Springtime is competition time at Toastmasters! This year, however, it was slightly different than in the previous years. As Toastmasters International disestablished the autumn competition, the spring competition included three categories: international speeches, evaluation speeches and table topics. Unfortunately, there is no humorous speech contest anymore.
But no worries, we still had a lot of fun! Given the increased number of contests, we decided to split the club competition into two evenings, one in German and one in English. On February 27th, we started with the German evening, covering all the three categories, followed by an English evening on March 6th.
Now it was time to prepare for the Area Conference: not only for the speakers, but also for Dorothee and her team, who organized the event. March 30th was a sunny Saturday and the location couldn’t have been better: a room on the 5th floor with a huge roof-deck! This allowed us, to do a lot of the preparation work and spend all the breaks outdoors in the sun! Hosted by Hamburg International Speakers, the following neighboring clubs from Area A3 were our guests: Stader Redenschwinger, Igel Toastmasters Buxtehude and Hamburg Power Speakers.
Next stop: Duesseldorf. This year’s Division Conference (Division A) took place on April 14. This meant another two weeks for our contestants to finetune their speeches. Our contestants? Yes, initially we had two participants from our club: Laura was our candidate for the Evaluation Speeches and Nancy represented us in the International Speeches Contest. In addition, Olaf, who was already member of two Toastmasters Clubs, had also joined Hamburg International Speakers in the meantime. He also took part in the International Speeches Contest. And the good news didn’t stop: Laura and Olaf made it to number 1 in their respective contests!
Certainly, Laura and Olaf had a great time at the District 95 Conference in Gothenburg from May 10th to 12th. Just imagine meeting Toastmasters from Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden and listening to lots of great speeches! And all this in beautiful Sweden!
Have you ever had overweight? Sorry, we don’t want to get too personal. We are talking about luggage at the airport. Olaf definitely had a funny story to tell on this topic. And he did it extremely well – so well, that he ended as No. 3 in Gothenburg! You can find the video from his speech here. [:]
And this is where this story ends – the story of Hamburg International Speakers competition time 2019. However, don’t miss following the International Convention, taking place August 21st to 24th in Denver, Colorado. And save the date for next year: The International Convention 2020 will take place from August 10th to 15th in Paris – and this means Europe!