR PESTO
MARINA SMILING AT ME GNOCCHI POLENTA YOGURT BIANCO
Which real food do you feel most connected to?
KEBAB COTOLETTA SUSHI POKE RACLETTE
SPÄTZLE MANSAF CHEESECAKE BREAD VANITOSA
WAAKYE VEGETABLE AND SUMMER SOUP CREPES GRANDMA'S MEALS TOSTADAS
How connected do you feel to our community at UWCAD?
I feel like our community has not developed to what it could be. However, I can guarantee that this will happen in the second term. There is a sense of safety in our community in my opinion
I think our community has a lot of shades I never thought about before coming here. Sometimes it's complicated to find my space around so many people and insecurities hit very hard, but I feel sort of a magic understanding between all of us, like a family
i'm not very sure about how i feel about this. there's times i feel like i fit right in with the values of the community and everyone here is amazing, but then these times are followed by occurrences where people are not very nice :(
Extremly connected in some cases with some people, rarely connected to others, but there is a nice balance
there's not a single day when I feel lonely and most people are very open and welcoming.
It's a big family where you like half of the people and still appreciate the other half.
I feel really supported and actually I am really surprised by the connections that formed for such a short period
Love it, a lot, still feel lonely sometimes though
I love it most of the time, recently there has been a dip, so it has been harder to appriciate being here, but I am hoping to come back after the winterbreak with the love and passion for this place i first arrived with.
Connection, in this case, is as the same level as being connected through a Wi-Fi network; the signal comes and goes depending on the weather and the quality of the company.
not so connected sometimes. There are little group of more popular people and some people I met were not so friendly or were just pretending to be nice when I talked to them . It's strange sometimes
Connection to by Irene Gallini
Ours is an incredibly linguistically diverse school. Within our community it’s hard to find two people that grew up speaking the same language (unless you find yourself surrounded by Italians at lunch). Here, our mother tongue becomes something very personal.
Let’s see what some students have to say about this.
Tin’s mother tongue is Vietnamese. When asked about how many people in the school he can have a conversation with in his first language, he replied:
“Zero, it’s really lonely. When I first came here I noticed that people who were from different countries could kind of communicate with each other. You have the Balkans, you have the Arabic speakers, the Slavic languages and the Italians. I really miss Vietnamese. The only way that I can speak it is by calling home, which is nice, but sometimes I wish there was a person I could talk to on campus.”
Livia’s native language is German. According to her, there are six native speakers and two teachers who share the same language. “I feel comfortable. When I’m homesick, I can speak to different people.
There are also things about our languages that most people are not aware of.
Nilaja’s mother tongue is Swiss German, which a lot of people mistake for German, she says:
“They’re different languages. What people get wrong is that they mistake Swiss German for standard German because it has the word German in it. Swiss German is not an official language. We don't learn it in school, it’s what’s spoken on the street. You will not encounter people speaking standard German to you. It’s something really personal
I do speak Swiss German to people in school, but as soon as the lesson starts, you’re expected to speak in standard German. You don’t normally speak to your friends in standard German. It feels really unnatural because it’s tied to professionalism in a way.”
She explains that the reason for this is the disparate nature of Swiss people. “Swiss people are not homogeneous, it’s actually many different people coming together building a nation. Therefore, language was never sort of a unified thing, which is why we have four national languages.”
What Tin would like others to know about Vietnamese is its simplicity.
“I think it's really convenient. Many aspects of it make a lot of sense, it’s a really logical language.”
Indeed, unlike most Latin languages, Vietnamese doesn’t require you to conjugate nouns and verbs depending on who’s speaking and what is being addressed.
“It’s a tonal language.To put it into an English perspective, I would say that the northern Vietnamese accent is kinda like the British accent, while the southern accent is more like American English. I think the central dialect would sound like Scottish because it’s really hard to understand and it sounds a bit funny to us.”
Sometimes it’s hard to speak only in English here. It can be very tiring for some. Nilaja says:
“It’s pretty okay, it really depends on the day. There are some days in which my brain is in Swiss German so it’s very hard for me to speak English, but besides that, I feel comfortable with the language”.
Some words or expressions can’t really be translated. Livia describes this aspect of life in the college as being a struggle at first.
“In the beginning it was hard. I'm still struggling, especially when I want to explain myself beautifully or I want to write an essay, but it’s developing. There is a word in German that is like a positive no. Doch. In English it doesn’t exist, it’s just yes, but in German there’s a difference between yes and doch. It’s so useful.”
Some people had to learn English in school. Others learned it in more creative ways. For example, Tin thinks he learnt
most of his English outside of school.
“It came from me being exposed to English media like games, YouTube videos, shows and stuff. I grew up with those things. I used to work as a translator to make Vietnamese subtitles for a cartoon, I think that helped me a lot.”
To the dislike of some people, every student here has to learn Italian in one way or another. Ab initio? B HL? Regardless of all that, Livia first started becoming more familiar with the Italian language while studying classical music.
“I’ve always wanted to learn it. I want to understand the songs I’m singing. I learned lots of arias (a type of song) in Italian. I had actually started doing it on Duolingo before I knew I would go to taly. I think Italian is so pretty. I can’t describe it, it's just soft and it sounds nice. Kind of like with French. I think if I could choose a superpower, I would choose to be able to speak every single language in the world.”
FACTS ABOUT CONNECTIONS
BY SIGNE LEARKE
Connections are a crucial part of how we function as human beings, and they are generally found to be an integral part of our daily lives But however we perceive and value connections, they can be difficult to fully grasp. At times, we neglect to truly appreciate them Below are some facts that you may not already know that could potentially help establish some new perspectives on all sorts of connections or that might just be interesting to learn.
1. Research shows that it only takes a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger. No matter how stressful this might sound for any potential university or job interview, it could also be a way to remember that all you really need to do is excel for that first 0 1 second of the meeting
2. Eye contact can establish a connection. Making eye contact with somebody is thought to release oxytocin (also known as the love chemical), which is related to activating feelings of trust and helping us bond. Eye contact is so crucial to our wellbeing and connection to others that it is one of the first things we are programmed to do from birth The distance that a newborn can see is the same as the distance from the breast to the eyes of the birthing person. When breastfeeding the baby, this creates an intimate language of eye contact between the baby and the breastfeeding person that helps them communicate and establish a connection.
3. Research has shown that people who are emotionally close to their siblings have higher life satisfaction and lower rates of depression. This is understandable since sibling bonds are some of the longest lasting bonds that one can form throughout life, and siblings are often able to provide essential support in times of suffering.
4. Cows have best friends! It is not only humans that are able to develop deep connections. Research found that cows are both calmer and smarter when they are around a friend
5. According to a survey conducted on American teens 57% have made one or more friends online. In an increasingly digital and globalised world, it may come as no surprise that we are able to establish connections with people despite never meeting them in person Through social media and video games, young people are connecting and communicating with people in other parts of the world like never before.
6. Trees “talk” to each other. While trees might not have learned how to use the Latin alphabet yet, they can be said to communicate and connect through an underground network of fungi, which they may use to converse their needs and send warning signals concerning things such as environmental changes.
7. Good social connections make you live longer. A study by Harvard University showed a direct correlation between having stronger social connections to family, friends and a community and being healthier and living a longer life than a person that is not as well connected.
As an individual from a micronation, I feel a certain disconnect to reading, when I peruse through volumes of adventures in much-explored American megatowns and romanticised European cities.
Icelandic mystery novels are often regarded as more thriller than mystery. There is a partial truth to this; they tend to navigate through and discuss violence much more openly than the conventional published novel. There were points in this book when I wondered how, with its openly gruesome style, the novel got through even the publishing stage. There were scenes where I pondered on whether or not my wildest horror dreams had come true; there was a point in the novel where even living people were assassinated within the faint light of a cemetery, in the small confines of a wooden coffin.
And yet, despite this disconnection to those grand and glamorous settings, I still find it strange to say that I feel a tinge of connection to a novel set in Reykjavik. After all, it is Europe’s northernmost capital, which feels weirdly out of place given how I come from the continent’s southernmost. Arnaldur Indriðason’s mystery novel was for me a special Christmas read, as it made me appreciate, for the first time, the authenticity of telling the story of a small place.
Although in the beginning I found the violent style of the book to be chiefly disturbing, as I read on I realised that there was an element of ingenuity in materialising the worst possible forms of human nature into literary descriptions. From a young age, we are told to shy away from explicit mentions of brutality and savagery. After reading this novel, however, I realised how important it is to convey the atrocity of a violent crime into words and stories, to warn us and make us understand how disturbing their nature truly is.
More than anything, however, from Arlandur Indriðason’s novel I understood the importance of preserving local cultures, no matter how small or insignificant they might seem from the point of view of a world map of thousands of kilometres and points of universal interest.
Throughout the novel, compact mentions of Icelandic culture were constantly brought up. Stories of fishermen lost in deadly storms, of the hardship of adapting to a remote Northern climate, and of dried seafood and spirit wine being the day-and-night meals. Somehow, beyond transmitting the setting through worn out, inky pages, those cultural mentions made me appreciate how those diverse ways of life are more meaningful when preserved at their almost ritualistic everyday routine, instead of in their commercialised form.
A Novel I Felt Connected to (Strange Shores by Arnaldur Indriðason): The Importance of Telling Storie
Connect the dots of the same color using continuous lines on the grid. The lines cannot branch off or cross over each other, and the numbers have to fall at the end of each line.
The woman was at the end of her rope. She couldn’t take the terror anymore. With a primal scream, she broke into a run, her feet pounding against the pavement as she tried to escape whatever was chasing her. She had no idea where she was going, she just knew that she had to get away. But no matter how fast she ran, the shadows seemed to be at her heel, always just out of reach. She could feel the predator’s presence, feel the chill it sent down the back of her neck, a weight that threatened to drag her backwards into the darkness. She was barely holding on, her mind and body pushed to the brink in her caffeine-fueled sleeplessness.
Just when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, the woman stumbled and fell to the ground, her energy spent. She lay there panting and gasping for air, as the writhing mass of darkness loomed over her. Its twisted, unnatural limbs reached for her, the claws that adorned its fingers gleaming in the dim light. And then, just as the monster was about to strike, it dissipated into thin air leaving the woman alone and trembling on the ground. She could feel its venomous aura, feel the icy breath of death on her skin. The terror was still with her, a shadowy presence that seemed to linger in the corners of her mind. And as she lay there, shaking and consumed by fear, the woman knew that she had been touched by something beyond the veil of this world, something that would haunt her for the rest of her days.
As she stumbled through the door of her home, the woman couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief wash over her. She reached for the energy drink that would alleviate her worry and give her the strength to go on. But as she brought the can to her lips, her throat constricted and she found herself unable to swallow. She fell to the ground, choking and gasping for air, her body convulsing as the energy drink spilled out of her mouth. And then, with one final spasm, her body was consumed by the darkness. Her eyes rolled back in her head as the poison coursed through her veins, her body writhing and contorting in a brutal death throe. It was a gruesome and violent end, a fitting end for a woman who had been consumed by her addiction. As her body lay there, lifeless and broken, the energy drink spilled out of her lifeless fingers, a final offering to the shadows that now surrounded her.
EBythan
Come to Porto…
When the chaos of life takes over, when feelings clash and intertangle, when you don’t know whowhatyou are… soul, mind or body… Come to Porto.
Maybe I will forget this day, maybe I won’t finish my homework, maybe I will die before getting to share… this.
But the waves whisper that none of these all matters.
The tranquillity of this infinitely small second swallows everything else. Doubt. Regret. Fear. Longing…
Shivers…
Why am I shivering?
My mom would say it is because of this morning’s cappuccino. Duinese might say it is because of the magic of the village, the sea, the rocks… Perhaps both. Maybe neither of them.
No, I’m not a religious person. No, I’m not praying. No, I don’t know the reason behind each material or immaterial thing, each being.
Though, this very moment is one of perfect harmony. pure peace. profound spirituality.
And I dare say I am lucky. I am grateful. I am Here Now.
You know, I might not remember this day. But the emotion, this highly abstract connection will forever remain tattooed in ink on my heart.
Amen
Connection is about many things, including the relationships with the person or people that you are likely to spend a lot of time with during your UWC life - your roommate(s). Below you will nd a list of questions that you can use for your “roommate night” in order to get to know each other better, thereby strengthening your connection. As Matt Marinec once said: “stay safe and have fun, in that order”.
Who is most likely to...
eat Sunday fries as breakfast not lunch because they slept until 11:00 am?
get stuck in Trieste/Monfalcone because there is a bus strike?
order kebab at 2:00 am?
break something in Mensa?
wake up at 7:55 am even though their class starts at 8:00 am?
remain asleep while the alarm is blaring?
eat weird food combinations in Mensa?
stay up until 3:00 am studying?
procrastinate until the last minute?
make a mess in the room?
break curfew?
Connect the dots of the same color using continuous lines on the grid. The lines cannot branch off or cross over each other, and the numbers have to fall at the end of each line.
