Why everyone should go to a Rodeo, at least once in their life...

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

“It’s boots and chaps, cowboy hats, spurs and latigo, ropes and the reins & the joy and the pain; They call the thing Rodeo.” -Anonymous

Being in Texas is surreal. Everything about Texas screams beauty; everything is green and big and it kinda feels like home. There is a rich, cultural history and it is also the place that stole my heart! We had the opportunity and privilege to experience Rodeo at Tejas Rodeo on the 4th of July celebrations.

My family and I at Tejas Rodeo

Here’s why Rodeos are awesome:

1. There is eye candy for everyone: Women: The cowboys who are riding the bulls/horses are gorgeous! They are strong, handsome and they are entertaining to watch… doesn’t it sound amazing?

Men: The women watching the rodeos are gorgeous, as well. Dresses/ skirts, boots and cowboy hats, need I say more? I think not.

2. It is great fun for everyone to watch! It is entertaining to watch the barrel jumping, the horse riding, the bull catching and the bull-riding. Children can participate in the ‘Mutton Bustin’ where they try to catch sheep or the calves. The women can enjoy the eye candy around them, as well as in the arena and the men can enjoy the view around them and all the action in the arena! Score, right?

3. There is a dance and live music afterwards! Hello, is this not a bargain and a score? You can dance the night away with your friends/family, plus you can dance with the cowboy/cowgirl, that you have been eyeing the whole night. The live music is also great; country singers, line dancing… Need I say more?

4. It is affordable: It is hours of entertainment and great fun for the whole family. It is worth every single penny.

5. The beer is cold: It is summer and EXTREMELY hot at the rodeos in summertime, but there is a cure! BEER!!!!! So drink up and enjoy!

My sister enjoying the action in the arena

RODEO IS SO MUCH FUN!!!!!!!

If all this is not motivation enough, just go anyway! Put it in your Bucket List! Just try it! If you don’t enjoy it, then I will apologize and send a chocolate, but I doubt that I will ever have to do that! There is entertainment for everyone and it is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience!

Love,

From the girl buying a mechanical bull to practice her bull-riding…

April Fools!

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

My previous blog post is just an April Fools joke! CALM DOWN!!!

I am sorry if I caused you a semi-heart attack. But thanks to everyone who phoned, who spoke their concerns for the 'travel agency' who contacted me on Facebook. Saying that it sounds a bit dodgy and also reminding me that my dad isn't Liam Neeson, who will be able to save me, once I get taken!

I still enjoy my studies and will take it through to the end! I am not a quitter even when the going gets tough! I only have 8 months left of studies, afterwards the adventures will begin. I will travel in 2016 though, but it will be done through reliable people and not randoms, who contact me on Facebook!
Hope you had a bit of a laugh!

Click here to see previous blog post.

Let the adventures begin: My final year as student!

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

My fourth and final year has started! This is the year of adventures, hard work and good times. This year I have a big, single room, which means music all day long and being only considerate to myself!

2015 will also consist of great friends and food, in no particular order! They will be part of the adventure of 2015! 

On the RAG farm, soaking wet with great friends!

The food of 2015!

I also have a bucket list to complete this year that will be part of the adventure. Check it out here.

This will be my year! Let the games begin and may the odds be ever in my favor. How will 2015 be for you??

Painting for holiday fun

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

What do you do when you get bored? You get creative (sometimes).

This year, I will have my own room at my residence and it will be a lot bigger, so I need to decorate it with more things. But decorations are expensive and not exactly what I want, therefore I decided to buy and paint my own decorations with my favorite color: Blue, especially turquoise.

Adventure: my word for 2015

"The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure."- Christopher McCandless

This is my motto for 2015. I simply want to have fun and adventures. Read about it here.

Happ(y)iness: My word of 2014

My motto and word for 2014 was: Happiness and the motto: Happiness is an inside job. I had an extremely happy year and it was because I chose to be happy. Read about it here.

I am impressed with my attempts at painting! I will take orders (ha-ha).

My word for 2015

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Words are very powerful things, therefore I like to pick a word each year to live by. I strongly believe that if I make that choice to live by the word then it will happen in that year.

My word for 2014 was Happiness and 2014 was a truly happy year for me. I constantly made the choice to be happy and make the best of everything. My quote for 2014 was "Happiness is an inside job", it will also be my quote for life.

My word for 2015 is ADVENTURE! Yes, I want to have adventures this year. It will be my last year as a student and I want to enjoy every single moment of it.

I will say 'YES' to every opportunity to have an adventure and to just have fun. I will also have to work very hard, but I will aim for adventure every day.

Also, happy New Year to all my faithful blog readers and to the new ones! I hope you all have a year filled with happiness and adventure. So here's to 2015 that is going to be an adventure!

What is your word for 2015?

Who thought job shadowing can be this fun?

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

In one day I learnt how to write a press release, how to evaluate a company's website, as well as how to handle corporate people when you criticize their website, social media presence as well as their digital marketing.

Day 1 of shadowing

In the beginning of this semester, we were notified by a lecturer that we had to shadow a Public Relations Officer in our October holiday. I wanted to shadow at my mother's company, only to realize they don't believe in the importance of Public Relations... Like are you crazy?

Anywho, I had to find other alternatives, because working at my mother's company was out of the question. My aunt's friend told us that her daughter is in Public Relations and will organize something, that's when the opportunity of a lifetime came my way! Flow Communications accepted me to shadow at them for this week. I couldn't be more ecstatic! They are a company doing pure communication work: anything from web development, content, design, social media, public relations, media training, exhibitions, name it and they do it in communication.

On my first day, I was asked to fix a press release by making it shorter and write more concise sentences. It was hard for me to think in English again after being at the university for so long, where we speak purely Afrikaans. I'm sure in a day or so, I will get my English vocabulary up to date again.

I, also,  helped to evaluate a company's website, we then went into a meeting later this afternoon to point out what needs to be done to their website, the content on it, how it links to their social media profiles, etc. Thankfully, it was not my job to tell them what Flow thought and what the critique was, because I'm only shadowing. It felt like sitting in a tennis court and the ball going back and forth. The opinions in the company differed so much, one person agreed, one didn't, the other one asked Flow to elaborate... No one was on the same train of thought. Coming to a conclusion was not easy at all. I was just a spectator in that tennis match and I'm so grateful for that. Nonetheless, it was a great learning school on how to handle a meeting like this.

A selfie on the way to the meeting with this company

Today was really great and I have already learned so much. Flow Communications have exceeded my expectations on so many levels. I cannot wait to see what the rest of the week has in store for me! I think PR may be for me, but let's not talk too soon.

Flow Communications is responsible for the following campaigns:

• Nando's
• World Wildlife Fund
• Nelson Mandela Foundation
• South African Tourism
• SASOL
• South African Heart Association;
• and many, many more!

So yes, I'm very privileged to be shadowing here. They mean business!

Peace out 'til next time!

A toast to a dear friend

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

My dear life long friend has decided to go work and travel in Versailles, France, for 7 months. 7 months! It feels like a lifetime to me! She will be an English assistant at a school there. She will always be able to travel in her off-time. I am very happy that she has this opportunity to broaden her horizons. But she is leaving us behind!

Marinda and me have been friends literally since birth, but actually Marinda is more than that to me:
I looked up the definition of friend in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2011: 568):
"a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations". But Marinda is way more than that to me: She is my lunch-buddy, my go-to when I need advice, my best friend, the person who understands me best, my soul sister.

We organized a farewell party for her, where we had a lot of fun and the other night, I had the opportunity to be her date to the formal, where it was our final farewell.

We are the complete opposite. We are night and day. The moon and the sun. Whatever you want to call it. But I believe that is why our friendship works so good, we can never get bored of each other, because of the fact that we differ so much. She is my friend that is my missing puzzle piece.

Marinda, I hope you have a wonderful journey of a lifetime in France. I hope you find yourself in ways that will amaze you. I hope you make friends all over the world. I hope you eat and drink as many weird and wacky things there, because you only live once and life is too short to be on the safe side! I hope you love walking down those beautiful streets every single day and that you will walk in the rain instead of avoiding it. Embrace the cold and the winters and maybe even the snow! I hope you do crazy things and make up your own bucket list! Well, this is kinda a demand ha-ha!

My friend, I wish you well. I really do hope that you have one great adventure and I cannot wait to hear all the amazing stories.

Listen to this song, it reminds me of the journey you'll be having.

I love you, Marinda, and I will miss you. But mostly I'm excited for you!

Will your younger self approve?

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my younger self. By younger self I mean my 5 year old self. I keep asking myself: Would my younger self approve?

Would the younger Kiara approve?

When I was little, I was a very big tomboy. I used to play with bugs, chase boys around with all sorts of them literally from big to small. I loved playing pranks on people, scaring the living daylights out of them, doing all sorts of silly things and part of being tomboy, I also loved to play with cars and refused to wear dresses, because it wasn't fun to play in it. Yes, that was my younger self. Just writing this blog post is giving me nostalgia, which I can't explain. Is it a part of yourself which you lose whilst growing up?

I feel like I have left my younger self behind on some playground, because somewhere along the line, life said that it is time to grow up. Why is growing up so boring? Waking up, getting ready to go to class, working, eating and sleeping has become my daily routine. But yet, life is fun and it is long enough to both have fun and sometimes be serious and act like an adult. I must just make time to have fun and just be me who I really am. I always make excuses that I don't have time, but my problem is that I never make time.

I miss the days when I made pranks on people. I can never forget the different reactions I got from people and how i laughed until I cried.

I once had a small paper bag, which said "Rattle snake eggs: handle with care". I would take it to school and show the teachers and they were usually curious to look inside, once opening the bag, a rattling sound would come out of the bag.

The trick was that there was a rubber band with a piece of metal in the middle of the rubber band. You then had to wind the rubber band up and hold the packet correctly so it won't unwind. When people opened the packet, the rubber band unwound and the metal piece hit the sides of the packet, making the rattling sound. It scared a lot of people and the reactions were priceless.

My sister brings the fun back

Since my sister's birth, I learned to chill a bit and have fun, because she is only young once and when she's older I won't be cool enough to have fun times with her. She taught me a lot about life and how to enjoy the simple stuff.

Enough of the complaining! This is my decree to myself for all to see: I will go back to my roots and have fun for the remainder of 2014! I will pull pranks on my friends and family! Yes, you heard it... be prepared, I'm coming

Being COLOURFUL at the Holi Festival of Colours

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Since June, I've been excited about this festival, because all the previous times that there were colour fests like these I was not able to go. But then the REAL DEAL came along and I was able to go!

Paint being thrown in the air

Thrown with colours by the photo bomber

The parents and me

It was really a fun day and it really was worth the money, because the whole day there were DJ's rocking the fest and there were great food stalls (Always a bonus for me).

We had an amazing DJ line-up:
DJ FRESH
PASCAL & PEARCE
MARK STENT
ROYAL K
LADY LEA
VIN GROOVIN
NICK ESSENTIAL
HOUSESHAKER
OZZY FUNK
KEREN ONAY
WILSON FURY

DJ Fresh and Pascal and Pearce, really delivered and they got the whole crowd singing and dancing! But later on, it got super cold and our flimsy jackets and jerseys was no comparisons to the wind.
But non the less we had a lovely time. So, if the Colour Festival is coming your way, make sure to get your tickets, because you will have a blast! This is a bucket-list event...

Trip to the zoo

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Today, we visited the Johannesburg Zoo. Here are some pictures:

Lions tanning in the winter sun

Baby sis throwing a tantrum

Fish over head

CANSA relay for life

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Yesterday, we went to the annual CANSA Relay for life. This was my second relay of CANSA that I attended and it is always great fun!

This relay was to raise awareness about cancer and to raise money for CANSA to help cancer patients. A few years ago,, I detected a lump in my breast. It is a very scary thing to discover.
The lump is benign. But after the detection, I decided to support wherever I can.

They have been planning this event for months and we really enjoyed ourselves. At the starting line you buy a necklace and add a bead for every time you walked around the field.

There were also food stalls and health stalls next to the field to show you how to lower your risk to cancer. A friend and I, went to check our health...

I am almost 21 and my age in health is 21.1, so I am not that unhealty, except that I should learn more good habits in order to live a healthier life. Challenge accepted!

Earth Hour

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Yesterday, the 29th of March was Earth Hour. Earth Hour is where you switch off your electricity or just lights to save the Earth little by little! Every little bit helps, your daily effort to save power is also making a difference.

We started out outside

We planned to watch the stars, during Earth Hour, but it is Autumn here in South-Africa and it gets quite chilly once the sun goes down. Our plans soon changed and we made a Christmas bed inside!

The flash is too bright in the dark

Take #2- dog included

It is fun to take part in an initiative, which is happening all over the world. 

What did you do during Earth Hour?

Canvas in the subway

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Yesterday, we had Canvas at the university. We paint the subways on campus, to brighten them up. It was the first time that we could paint at the engineering campus' subway, because it is still relatively new. I am not an artist, but our residence decided to have a support team, so me and my friend could also participate! The theme for this year was The equilibrium of opposites.

Beginning our shift as the support team

The start of the canvas

Me with the end-result

Our canvas is two owls, but if you look closely you can see the Ying-Yan sign in the owls. It came out beautifully!

My favorite canvas

We had a lot of fun as the support team. Next year, I'm doing this again!

Sending letters

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Yesterday, I had sent my first handwritten letter! Francois Maritz has come up with this idea and I think it is wonderful.

My first letter

This is about feeling the pen and paper, licking the envelope to close it, about using postage stamps. We are experiencing the true feeling of writing again. If you are in South-Africa and would like to join this pen pal group, you can email me at kiara.oosthuizen@gmail.com and I will fill you in on all the details!

Decorating the corridors

By Arnia Kiara Oosthuizen

Every year, in the dormitory we have a corridor-decorating weekend. This year, we decided to have a farm/cowboy theme for the corridor, which I live on. Here are some photos of the end result.

Me and my roommate's photo on our door

Our name board

Everyone living on the corridor's photos, pinned up in the corridor

The birthday board

The painting in our recreation room

Our washroom

Decorations in the windows

Our telephone room

It was so much fun in taking part in decorating the corridor and the results are very beautiful.