House of Friendship Grand Opening

For the first time in the history of Rotary, they had a grand opening for the House of Friendship where everyone meets and mingles, and where you can find all kinds of information on Rotary projects, products, and people.

Quite by chance we ran into Raju and Asha along with 2 friends of theirs from Spruce Grove, so the 6 of us went to the opening together. Not wanting to miss anything (and also because we got there early enough) we managed to get 6 eats in the third row center. In fact, if I wasn's busy looking at the stage, I was looking at the back of Carl-Wilhelm's head. He turned around periodically and I choose to think he was looking at me... though Raju was probably in his line of sight.

The ceremony was excellent! The Tivoli Boys' Band marched in and played "Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen" to which we were encouraged to sing, having been given the lyrics as we entered. They were rounded out by a wonderfully harmonic young girls' choir which lent some pizazz and harmony to the melody. They followed this with some lovely Swedish and Danish folk tunes. The Emcee gave us a wildly embellished version of the story they were singing which just added to our enjoyment. The choir even sang an African song a capella, and another in English. These young kids over here think nothing of learning multiple languages and appear to be proficient in all of them. And a final note, every single one of the boys and girls was strikingly good looking.

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