As those of you who have been following my blog, I am part of the world’s largest global association called AIESEC. I am happy that with AIESEC I have had the opportunity to travel to Ghana, Kenya and spent four months in Estonia.
I have been involved with AIESEC in Egypt now for three years, and since I was in Canada I wanted to experience a North American experience. I decided to attend Western Regional Conference (WRC), which is slightly overwhelming because I realized that Canada makes the size of Egypt look like a football. The land size is gigantic and getting around takes quite a long time.
I realized during the conference some interesting cultural differences from the ones back home:
- Cheering: Back home, we don’t really cheer, I guess its some North American thing. The local chapter I was part of hadn’t won in years and our local chapter president decided that it was one of the things we have to do leaving the conference. The spirit was insane, and at first I found it annoying, but its so contagious and the camaraderie of doing something with a team makes things unstoppable.
- Canadians: This is probably the same for North Americans but they are so many ethnicity. There are so many nationalities who although were born in Canada had huge ties to their cultures.
- Parties: The parties were really creative from costume to the amount of insane games that people would take the time to create or to research.
Also I was happy to see Assem, another Egyptian who is on the Canadian national committee, even though I don’t know him well, it was nice to see someone who wasn’t a stranger. Of course the highlight of the conference was winning the SPIRIT keg, you can actually see me cheering in the video of the conference.
