#lo8

Physical activity hasn’t been a strong side of mine for a few years now. Back in middle school, I had suffered a serious injury while playing football - namely, I shattered my knee, rendering me unable to walk for some time and to do any sort of sports for way longer. The effect of this injury on me was not only physical, but also - primarily - mental. I started to associate sports with trauma. So, as I was thinking of ways to reintroduce physical activity into my life, I thought of sports that I wouldn’t consider “dangerous”. And so, swimming came to my mind.

I’ve been attending a nearby pool since 2019 started regularly. Now, swimming was not a strong side of mine either - I remember being 13 at a sailing camp and passing a mandatory swimming test by walking on the lakebed and doing swimming movements with my hands. This is more or less how my pool activities this year started too.

Luckily, that’s no longer the case - I’ve even mastered some swimming styles on my own, namely a perfect breatstroke and a more-or-less alrighty butterfly. As usual, persistance turned out to be key. It took time for this progress to occur.

Another thing I’ve noticed overtime was that I slowly stopped to associate physical activity with injury. As spring started, I found myself in situations such as regularly riding a bike to and from work and even jogging. I think, although I might be wrong, that starting slowly was key to reintroducing activity into my life.

I’ve noticed a theme in my recent CAS reflections, too, as I was writing this post - persistance and regularity often turn out to be solutions to my problems, and these are skills which largely came to me through the CAS programme, although only recently. As such, I feel I’ve gained an important piece of insight into how my mind works, and what I should do to become more productive in the future. This will definitely be of use to me.

me at the swimming pool in a swimcap and a wonderful new kids on the block towel (my most prized possesion).

LO1 - Increased their awareness of their own strengths and areas for growth

LO2 - Undertaken new challenges

LO5 - Shown perseverance and commitment in their activities 

LO8 - Developed new skills

Most people find some degree of pleasure in a tasty meal. While this might be a truism, it’s also a fact that has powerful implications for the planet Earth - mostly because over 90% of the world population consumes animal products, the production of which has been proven by numerous studies to be a leading cause of pollution and land degradation and is known to consume as much as a 100 times more resources (land, water and energy) than the production of plant-based foods with a similar nutritional profile. Not to mention the inhumane nature of the process itself.

Knowing that, and having been vegetarian for four years, I’ve decided to cut all animal products out of my diet (with the exception of honey, the production of which can actually be beneficial to the environment and bee population). This decision presented a challenge. I, as most people, also enjoyed a tasty meal. I enjoyed a pancake, a quality cheese, a nice poached egg with my breakfast. Hell, before I went vegetarian, even a rolada śląska or a chicken noodle soup. Unfortunately, I also enjoyed integrity.

Necessity truly is the mother of invention, and as time passed, that became more evident. Rice and beans weren’t doing it for me anymore. Neither was hummus. I craved the flavours of my Silesia childhood, and drooled at the sight of non-vegan meals prepared by Michelin-starred chefs in YouTube videos. I had a dream, and that dream was vegan Polish fine dining.

A quick search proved I needed to learn how to make quality food myself. Luckily, around the time I made the decision to go vegan, I started working as a waiter at a vegan sushi bar, and started researching Japanese cuisine. My first idea for a meal was a variation of the Polish chicken noodle soup, and I’ve learned that in Japanese cuisine, a vegan stock prepared by infusing water with kelp called kombu dashi is used to flavour soups, as well as shiitake  dashi, prepared with shiitake mushrooms. That was my starting point. I picked up some dried kelp at my local Asian market, and used dried Polish wild mushrooms instead of shiitakes to put a local spin on the idea. The outcome was wonderful - my vegan broth gained the same umami flavour I remembered from a chicken stock.

A carrot-bay bolete soup with homemade noodles, wilted spinach and roasted celeriac with a bilberry-miso glaze

A vegetable-kelp soup with abura-age (fried tofu), blanched bok choy, sesame and nori seaweed

After that breakthrough, I’ve started learning about traditional Asian meat substitutes and playing with various types of them. Vital wheat gluten (seitan), soya mince, yuba (tofu skin) and mushrooms (mostly oysters and portobellos) became necessities in my pantry. I’ve also researched varous kinds of tofu, plant milks and egg substitutes (such as flaxseed or, unexpectedly, oatmeal). To top that up, I’ve learned quite a bit about fermented foods and using them to “crank up” the flavour of vegan dishes. My first foray into that was a jar of soured honey!

Vegan flax pancakes with caramelized pears in soured honey and a lemon-soymilk sauce

Quinoa with seitan strips, guacamole, habanero salsa and corn

Grilled portobello mushrooms with a redcurrant liqueur-balsamic vinegar glaze, corn cob, pomegranate-orange-rocket salad

Soon enough, it became evident to me that I had some culinary talent in me! One thing I didn’t feel completely confident with was desserts. The first dessert I made since going vegan was a jasmine tea and persimmon jelly, and it was absolutely disgusting. I mostly stuck to fruit afterwards. However, after a while, I decided it was time to keep trying. And so, I tried to bake some cookies and banana bread.

The cookies were hard as rocks, but the banana bread actually turned out alright! I started researching egg substitutes again, and it turned out bananas actually work in a similar manner as eggs. During the process, I’ve come across a recipe for a silken tofu cheesecake. I knew I had to try that. For the first time, I succeeded completely!

Me, making that cheesecake

The same cheesecake, partly devoured. I couldn’t stop myself from eating it before I took a picture, sorry

Seitan nuggets with broccoli, curry rice and vegan tartare sauce

Grilled yuba with simmered white radish, deep-fried leek threads, and julienned carrot with perilla

Overall, veganism so far has not only been a right ethical decision, but also, unexpectedly, a great adventure and an outlet for my creativity. I felt I’ve overcome some obstacles along the way - finding some ingredients required quite a bit of dedication and searching, not to mention the availability of information I wanted. For example, one thing I wanted to research was shojin ryori, a Buddhist Japanese plant-based traditional cuisine, but most of the resources were in Japanese or broken English. However, after a lot of snooping, I’ve found an electronic copy of the cookbook Kansha: Celebrating Japan’s Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions on Amazon, and found a lot of inspiration there (for example, the recipe for simmered white radish). When tasting that radish and feeling it basically melt in my mouth I thought to myself that dedication pays off. And it really did.

Right now, I can’t wait for spring. I’ve been reading up on edible flowers, traditional Silesian food, a variety of Polish vegan foods (mostly pickles), and as soon as fresh vegetables and flowers start hitting the markets, I’m hoping to harvest my crop, so to say. I’ll be following up with an update then.

LO1 - Increased their awareness of their own strengths and areas for growth

I’m a pastry chef now.

LO2 - Undertaken new challenges

LO7 - Considered the ethical implications of their actions

me (right) and my best friend, as I took the stage.

Last Saturday, something very important to me had happened. I played a concert an a charity event called ONKOŚWIR (loose translation: onco-wacko), organized by the Warsaw indie music community to help fund the treatment of Michał, a teenager inflicted with an agressive form of leukemia. The concert was also the premiere of my debut album, called TYCHY after my hometown.

This was a sacrifice to me. Not only in that I volunteered to play the album without compensation (this was a very small part of what I felt was important). The album I made deals with themes of childhood innocence, family and dreams, things which were extremely private for me. Writing the album, which took me over a year, was a very private, emotional and introspective process - I managed to finish it only after 3 days in seclusion, in an empty apartment with only my laptop, headphones, microphone and a sleeping bag. The thought of playing it live was scary to me, to say the least. I was never going to do that, or so I thought.

My friend Kuba, who also runs my record label, met me for dinner one of these days and told me about his plans for ONKOŚWIR. I immediately thought about my previous experience with a charity show and the satisfaction it gave me, and on the spot I decided to offer my services, so to say.

As I took the stage, under immense stress, I thought again about the value that art creates. The sight of a packed room before me was a testament to that. I felt that overcoming this stress would not only help me progress as an artist and a human being, but also be a treat to people who chose to help Michał’s cause. I closed my eyes and started singing, and everything fell into place.

I felt like a gained a new skill that day, and that was dedication. As I was writing this post, my computer suddenly turned off, and I lost all of my work. Before this Saturday, that would’ve made me not want to continue, but today, I resumed my work instantly.

Another skill I felt I’ve developed was something that was very important for my creative endeavours - and that skill was opening myself up in front of people. My thoughts and emotions were my artistic strength. I showed my soul in front of a crowd of people I barely knew, and that was cathartic, to say the least. And I can say, gladly, that it was the feeling of empathy within me that helped me do that. I felt I could be understood, and I felt I could do something worthwhile.

Both of these skills helped me make another unrelated step in life - I started swimming! I will be following up on that this week.

fb event: https://www.facebook.com/events/550536302093813/

“TYCHY”: https://enjoylife.bandcamp.com/album/tychy

LO1 - Increased their awareness of their own strengths and areas for growth

LO5 - Shown perseverance and commitment in their activities

LO7 - Considered the ethical implications of their actions

Having represented my house (Sandpiper) in Y11 for the annual Upper Years (Y10-13) public speaking competition (and surprisingly winning!), the Speak Out, I decided to go for it again, especially seeing as this is my last year in school.

In my previous speech, I spoke about the human impact on the environment from Mother Nature's perspective, while touching upon the value of nature and how we take it for granted.

This year, however, I decided on a topic that looked more on some issues with our modern society: our desire and obsession with perfection. How this subtle idea is instigated through social media, between competitive students, parents, and essentially every working environment. Opening by relating situations to the audience in which they may have unconsciously sought for perfection, whether in themselves or in others (e.g. the one wrong note of a musician's performance out of the thousands of correct notes), I went on to speak of the importance of shaping your own idea of perfection, one that doesn't harm you or others around you or generally cause negative feelings - one that consists of you simply being comfortable in your own skin.

I must say that the competition this year was extremely tough - the rest of the speakers varied in their content from being intriguing, serious, to emotional and personal, and so I unfortunately didn't win this time! Even so, I felt that this topic of perfection needed to be thrown out into the open, to make people self-aware and remind them to take a step back every once in a while.

Every year, there is always a ceremony for the top exam candidates in the May and November session of the same year - either by overall score, or within the bracket of the instrument itself. Having obtained my piano diploma with a Distinction, I was one of the awardees for this afternoon’s ceremony. Due to the fact that I also obtained the highest score at my level, I was also asked to play a piece towards the end of the ceremony, along with the other top candidates for the rest of the grades.

I chose to play the Liszt Sonetto del Petrarch 123 for the ceremony, seeing as it was a piece that distinctly showed it was of the diploma level, with the range of expression and genres interwoven throughout the piece. It had been a while since I’d played the piece, let alone to the standard that it was at just before the exam, and so I spent the last few weeks perfecting it with the help of my piano teacher. While I managed to get it to a good enough standard for the day, I wasn’t fully prepared to play it without the sheet music (it’s 7 pages long…) and so I brought it with me on the day.

It's been a hectic first few weeks back. During the summer holidays, I was given a new piece to work on, one that was of a much higher level in its technical skill and demands. One of my previous exam pieces was a Concerto by Carl Maria von Weber, who is the same composer of this new piece I was given - Concertino Op. 26 in Dm. And my my… if I do say so myself, it is certainly a step up from my previous pieces. In fact - it kind of terrifies me. I mean… look at this:

I asked my teacher to tell me more about the composer - it turns out that while he did not only write for the clarinet, he was one of the first few who did so, and really established its role within other musical pieces. This piece in particular astounds me, for he wrote it in 3 days, only to give it to a German clarinetist to learn (in another 3 days), in which only 2 days later they performed it in the palace.

So I spent the holiday trying to learn as much as I could, only to realise its exact difficulty - thus, I only managed to learn the theme and the first two variations. I tried my best to become fluent in it, because sight reading in this case is not sufficient enough (it's far from sufficient).

Anyhow, we got further than ever before today - going all the way to the fourth variation. After practicing each section numerous times, my teacher decided to introduce a whole other piece to me, to go with the Weber Concertino: Schumann's Fantasy Pieces. This was much easier in its notes, but still fairly difficult due to the key signature as well as some passages where the fingering got a bit tricky. Even so, it was also good to learn a new piece in the sense that I would not get tired of or overpractice the first one.

Ever since my last exam, I hoped to continue learning clarinet pieces, especially the more challenging ones. This was due to a combination of factors: my passion and interest for the instrument, my eagerness to improve my own skills of sight-reading, agility, versatility and stamina, as well as my knowledge regarding the different clarinet composers. Furthermore, these pieces would help immensely if I was to audition for the orchestra of one of the universities I may be attending in the future.

Activity: Bollywood & International Day Dance (01/11/17)

This year is full of me counting my "last ____", International Day being one of them. Although not as big of an event as Peace Week, there was some organising my council had to do - regarding the lunchtime performances. It just happened to be that I'd been taking up a few Bollywood classes, where we learned a full choreography, and so we saw this lunchtime as an opportunity to showcase our dance!

I still recall the day I had decided to sign up for Bollywood - I was scrolling through the CCAs list one night, filtering activities that failed to attract me, that did not work with my time schedule, and so on… until I arrived at one that I had never seen before: "Indian Kathak Classical and Bollywood Dance CCA". Without knowing whether any of my peers and friends would be joining as well, I signed up for it almost immediately, fuelled by my own interest as well as my passion for dance. I'd never done any kind of cultural dancing before either, so this was certainly new space for me to explore - and explore with zest!

It turns out that I was the only Y13 that signed up for the CCA, but that didn't discourage me. Classes turned out to be more intriguing and exciting than I thought - we learnt a mixture of classical dance moves (Kathak) and Bollywood dance moves, in which we had routines for both. It was definitely different to any previous dance experience I had - I soon realised that each dance style has their own story to tell within the movements (whether intentional or not), as well as their own way of telling it. While ballet is majorly characterised by grace and poise, ballroom by the flow of your actions, Bollywood dance is distinct in its expression and vividness. There is a confidence that is required, along with a specific degree of femininity. And to be able to achieve that - well, I'm still working on it…

There was one thing for sure though: I always left the room feeling much more lighthearted and free inside, having danced away the stresses of the day. The dance possessed an energy to it that I had not encountered before, but was accepting fully in each of our sessions.

Back to International Day. After spending the few weeks before rigorously running through our dance routine and perfecting each move, we were prepared (but jittery on the inside) to perform. I had come in wearing my turquoise national Chinese dress, only to change out of it and into a fiery and striking Bollywood outfit. When we took the stage, it was undoubtedly a surprise to everyone, myself included. Although I made a few slip-ups, the rest of the girls really carried the group and our image, and it was overall an extremely enjoyable and lively performance that left us all feeling a new sense of accomplishment afterwards.

Taking Bollywood did two things for me:

1. It improved my confidence and how I expressed myself. Many of the dance moves always have a purpose behind it - fixing your 'jewellery', unveiling yourself, sassing your opponent - and to constantly have to mold myself into different forms and emotions not only showed me the wonderful outcome of stepping out of my comfort zone, but it also provided me with a new sense of flair and confidence.

2. As a leader of the school, I firmly believe in leading by example. We often reinforce in many of our assemblies the importance of celebrating the integration that exists within our school, as well as the impact on yourself when you step out of your comfort zone. While this was an unexpected action of mine, I hoped to show people that it can be extremely liberating and beneficial if one simply makes that step forward and out.