Here is the first of many to come detailed posts on my experience in the GYLC. Am trying to give a very honest picture of the conference, including the very few shortcomings that I found as well. Hope you find the post useful....
Day 1 : Well after a long and really tiring flight , it was a great relief to finally arrived at the Dulles International Airport in Washington DC and not being bothered by the excessive American Airports security. As I stepped outside , the lush green and extremely clean surroundings really impressed me. Well people DC does not have the huge skyscrapers everyone imagines while thinking of America . There is a rule here which states that none of the buildings in the city can be taller than the Washington Monument , which though is very tall but cant exactly be classified as a skyscraper.
The hotel in which we were accomodated was good. Unfortunately the food really sucked , literally even for the non vegetarians and you can well imagine what it would have been for a vegetarian like me.
We were then informed about our groups which had already been assigned randomly for each one of us. I happened to be a part of an amazing group of people and we were representing USA at the conference.
Day 2: Well there were a total of 360 people at this conference so the people here had made 16 country groups of
about 20 people each. The whole process was quite interesting. It would be really difficult to explain it completely, however I can say that these country groups would go on to participate in a Global summit on the last day of the conference in a manner to how a summit actually takes place in the United Nations. The best part of it is that the Global Summit of the
GYLC actually took place in the United Nations Headquarters Auditorium in New York city. We got a chance to listen to Mr Craig kielburger from an organisation called Free the Children. It was amazing to hear the accomplishments of the speaker (including a nomination for the nobel peace prize) who was just 22 years old. More on him can be found at the organisations website
http://www.freethechildren.com/aboutus/craigmarc/craigkielburger.htmDay 3,4,5 : Saw lots of monuments in DC , and I must say there are really a large number of them in here. To name a few interesting ones were the Lincoln memorial , the Thomas Jefferson memorial , world war 2 memorial etc. etc..... One really remarkable place was the American National Holocaust Museum. It was really a pain to walk through the entire museum and feeling the plight of the people who were there at that time. There were some real videos of the incident and trust me they were really moving. I even had nightmares during sleep that night. Also visited the American Air and Space Museum and it was the coolest place I have ever seen till now. There were actual space capsules that were used during the earlier years of the US Space program .There were loads of aircraft , of all types from commercial to military fighter jets. Then there were some really cool Flight Simulator games within the museum which one could play sitting inside of models of various super cool aircraft and unfortunately due to lack of time I could not make use of it...... :( I could write a whole page
about the Space Museum but I realise that I might just be boring you guys.
By the way there is this huge place in Washington DC called the national mall where all the memorials and the museums are located . The White House , the Washington memorial and the Senate lie in one straight line at the center of the mall in a similar fashion of the India Gate and the Rashtrapati bhawan in New Delhi . It is a really beautiful place. But one drawback was that it was really really expensive. For an example a bottle of water on the national mall costed arounf 2$ . I also got an opportunity to get photos clicked in front of the White House. It is a really small building compared to the Presidents House in India..... Hurray !
More in another post....
Cheers
Sparsh
Dhruv (2nd from right) and me (extreme right) getting ready for a conference session at manhattan college , NYC.
The USA group aboard the farewell cruise .... miss u people...
