Saint Patrick’s Parade

March 17 was undoubtedly a noteworthy day this year. We organized the fourth TAKE FIVE session of the spring season. Oh, and Saint Patrick’s Day happens to have fallen on the very same Thursday. For this negligible reason we decided to go off the weather-beaten track and invite our visitors to celebrate this special day with us. We also had the honor to welcome an extraordinary guest.

We took off with the following introductory question: what would you be a patron saint of? Then, instead of reaching for the color envelopes, we continued with a nice Saint Patrick’s Day quiz compiled by Era. It contained twelve questions carefully arranged in order of difficulty. We had the wonderful plan of showing the questions on the big screen using a PPT. As the saying goes: man proposes, CD-FŰ disposes. The TV had been moved to the other room for the darts players. Mastering your ability to improvise is among the perks of being a club organizer. We ended up reading out the questions one by one. In each round the members of the three small groups had to put their heads together and find the answer in one-two minutes.

We concluded this exciting show with two extra questions, one of which was “How many million pints of Guinness are consumed world-wide on St. Patrick’s Day?” (The astounding answer is 13 million pints.) The extra questions served as a smooth and almost unnoticeable transition to the topic of the day. The credit for the description goes to Balázs.

IT’S SAINT PADDY’S, HAVE A PINT!
Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated all around the world. Not only is it celebrated, people celebrate it in fashion – mostly dressing up in green and getting severely drunk. This happens more than enough at other occasions as well, but on Saint Patrick’s Day it is definitely encouraged. Do you think that it is wrong to encourage drinking on a society level because it maximises peer pressure, or it doesn’t matter because anyone can say no whenever they want to? Do you think that peer pressure is harmful in general? Have you ever done something out of peer pressure – because everyone else was doing it?

The questions of social drinking and peer pressure planted the seeds for an insightful discussion, which was later crowned by the four speakers on the podium. After they had presented their thoughts on the matter, the conversation shifted from the original topic to social media – whether creating a Facebook account could also be the result of peer pressure today.

However hard we tried, we didn’t manage to withhold our creative power when it came to the game. We had previously made a list of all the patron saints the people had said as their answer to the introductory question. We started off by giving one patron saint from the list to each group. They were then asked to come up with a name and a brief history for their saints. Finally, one person from each group took the hot seat and read out their stories. The game turned out to be so successful that it became more and more difficult to breathe from the laughter as the speakers took turns. It was indeed the perfect way to end our Saint Patrick’s Day event.

English Club Crossover

As Mac Taylor and Horatio Caine from the two CSI series met occasionally in crossover episodes, a kind gentleman from another English club was among our guests that night. Balázs and I spent an hour talking with Gergő before saying goodnight. He told us that they had founded their club just recently, and we were invited to check it out in the near future. Their club is called Chatterbox Chat Club. (Click here to see their Facebook group.) We were delighted to receive lots of compliments from Gergő on our work.

As you know, you can always find our latest event on Facebook. Keep in mind that we are open to your topic recommendations. Feel free to contact us and tell us about your ideas.