GeMUN

I obviously should have written this as the event was happening as there are several days of wonderful experiences to write about and they are simply going to be forgotten. I am writing this a week later...

I accompanied 6 students from Jessica's school, including Jessica herself, to the Genoa Model United Nations (GeMUN) in Genoa, Italy. Through a various combination of political changes in our country and a personal need to get away for a while I ended up accompanying our student delegates rather than one of the school teachers. The event was happening during our school holidays.

It took us a half a day to get there (drive out to Beauvais airport, catch an incredibly cheap Ryan Air flight to Milan and take a minibus taxi from Milan to Genoa). We were greeted by the families who would be hosting the students and I was taken to register our school at the event. I was then left to wander around Genoa for the rest of the afternoon and that's exactly what I did. I walked and walked and walked for over 4 hours all over town. It was wonderful. The weather was nice and dry and neither too cold nor too hot... just right.

I listened to people talking while I ate my ice cream or coffee wherever I stopped and I tried to reply in my best pigeon Italian whenever possible. As always hand and body language is such a vital part of Italian communication, and everyone knows I have that down pact, that I could get my point across long before I ever opened my mouth. As everyone knows if you want to shut Derek up hit him with a serious dose of throat cancer, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. As you can see it takes weapons of mass destruction to shut me up. But, amazingly and wonderfully, even that is only temporary. If you really want to shut Derek up for the moment, and at any moment, just get him to put his hands in his pockets. Due to a wonderful combination of Italian and Eastern European Jewish ancestry the man is practically completely incapable of communication without his hands. In the evening I went out for dinner at a local pizzeria and just watched everyone else talking. The hands flying about the tables, with miraculously nothing being knocked over, and the wonderfully exaggerated facial expressions as everyone looks each other directly in the face as they speak. It was like my last trip to Israel... it just felt like home.

I spent whatever moments I wasn't at the event walking and walking and walking. I spent evenings eating wonderful food... I took breaks in the afternoon for amazing cups of coffee (cappucino generally) and I had ice cream as often as I could. I discovered that Italian ice cream is even better than Haagen Daaz for my throat as it seems to coat the inside of my throat thicker and for a longer time than Haagen Daaz. If I lived there I would get a doctor to prescribe a couple of scoops twice daily.

We spent the next 3 days with our students, including and especially the jewel in my crown in my obviuosly compltely unbiased opinion {vbg}, doing an absolutely brilliant job in the conferences of the model United Nations. There were private schools from around the world participating (Lebannon, Cyprus, Egypt, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Korea, Turkey and of course Italy) and our girls were just plain outstanding. In any given conference there are maybe 20% of the delegates who truly participate: standing up and defending their clauses, debatting the others' clauses and getting their resolutions through using all of the very realistic political methodology. In each of the 3 conferences our students participated in absolutely all of our 6 students were in that 20% and I was proud of them all at the end of every day and I'm not even their teacher. It was a particular pleasure to watch Jessica get up, quite regularly and sometimes annoyingly regularly {g}, and absolutely eloquently present her arguments with her wonderful English accent with bizarre American overtones every now and then.

At the end of the event, out of the several hundreds of delegates, 6 delegates are awarded Best Delegate for their specific conference. One of our students won a Best Delegate award!

The organisation of just about every aspect of the event was deplorably, ridiculously bad. But I will not go in to that... it's just not worth it and in the end we all managed to have a great time and nothing was penalised.

The event ended with a disco event for the kids which was ridiculous as these European adults weren't allowed alcohol and were thrown in to a tiny room to dance. They all ended up leaving and going elsewhere to drink and dance their Saturday night away. I then spent most of Sunday afternoon trying to find them around town and get them assembled together to prepare our departure.

After a quick visit to the Genoa Aquarium we made the reverse trip home on what was the hottest and most beautiful day of our trip. I don't believe anyone really wanted to go home including myself. Worst of all, for the students, was the knowledge that tomorrow morning was the first day back in school after a fortnight of holiday.

We got home a little after midnight and went to bed dreaming a bit about the days we had just passed and a bit about the future...