lunes, 24 de junio de 2013

Hodad!

The  BCN  TM meeting of 19 June was truly an exhilarating experience.  After our President Marion Chevalier opened the session, the Toastmaster of the meeting Agnieszka Gut started with a lot of verve and a very interesting word of the day: hodad. In case you’re curious, it means:  “a nonsurfer who frequents surfing beaches and pretends to be a surfer”.

Then, Timekeeper Cristina Simon,  Ah-counter Teresa Rubinat  and Grammarian Mariyana Tascheva explained their roles  and from then on kept a close eye on the speakers so that they stick to the time limits,  use proper grammar and don’t use fillers.

What followed were 4 amazing presentations:

Isaac Riera opened up with his  Icebreaker and told us a great personal story of how he got from point A to point B in his life, inspiring us to look for and grab that elusive point B.

Markus Matioschat, also breaking the ice, told us how he found his own way by sharing with us his passion for martial arts and what they mean to him in his life.

Rayane Bachammar’s presentation about Africa showed us the powerful forces that are shaping it and opened our eyes to what’s going on in a continent that’s so close (just about 20 km away from Europe) yet also so distant to us.

Brock McCurdy’s closing presentation showed us how to improve the quality of our lives by eliminating the most important stress factors in our lives.

Next, our 4 evaluators Jesús Salillas, Christian Clottu, Judit Permanyer and Marion Chevalier pointed out the strengths of every presentations and indicated the possibilities of improvement.

For our most entertaining part of the session, the  Table Topic Master, Nacho Telléz chose a very interesting way of giving  table topic s to our volunteers. They had to pick 3 words from the hat and then tell a story using these words. The volunteers that came both from among the members as well as from our guests did a splendid job at coming up with interesting improvised stories and even managed to use our word of the day in a very unusual way (hodad! J).
In the end General Evaluator, Eric Guntermann summed up the session with a notion of nostalgia since it was his last meeting before going back to Canada.

The session was closed by our acting club president, Marion Chevalier, announcing that the next one will take place with the participation of a special guest from the catalan newspaper  Ara  who would like to write an article about our club.

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