EYP National Session in Moscow (November 2019)
Thanks to the support of the school administration, this year we were able to not only attend the Sixth National Session of EYP Russia, but also take a few days to visit the beautiful city of Moscow.
After very regrettably using an airplane to arrive in Russia and taking an obscene amount of time to drive from the airplane to our apartment, we finally got a chance to lay down our luggage. After we went out to eat and shop for groceries, where the writer, tired by the flight and with very little knowledge on the Cyrillic alphabet, mistook a jug of milk with the picture of a cartoonish cat on it for milk milked from an actual cat. Every meal we had during the days before the session was amazing. We had the pleasure to try everything from local Russian cuisine to even typical Georgian recipes.
We were greeted by an “unseasonably warm” 8 degrees Celsius average temperature for the week, which made the sightseeing and general stay much more pleasant, even if quite worrying from a climate perspective. Besides the obvious visit to the Red Square, we also had the pleasure of visiting the inside of the Kremlin and got to see a museum about the Tsars that ruled before the Russian Revolution and their riches, as well as a very big bell and a very big cannon. Inside and outside of the Kremlin we visited many churches, in which the writer, used to the wide and open designs of Italian cathedrals, always found a way to get lost within their charming but confusing design.
A personal favorite museum was one about art, in which we saw the works of many artists active between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and admired how realistic and deep in detail their art went.
At the start of our trip we took a guided tour through a part of Moscow’s center, which gave us a very interesting debate with the guide, which gave us an insight into a possible conspiracy looming around Greta Thunberg and other climate change activists to, and I quote: “She's up to something. Sell drugs or something, I don’t know.” Stunning.
Thanks to good connections, we were also able to have a meeting with both David Nauer, SRF correspondent in Russia, as well as with the Head of the Swiss Business Hub Russia at the Swiss embassy. One was obviously more formal than the other was, but both were extremely kind and had a lot of interesting things to say and anecdotes to share.
The Session
Finally, we get to the session. On the first day, we had the classic EYP program full of games to get to meet all the new people we were going to work with. The place we met and worked at for the entire session was Moscow’s university. After the Opening Ceremony we went to the hostel and checked in very slowly. The hostel’s wifi malfunctioning around the time we were there also meant us Swiss delegates were completely cut off from the rest of the world when not at the university.
The following two days were spent working hard or hardly working on our resolution. They went very smoothly and were entertaining as always. In retrospective, the writer does feel he might have been a bit too assertive and loud with his opinions. On the second day we also had a dinner with our committees, where the writer tried what has officially become the best hamburger in history.
The fourth day we spent doing various fun activities like sightseeing again, we listened to a panel debate, had a very fun open mic evening (with Ella singing) and ended it by going to a small museum outside of the center of Moscow.
The last day was the General Assembly, as big, pompous and elegant as it always is. We sadly had to leave earlier to not risk missing a flight.
In conclusion, it was a very fun trip where we all learned new things and met many amazing people from both Russia and many other parts of the war.
The road for our delegation ended there, but the writer’s career with EYP definitely did not.
Pietro Fasoli 5B