Preparation
Preparation - Basque Country
Preparation - Netherlands
Hi everyone
We are from the Netherlands, the land of stroopwaffels, windmills, wooden shoes and tulips.
We could present you a similar presentation like you have seen so far, however in the Netherlands we have a very specific issue. On the fifth of December we celebrate Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas is like Santa Claus, but they’re not the same. With Sinterklaas children put their shoe in front of the fireplace, and then their presents are delivered through the chimney. Sinterklaas comes from Spain on his “Stoomboot” bringing all the presents to The Netherlands. This is a Dutch tradition, and it happens annually. Sinterklaas arrives sometime mid November, and from that time until the 5th of December children get small presents in their shoes. On the 5th of December we celebrate Pakjesavond or Gift Night. On that night a big bag of presents is delivered in front of people’s doors.
The story of Sinterklaas is based on a children’s book from 1850, called “Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht”. Sinterklaas himself is based on the Turkish Priest of Myra, who lived back in 280. The Priest of Myra was seen as the Protector of Children, protecting them from harm.
During the Middle Ages Sinterklaas was celebrated in France and Germany. He came in front of the kids and would reward the good and hard-working kids, while punishing the bad and lazy ones. The bad kids would be put in a big bag, and be brought back to Spain. Of course this wasn’t actually true, just something we made up to scare the kids, in order to make them behave well.
Nowadays, this tradition is still held up. During Sinterklaas children put their shoe in front of their fireplace, and put in carrots and sugar cubes as a present for Amerigo, Sinterklaas’ horse. These are then taken out by their parents, and replaced with presents. Of course young children actually do believe that Sinterklaas is real, and have no clue that its actually their parents. This “schoentje zetten” happens about 2-5 times from when Sinterklaas arrives until Pakjesavond. Then on Pakjesavond families get together, have a nice dinner and sing typical Sinterklaas songs. Usually it also involves presents, which are delivered in front of the door, in big bags. There’s always presents for everyone, but usually little kids are the ones who get the most things. People in The Netherlands also celebrate Christmas, so you can imagine that December is a pretty financially devastating time for most families.
However, the issue with Sinterklaas are his helpers. They are called Zwarte Piet or Black Pete. They are his subordinates, and have to deliver presents for him. The problem with this is a pretty obvious racial issue, because Sinterklaas is a white guy ordering his black servants around. Some people in The Netherlands are offended by this, because it reminds them of slavery. But other people don’t want it to change, because they say it’s tradition. Right now there are three parties. One who think Zwarte Piet shouldn’t change, one who thinks it should be adapted to a racially accepted thing, and one party who are neutral, and don’t really care what happens. People are really serious about this matter, and there have been numerous rallies and protest to change Zwarte Piet. Some solutions are to give them dirty spots on their face, instead of them being completely black. These spots would then allegedly be from going through chimneys to deliver presents. Some people want different colored Piets, like yellow or even rainbow. We want to know what you guys think about this matter, whether you think it’s racist or not. All the people that think Zwarte Piet is racis, please stand up.
To finish our presentation we have made a Kahoot Quiz, with some old and also some modern Dutch words, and you can guess what you think the word means in English.
Preparation - Sweden
Preparation Austria
Good morning dear students and teachers,
We are the exchange students from Austria. Our names are Anna, Susanne, Sophie and Claus and today we want to talk about the differences among generations in Austria.
Therefore we will inform you about the differences in language, music, clothes and many other things.
We hope that we can give you a good overview of this topic and feel free to ask questions during our presentation.
Language
So, let’s begin with differences in language.
Dialects
As you might know, in Austria, we speak German, but the thing is we have lots of different dialects and each dialect has its own type of words.
It’s hard to preserve the dialects. The use of these words has diminished during the past years. Mostly young people have stopped making use of old Austrian dialect expressions in their everyday language. They have started to make up their own words or added English words.
We call that teenage slang. And that’s a thing every generation has. They have their own slang with typical words.
So you can say the younger the people the less use of old dialect phrases. So that’s actually the big difference here.
But still, Austrians love their dialects, and none will stop using dialect because it’s something that’s unique for Austria.
Here are some typical words for “hello” from our dialect:
Grias di, Grüss Gott, Servus.
Another change in language is that nowadays people have better foreign language skills. Most students learn at least English at school, but there is also the opportunity to be educated in Italian, Spanish, French and some other languages.
Teenagers in Austria usually have good English skills because they watch English videos, or they read a lot of English stuff on the internet every day.
But my parents only learned English or maybe another language at school and they don’t surf as much on the internet as teenagers do so they don’t get influenced that much by the internet. My grandparents didn’t have the chance to learn languages at school. There were just a few people who had this opportunity.
Now I want to talk about music.
The older generation like my grandparents listened to the Everly Brothers, Freddy Quinn or Nancy Sinatra. Our parents were actually listening to the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Sir Elton John and NSYNC. The younger generation, our generation is different. We are fans of Billie Eilish, Imagine Dragons and Twenty One Pilots. The Austrian rapper Raf Camora and the German rapper Capital Bra are great examples of German rap. But we also love Yung Hurn. He is an Austrian Hip-Hop musician. Classical music is often played by Symphonic Orchestras, like the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Brass Bands often play military marches.
But in Austria there is one waltz every Austrian has to know: the Viennese waltz, for example “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss.
Let’s turn our attention to food now.
Bratl (roasted piece of pork), Scheiterhaufen (bread pudding made of toast, milk, eggs, apples, cinnamon etc.), and any type of Knödeln (Speckknödeln: dumplings filled with bacon, Marillenknödel: apricot dumplings) etc. were often eaten by our grandparents and parents.
Our generation eats more fast food like Kebap, Burgers etc. But we also have food trends like vegan or vegetarian food.
On special occasions or Sundays we eat “older generation” dishes like Bratl or Schnitzel (thin breaded, pan fried veal cutlet).
The good old Schnitzel and Kaiserschmarrn (chopped sweet pancakes) will always be the unique dishes of Austria.
My first topic is family.
The typical family model has changed a lot in the past few years. A few years ago it was common practice that the woman stayed at home and the man went to work and earned money for his family. The woman had to take care of the household and children. At this point I want to give you some historical information. In Austria women were not allowed to work without the permission of their husband until 1975. Couples usually got married very soon and the woman started to have kids very soon too. It was absolutely normal to have a lot of children. Nowadays many things have changed. It is more common that women go to work too and are also focusing more on their career. Because of that, couples often have their children later and instead of having 3-5 children they only get 1-2 children. But one thing has not really changed: the importance of family and the cohesion among themselves.
And now I want to move on to Leisure time and club activities.
Different types of leisure time activities are very common in Austria that applies for every generation. Everyone likes to do some sport or be part in a club for example the fire brigade or the marching band and orchestras. Nowadays we have more offer of sports and clubs, so teenagers have more possibilities to do the things they want to do. But skiing is the most popular sport in Austria, every generation does it.
Let us talk about the differences of dressing now.
Of course, the style of dressing is different from person to person. This applies to the older and the younger generation alike. But in general, I can say that my generation is dressing comfortably and often follows the newest trends. For going out it is common to dress a little bit more casually. We also have traditional clothes in Austria, for the girls & women it is called “dirndl” and for the boys & men it is the “lederhosen”. These costumes are worn by the older and younger generations on different occasions, for example the “Oktoberfest” or the “Dult”. A main difference between the generations is, that my generation doesn`t dress as nicely as it was once common. We are often dressed more casually than we should be. For example, the sweatpants, which are often worn for nearly every event by young people. This kind of dressing up is very uncommon for the older generation.
Now we want to talk about the religion in Austria
Most people of Austria are roman Catholics. But for the newer generation it is more likely to be without confession. Most of the teenagers in Austria go to church twice a year. That happens for Easter and Christmas. The older generation is still more connected to religion, so they go to church once a week and praise the lord.