What makes life more creative on the Thor
There are many small details that make living on the Thor so special, and one of them are our projects. Every Friday, all students meet up from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in little groups of round about ten people. Every project has a different job. There is a music project, a project called “Auftakeln”, a photo project and a publicity project. In every project there is also an adult, who supports and helps the students.
In the music project or the ship’s own band (which I myself am a part of) we play songs for every birthday – instrumental or (only) with our voices. Aboard the Thor there are a piano and the instruments which some students brought, and we use them for our project, but people can also use them in their free time. We also write a new verse from a birthday song every time when it is someone’s birthday. Sometimes, we write our own songs and share them with the group, especially for special events like saying goodbye to our parents or New Year’s Eve. For Christmas we performed a little musical about Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the Three Wise Men. It was a big success, but I must say I didn’t know that it is so much work to make a musical ready for stage. We are no professional music group of course, so sometimes the music we make might not be perfect, but that is ok, it is the will that counts. What makes the work in the music project a little bit harder is that we haven’t got so much time for practising and not enough places where we can do so, because we have to go into one of the small cabins. We do this because we want the performances to be a surprise and practice without everyone hearing all our songs before.
The project called “Auftakeln” makes our everyday life on board more beautiful with decoration, sweets or various other things, and I love it! Most of the time the students of the project are working in the messroom during the meetings and all students are sitting at the tables sewing or stitching. Some of them are in the cargohold and make things from wood, like our cell phone box (we need a place to store the cell phones as we don’t use them aboard) or the “Kummerkasten”, a box where we can anonymously put in our constructive criticism, so we can speak about it in the next students’ meeting.
As its name suggests, the photo project takes wonderful pictures of us, the ship and the nature around us every day. But the main job of the photo team is to decide which photos deserve to be on the website or on Instagram to be able to give outsiders an insight into our live on the Thor, and to find informative subtitles for the website photos. Additionally, they collect photos from everyone and sort through them, so we’ll have a beautiful memory in the future.
The publicity project produces an interesting podcast about our journey. They have made e.g. podcasts about our everyday life on the Thor and our stay in Panama. Sometimes, when they make recordings, we all must be very quiet, so they can interview some students and crew in our library to give people outside an impression what life here is like. They have to apply very creative methods like recording under a blanket to tune out unwanted noise. You can listen to all podcasts on our website, but of course, they are in German. It always takes a very long time to edit the different recordings into one podcast, but they are so great! Some students of this project are also working on a yearbook for our year. In it will be photos, texts and memories for us at home.
For me, it was very difficult to decide which project I should chose before our big journey, because they all sounded so interesting. I like working with wood and textiles, taking photos, making music and editing podcasts. But I’m still very happy with my choice because music is one of the things I love most!