Noriada i Maturalna
Noriada doesn’t exactly have a translation. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if Canadian students tried to pull something off like this, we’d all get arrested, suspended, and possibly have our diplomas held back. Back at home within the past, froshing younger generations used to be popular until things got out of control and it became a classification of bullying. Essentially, that’s how people start off Noriada (in Velika Gorica at least). All of us got up to be at school around 7am, where we filled up our water guns with all sorts of things, spraying the younger kids as they walked into the school. There was no escape; we had the building surrounded! In past years students would throw eggs and flour too, however you can imagine how terrible it would be to have to sit in school for a full day covered in bits of egg yolks and other miscellaneous foods; this year the teachers only allowed liquids (fair enough!). We all hung out at the school in the morning, and it was like a huge party. The school arranged for a DJ in the back yard and we all continued throwing liquids at each other while celebrating our last day of school. Meanwhile, in Zagreb, every student in their 4th year (final year) also graduating that year gathered in a square called Ban Jelacic Trg, essentially city center. Us villagers popped on the bus to go meet up with every other school in Zagreb, the bus ride too was a bit wild! Another thing that’s really common during the last week of school and for Noriada is to blow whistles super loudly, literally everyone has one. Imagine everyone on the city bus, blowing whistles, standing on the seats, chanting, blowing their whistles and having a great time. Pretty rough day to have to use transit to get to work.... But eventually we arrived and joined the chaos. Obviously the police wanted to ensure that students were being safe, after all with so many people doing stupid things, someones bound to get hurt. They essentially shut down Zagreb for a good portion of the day; traffic was stopped to allow us hooligans to stampede around the road safely, and officers were everywhere to ensure extra safety measures. There were people packed like sardines in Jelacic trg. Walking shoulder to shoulder amongst all the 20,000 students in the square was a crazy experience to say the least. With DJ playing music that was making all the buildings rumble along with almost every student blowing their whistle, my ears were ringing for days. This was by far the most unique experience I’ve had yet. I wish I could describe every detail, what it was really like, but it’s too difficult without seeing for yourself. From the square everyone marched for about an hour to continue the celebration at Park Bundek. It was super cool to experience something totally different than I did back at home for Graduation. To be honest, I wish that Canada had something similar to Noriada! We all had a lot of fun celebrating a hard working year with everyone in the Zagreb area. The next day was Maturalnas Vecears, essentially their graduation celebration! This bit was somewhat similar to what I experienced last year in Calgary. Everyone got all dressed up and looked wonderful for pictures at our school! After we all made our way to the dinner venue with our families. Here we spent some time socializing before we had the daughter-father/mother-son dance, then sent our families back home so we could eat dinner and enjoy time dancing and what not with our class. To say the least, with all the fun activities we experienced the previous two days, I was exhausted the next day! Enjoy the pictures to follow, and more stories in my next posts! xo