Two sticks

Two sticks, a strand of wool, two rubber bands, soap and water. Do you know what tristring is?

I didn’t know either until a couple of days ago. Watch a couple of videos to document it and then come back here.
It makes really amazing soap bubbles doesn’t it? Why not try building one and see what comes out?
Bah yes, they are pretty but no big deal you may be thinking. Besides they burst after two minutes, it’s not even worth spending a few euros and putting my energy into building such a tool. Then maybe they also burst on me, and I also get soap on my clothes, you never know should they leave a mark….
no, no it’s not worth it.

And maybe you are right, soap bubbles don’t appeal to everyone. And it is true they cost almost nothing, but why should I spend my money like that? If you knew how many times I, too, have spent money I regretted: the new cell phone, a brand-name dress, the latest PC model… Few times I never regretted, and they were always the ones where I spent the money on experiences.

Yes okay, but experiences that are really worth having, experiences worth having. And for a discerning guy like me, it hasn’t always been easy to find them, I have to admit.
“We at Aegee organize a vacation in July for other guys who come from all over Europe,” some of my friends told me one day, “why don’t you help us?”

Mah, it will be the usual classic vacation, I thought, however why not try, after all, the Aegee Bergamo group I recently joined is really nice, I also met many who are now my friends. So why not. I bought the ingredients and started to help build the tristring, although I didn’t expect who knows what result: after all, it’s not like it was the first vacation I was taking with friends, right?

Then that week in July came, flew by, and was over in a second. A bubble filled with memories, experiences, laughter, contacts, laboriously generated by blowing slowly and burst violently in a second. I had met young people from all over Europe, sharing with them moments, laughter, opinions, listening to their thoughts and confronting them on so many current issues in Italy as much as, unexpectedly, in their home nations. Aegee had given me an experience. A worthwhile experience. And all over Europe there were these events the years before as well, and I knew it, but I had always watched them pass by from afar without giving them any attention, a soap bubble always seems so trivial in the end. I had never stopped to see what that bubble might contain, no matter how much I had been told about it, but I could not understand it. And so how do I now explain it from the outside to you who are reading?

I could tell you that I have indelible memories, that since that time as soon as I can I have a plane ticket in my hand, that I have learned so much, made so many friendships, but I don’t know if that’s enough. From the outside, those bubbles keep looking so trivial. But if you’re in Aegee, though, it means that an intuition toward the little woods, the rubber bands, the yarn you’ve already had. You thought maybe something can be done with it. But maybe you’ve also always thought that basically these are such common materials that you don’t think you can get something really nice out of them, I mean we’re always talking about bubbles in the end right?
Give it a try: click that button, leave the comfort zone paranoia behind, and apply to a European Aegee event. You already have the tristring in your hand: you just need to put some soap and water on it, and you’ll become the star of your first bubble. Sooner or later it will invariably burst, because that is its nature: at that point you will tell me if I was exaggerating when I described it as extraordinary, or if you are of the soap marks that were left on your clothes and you thought were so boring, now you can’t do without them.