Monday In Berlin

Sunday:

We changed hotels from Checkpoint Charlie to the Estrel Hotel and Convention Center where we will be competing. Last night was the first night on the competition schedule, which kicked off with the SIFE World Cup Cultural Fair—it was worth coming to competition just for that. Each country set up a booth to represent their country with food, dancing, jewelry, etc. Each team also wore native garb from their respective countries. We represented the U.S.A by bringing Oreos, Flagler college key chains, and Mickey Mouse bookmarks. To represent American attire and our area of the United States we wore Mickey Mouse ears and Mickey t-shirts. It was amazing to see other country’s excitement about our Disney theme. Each Flagler SIFEr was probably photographed 100 times with people wanting pictures with the “Mickey team.” It was absolutely incredible seeing teams from every corner of the world come together to celebrate the diversity of our cultures.

After the cultural fair we went to the opening ceremony where each team paraded across the stage with their national flags. We were told later by a Flagler parent that the opening ceremony was broadcast live online at www.sife.org/worldcup. I am not sure if all of the award ceremonies will be broadcast live but if you are interested they would all be on the aforementioned website. The competition schedule is on a previous blog post; please do not forget that Germany is six hours ahead of Eastern Time.

Aside from introducing the competitors the Opening Ceremony was also the first time competitors were told the pairings for our first round of competition Monday. We were the second to present in a room competing against: Singapore, Azerbaijan, the Netherlands, and Swaziland.

Monday:

We have been working hard on practice presentations and Q&A practice; we apologize for not getting Sunday’s blog up until today. As a result, we can also use this blog as an opportunity to tell you about our first round this morning. We presented second at 10:35, to a panel of approximately 25 judges from around the world. Although the competition results will not be released until this evening at the 5PM Opening Round Award Ceremony we all feel like the presentation went extremely well. As Donna, Barry, Dr. and Mrs. Abare, and our other supporters all said there was nothing that we could have done to improve the presentation or Q&A. Now we just have to wait for the results…

We will update later this evening with news about whether we are moving on to the semi-final round of competition tomorrow. For immediate status updates look to our Twitter at Flagler SIFE.

Love,
The Flagler SIFE Team