I spend 3 whole days working on a personality map.

This map symbolizes where I’ve been through. I’ll talk you through a part of it.

Our journey starts on the waters to the left—an island. You will see the coast of Dubai and the Palm Jumeirah sitting for as long as their owners have been living on there. If we take the bridge into the urban area of the rest of Dubai and navigate ourselves through the dense city, you will see that one tall building named Burj Khalifa.

If we continue on the road, we will encounter and EARTHQUAKE. QUICK! DROP, COVER, AND HOLD. Phew, thank goodness we made it out alive. Thankfully that was a small earthquake so no buildings were destroyed.

If we continue with the road, and turn left at the T shaped intersection, we will pass by a beautiful and wonderfully made park, full of little kids playing happily around one of the 3 slides.

After admiring the beauty of the park whom the friendly kids played in, we keep going on the road to a crowded beach. The people there are swimming in the waters and sunbathing with some exploring a Y shaped dock view place. Everyone looks happy. A small airport sits right beside the beach, which is crowded with aviation fans admiring their beauty as an airliner jet passes right on top of their heads.

If we can fly, we will fly right to the tippy top on the left side of this little world of mine. We will see a school with cheerful kids just finishing their school and planning the rest of their happy day. Telling their parent what an interesting day it is today.

And that is the end of the journey of my little world of mine. No worry, for this trip of mine is completely free.

Summer. All year we wait for it; the slightly less than three month long weekend. And then it arrives, but no, instead of going outside and having fun, your mom has you sit inside and do MATH! The sun is shining, the birds are singing and you have to do long division and fractions and the circumference of a tire. Every year I think “I am done with math, maybe I can have time to learn basket weaving or make candles”, but then you’re told to do algebra. This year will be even worse because I’m doing harder math. But at least I can do other things.

As y’all should already know if y’all’ve been paying enough attention, this year we SCAers have been studying world geography. We have gone (in spirit) all around the world—from Central and South America, to Europe, to Asia, to Oceania, to Canada and the United States of America. The former of the final countries is a land renowned, according to our ACME Gears agent debriefing, for such threats as its wild, life-endangering moose, its “suspiciously aggressive geese,” and its polar bears. ACME Gears has very politely warned us that any encounter with said polar bears is marked as no longer field research, but instead training for the 400m.

I have already expressed my wish for y’all to be attentive readers. You have hopefully already observed my digression. What does Turkmenistan have to do with Canada? Absolutely nothing, except that like Canada, Turkmenistan is a really cool place! It’s such a cool place, in fact, that I have decided to share a few of the most interesting facts that I learned while researching the country:

Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat, is the Guinness world record holder of the “highest concentration of white marble buildings” in a city. This alone gives the capital the look of a whitewashed penguin, but the city’s law that all the cars in the capital must be clean (which isn’t necessarily easy for a city in the middle of a desert) and painted either white or silver, adds a second and excessive coat.

A couple of random facts I collected are that dogs were once banned in Ashgabat on the grounds of their “unappealing odour,” and that, excluding the few exceptions, it is illegal for men to have beards in Turkmenistan. A slightly more applicable fact is that the writing script of Turkmen, Turkmenistan’s official language, is the Latin alphabet, which is odd because most of the country’s neighbors use Cyrillic.

Turkmens celebrate the second Sunday of August as national Melon Day. I did not go in depth in researching Melon Day—a great folly, I am sure—so I cannot tell you why Turkmens have a national Melon Day. I guess it’s just because they like melons so much. It makes me wonder why we don’t have a national Melon Day. Anyway, on Melon Day Turkmens celebrate melons (they have 430 different varieties) and participate in melon competitions and parades.

Somewhere far from the capital and likely far from melon parades, in the great nothingness of the Karakum desert, is a massive inferno that has been burning for decades. The Darvaza gas crater is thought to have been formed about fifty years ago by Soviet geologists who set fire to natural gas in order to burn away leaking poisonous fumes. This thought, however, is not fully confirmed. I don’t know about you, but I find a gigantic blazing pit that’s been burning a hole through the desert for half a century, whose details of origin are not fully confirmed, just a little worrying. Unfortunately, the fire in the Darvaza crater is actually beginning to die, so whatever issues it used to have will matter little soon.

In my cursory examination of the government I learned that Turkmenistan is currently under the control of a totalitarian dictatorship. The current president (dictator) is Serdar Gurbangulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow (if you have not done so already, please repeat that out loud). His mother is an “Honored Carpet Weaver of Turkmenistan,” a title which strikes me as very peculiar.

I also learned that Turkmenistan had a dictator twenty years ago, Saparmurat Niyazov, who wrote a book, Ruhnama, which had to be memorized and recited everyday by Turkmens. It was legally required to be placed in every mosque, a statue of it was made, it was sent to space, and Turkmens even had to answer questions about it before getting a driver’s licence. This same dictator renamed all the days of the week and the names of the months after his family members.

There are lots of other, even more cool things about Turkmenistan, I’m sure. I recommend researching it! I found it a really cool place! And if you are an exceptionally eager researcher of foreign countries, I’ve recently heard of another really interesting country. I can’t quite remember its name, besides that it started with ‘B’ and ended with ‘a’ and most certainly does not have ‘olivi’ in the middle, but I do remember that it was a really cool place with a fantastic culture, a unique history and people, and a small but excellent international Christian co-op school somewhere in the nation’s capital.

This year for geography class I had the privilege of studying the great land of Costa Rica, which is not known for its frogs. Costa Rica is in Central America—as I am sure we all know—but it reminds me a lot of Colombia, for reasons I can’t quite explain. Costa Rica was one of my favourite countries of the year because of its vibrant culture, traditions, and tasty food (in all honesty, that was my favourite part).
In Costa Rica’s plentiful tropics little see-through frogs can be found. They are called glass frogs and, though no one agrees with me, I think they look a tad like candy. Also found in the tropics are the elegant ruby-spotted swallowtail butterflies, and the less elegant owl butterfly.
Costa Rica also has food that is to die for, which is a possibility when getting street Ceviche. Interestingly enough, various kinds of fruit salads are also considered street food. If you want to see some of their food in person, get yourself invited to prepare the Christmas tamales with someone’s family. If you are assigned to cleaning banana leaves, don’t think too much about that.
Music is important to their culture, with several music festivals, including the intriguing underground* Ocaso Festival, celebrating their unique music styles. Calypso is a very popular genre in Costa Rica, though less traditional and more popular genres are also common.
Costa Rica is definitely worth at least a quick Google**, if not a visit.

*Probably not literally
**Not that I don’t think there is something distinctly nefarious and slightly evil about Google. It has its own verb! And a noun!

In class today, I was tasked—burdened, even—
To write of chocolate in terms of taste and sound.
What sound does chocolate make? Who knows?
And so I fabricated lies.

I ‘splained how angels up above do fracture bars;
The sound of shattered chocolate plays a holy tune.
I love sweets as much as any other, but I admit
That’s just not true.

Soup’s my favorite food, so when I covered taste,
I ignored the prompt; instead I wrote of soup.
But it was chocolate soup,
So that makes it okay.

Walt Whitman’s poems had heavy themes, and rarely mentioned soup,
But often featured metaphors, as so many poems do.
P’raps there’s deeper meaning to my ramblings on chocolate.
I should publish this.

Where once there was challenge
Now I am free
Free
Free
Free of the rhymings and timings of the old poets
For behold
I rhyme no more
And no longer am I restricted by the chains of meter
For behold
I meter no more
Once where there was order and law
And the pains of genius were upon me
I may now become wild
Free
Free
Once there was purpose and dignity!
IT IS DEAD
I AM NOT A CAPTIVE
I HAVE RISEN ABOVE THE RULES
I AM A POET
Who honestly isn’t trying very hard
Because rhyme and meter matter
Though it’s easier to scatter
Your words, it just looks shattered
Broken, not complete
It lacks the bones, the meat
It just looks dumb
However
If I’m being honest
It was fun to write.

For this newsletter, us poor students enslaved by the Newsleditors were told to write poetry in the style of poems that we have been recently reading for Literature. Those have mostly been Romantic poetry and Free verse. Now, since Free verse is evil, twisted, and very unpleasing, this poem must be considered Romantic poetry, no matter how little it seems like classic Romantic poetry.

The picnic table, at where we luncheon
Is often covered in stuff.
It makes it slightly hard to muncheon
In fact, it’s rather rough.

Those rocks and sticks and other things
We’d easily move away;
But perhaps it is the joy they bring
That keeps them where they stay.

Either that, or it could be
That this job we’d rather shirk.
Discomfort seems so sweet to me,
Compared with physical work.

1. Its temperature ranges from 40C to -15C.*
2. People consider it rude if you call them cute or pretty. Say something like, “I’m looking very pretty today, aren’t I?” before complimenting them.
3. Never eat Candy or anything delicious on Holidays**, unless you have sent an email of thanks to the personal company who made it. Never send a letter or give verbal thanks. In the days before emails they sent letters or telegrams.
4. There are special arenas where people sword fight to first blood. There have not been any serious injuries since 1995.***
5. On Christmas in Bulgaria every year we eat chicken with corn in a cup and roasted carrots.
6. In Bulgaria on Mother’s Day women and girls don’t work until they want to and only men and boys work and go to school.
7. In Bulgaria, eating soup with a fork is considered a sin, it is insulting to the person who created the soup. His name is Jeff Clinginton. He was an Irish man who loved water but thought it was boring and needed some flavour, so he created soup.
8. It is mandatory that everyone in Bulgaria has a picture of Elon Musk on their wall. That is because the people in Bulgaria really respect him for how rich and manly he is. If they don’t have one, they are executed.
9.  A strange Easter tradition in Bulgaria is to dye a red egg for each member of your family and tape it to your arm and see how long it takes to break. Whoever had the egg that lasts the longest is traditionally presented with an orange but most families substitute with truffle fluffies as a substitute, whoever has the egg that broke first is responsible for cleaning up the mess. The egg that never broke is thrown out a window for that person to have “good luck.”

*104F- 5F
**Such as Baba Marta (Баба Марта), Easter (Велик Ден) and Christmas (Рождецво Христово)
***In which someone’s nose got hit. They lost smell in one nostril (the left one).

My teacher Miss Fani was teaching us about a recently discovered bird called the Looflirpa. It sounds funny but it is actually really cool. This magnificent bird is located in the city but you can’t see it because it has crystal reflectors that makes it impossible to see when it is flying. It would be fun to have one as a pet! The only way to get it to come to you is by saying its name backwards. 

Sometimes odd things come up in our classes, and often enough they sound like they’d make good band names! Here are the weirdest and best; feel free to use these to name your new band:

• Fredrickly Confused
• We Wanna Steve
• Anxiety Academy
• Skittlesy
• Quinsley and The Thieves
• All is Well in Norway
• Several People and a Guitar
• The Finnimore Coopers and Jemima
• Snails 4 Granted
• Beyond Pudding
• Dark Side of the Cat Loaf
• Anika’s Tooth Mask
• Zachary The Four-Legged Reptile
• R is for Rabies
• Wrong Side of the Capo
• Corridor of Punishment
• Deadly Stew
• Dental Tourism