Saint Valentine's day approaching...

SESSION: 12.02.2014

The approaching Saint Valentine’s day perfumed lightly the air of this Wednesday evening session. The ingredients  adventure, lies, fragrances and love involved by the session’s topic of the Olympic games and the pursue of excellence made this session a sense explosion for all TMT and guests.

The Toastmaster of the day Lukasz Zagroba guided us perfectly organised through this „excellence session“ with a big portion of humour and appropriate quotes. His comments after all speeches and evaluations fit perfectly to the speech topics and made us think or laugh out loud, especially after M.A Garcia Tarrazonas’ speech which he commented with the word: „St. Valentine will not be the same after this speech“. The technical team was composed by the grammarian Jelena Vetockina who invited us to use the word of the day „floating (on air)“, the ah-counter Rúben Martínez-Fanals who compared the inappropriate interjections and pause fillers in our speeches with holes in our shirts: more crutches, more holes in our shirts, less exit to get a fantastic Saint Valentines date, and the timekeeper Joan Marc Garcia Corominas who explained us the value of time at Toastmasters’ sessions. Christian Clottu was the voluntary joke teller before the first part of the session began.

Catalina Maldonado’s „The best hidden treasure of the world“ speech started in darkness and with bird chirping. A completely new experience for a speech introduction. Catalina told us from her trip to Amazone in Peru, Brasil and Colombia last year where she felt for the first time connected with life and she felt part of it. Her whole speech was delivered in a very interactive way with sounds and strong body language according to the speech goal.  We could feel how she dicovered paradise this specific night seeing the stars of the sky reflecting in one of the rivers of the Amazone forest.

Nacho Tellez started his speech „Lies are undervalued“ with a result of a University of Southampton study: We all lie 5- 10 times a day. After giving some of the typical lies of women and men and wondering why we are taught not to lie when we are children, but then break with this tradition when we are adults, he asked: Is every single lie something bad? To give an answer to this question, he told an anecdote of his grandfather’s friend whose life was saved by another friend in the Second World War through a lie. At the end he announced us that the whole grandfather story was a lie but invited us to think about if lying can have positive aspects.

In her speech: „Which is your calling card?“ Mariyana Tasheva introduced us to the incredible world of fragrances. Which fragrance fits the best? How should we select it? And how should we use it?  With the help of a fragrance wheel, she gave answers to these three questions, involved the audience in a concrete example and illustrated that personal characteristics, music and experiences influence our choice in essences. We learned  about the secrets of the interaction of the fragrance with the body chemistry,  on which part of the body we should apply the fragrance and how we should do to buy a fragrance.

Love is a trapp? According to M.A Garcias Tarrazona speech „A many splendored thing“ love is a mind trick created by nature. M.A introduced his speech telling us about a conference he attended when he was younger, a conference with the topic: „Why do we fall in love?“ that handled the interesting theory of love as a trap. M.A demonstrated through the human evolution why we became better in falling in love in the last thousands of years of our existence. After the speech, three minutes were given to the audience to ask questions regarding the topic. In his answers, M.A inserted his personal experiences with theoretical knowledge.

Madalina Burghelea, Joan Fabregat, Marion Chevalier and Lucie Arnaudies highlighted the strong points of the speeches: the introduction of Catalina’s speech in darkness, the provocative and changing structure of Nacho’s speech, the interaction with the audience in Maryiana’s speech and the humour and the involvement of personal experiences and theoretical knowledge in M.A’s speech. They also gave some helpful suggestions to make the speeches even better.

The third part of the session was led by the table topic master Paul Conde Medina. This part was influenced by the approaching 14 th of February. Paul informed us in his introduction about the origins of the Saint Valentine’s day. It is not an US-invention as commonly thought, it is traced back to the Roman period. The 3 table topic speaker were Isaac Riera, Blanca Ortiz and Ramon Matabosh delivering impromptous speeches about recruiting soulmates, the adventure of love and forgetting important dates.

The session ended by the general evaluation of Christian Clottu and the reports of the Grammarian, the Ah-counter and the timekeeper. Christian gave us some advices and recommanded us to take care of the low energy mode at the beginning of the session, the fact that we should occupy roles when they are vacant and give more examples in our evaluations. The session was closed by the Seargeant of Arms Lukasz Zagroba and we all rushed out of the room to fulfill our daily lie-quota! 

Blogger: Rayane Bachammar