Chinese Speech Competition

Yesterday was the 10th annual Auckland Chinese Speech Competition. Last year I did really badly, as I had only prepared my speech about our family's kitten a couple days before the competition. This year I had written a speech about two weeks before, but the proof-reading process took a bit longer than expected. It was only two days before the speech competition that I had settled on the final version of my speech! A bit of deja vu there...Anyway I spent my last lunchtime on Friday with Phoebe trying to practise my speech to her (trying to avoid all those distractions!) and then spent the rest of Friday night and Saturday morning practising.

Finally the speech competition came at 2pm at Auckland Uni. I met up with Bronwen and Nikki who came and were going to compete as well. I wasn't sure if they were going to or not, since they had had an awful English assessment the day before! There were about 24 students competing in our category, the largest of all categories there! In past competitions the year 12 and 13 categories have been the smallest, but I suppose numbers of Chinese students have been growing over the years.

This year they changed the format of the competition, so that after you gave your speech you had to answer two questions related to China in Mandarin. We were only given the questions and answers to learn two days before the competition!

Bronwen went second. Her speech was pretty good! After when she had to answer the questions my mum (who was filming in the back) and I were trying to tell her the answer, with my mum mouthing it and me holding up a piece of paper with it. Fortunately she got both questions right!

I went right after her. In a late minute decision before I left home I decided to wear a costume to be slightly different, so I got up in my Scottish kilt and a Chinese hat with a fake ponytail. I gave my speech on being a Eurasian. I'm not too sure how it went because I did stumble a little bit! I managed to answer both questions correctly (although I hoped the adjudicators heard correctly too!)

After that I had to listen to another 20 or so speeches before we got to Nikki's. Amongst those other speeches was last year's winner, this Korean girl from Lynfield College. I was anticipating a good speech from her. It turns out she was using the same speech she did last year according to my mum! Nikki finally did her speech and she did hers well too!

The prize-giving is sometime in October so I'll have to wait a while for the results.

My family and I walked around the city for a while after the competition. It was a bit freaky. There was this drunk Maori guy who chucked a glass bottle at the wall. We also came across this big group of emo's. That was scary too!

I had a good chat with a friend and discovered heaps of interesting stuff that fills all these holes in my understanding of certain things, and this morning at church I'm sure I saw another person from our school there - Angie...but then again I always think I see people but they turn out not to be that person (eyes playing tricks on me)