The GEEK Society’s conversation club
Hello, and welcome to The GEEK Society. I, for once, want to give you a warm welcome and show you what is The GEEK Society’s Conversation Club.
As you may deduce, we are a conversation club, This, however, doesn’t mean we are your regular conversation club. Not at all. The GEEK Society offers you a chance to socialize with a group of friends with similar interests. We, as you may already have deduced, are geeks. GEEK, however, stands for Gaming Experiences and English Knowledge, and what we do is simple: we play and have fun in English.
Each meeting of the GEEK Society aims for two objectives: have fun and practice our English skills. We reunite to play games and have fun, and those games can be as odd as a Murder Mistery Role Playing to a simple Hangman or Tic Tac Toe game. We have lots of games to play and we sometimes meet at a restaurant instead of our offices, so we can also eat and drink and have a good time. So far we have English speakers of three different kinds of English: Canadian, North-American and British English, so we can assure you a lot of different accents.
The best part of this is the cost. If we meet at a restaurant, you will only pay for what you eat at a restaurant, such as Sirloin Stockade, sometimes Scratch du Ouro or another buffet, or a nice restaurant. You won’t pay a buck to join, you’ll just pay what you eat. However, on small meetings or special occasions we will meet at our offices, and then we will charge a cover, usually less than one hundred and fifty pesos, and we will provide all the food or drink you want: that means a barbecue, grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, a pizza party, or even all of them together. And booze. We have booze. Not lots of booze, because we are respectable drinkers and not plain cheap common alcoholics. For the designated driver we have non-alcoholic beer, for example. Or lots of different soda flavours. Or citrus, tropical, hawaiian or even Delaware punches, for that matter.
Still, we stick to the basic idea of a conversation club. The idea is to meet, speak in English and have some fun. The host (yours truly) usually provides a topic of conversation (except during The GEEK Sports Edition) to use it as a start point. Last time we choose food, just for fun, and we ended up discussing anthropophagia in the ancient Egypt. There is no time limit for the meetings, so if you leave early you may return later (but of course…) and we may be watching a movie, playing Risk or Clue, eating a second time, or just scratching our navels. Or other body parts, I’m afraid. That reminds me: sometimes we actually watch a movie or a tv show that will work as a topic for discussion, or just for fun. Usually, for fun. We haven’t done that recently, because our TV is just 20 inches in size, and we want to get a big one. I propose a 54 inches, but there is a little bit of a problem with the price.
Anyway, let me continue. Another thing our Society has is a library. It is not a very big library, but it’s growing. I’ve been purchasing books of science fiction, fantasy and science, along with a few selected novels. We have, for example, Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities along with Orson Scott Card’s The Ender Game and Terry Pratchett’s Rincewind the Wizzard. You can read those books in the club, or take it for up to two weeks. The Library gets more books each month. so much books that I haven’t even read all of them! (yet)!
You may wonder “Why ain’t you charging more for these services? Are you nuts?” and the reason is that I do this in my spare time. I want to make this my bread and butter, but, alas, I can’t do it without first some money to mantain the club on low seasons. Therefore, the club is just a bunch of friends hanging out together, and I think it is nicer. It’s not a business: it’s a past time (I wanted to say “It is a way of living” but that sounds awful). So the club is cheap-to-free, and we both gain something from it: you have a place to practice your English, I get an extra money that allows me to host another party. And practise my English too.
“Wait, ain’t you an English-speaker?” you may say. Well, I am, but not a native one, as you probably have inferred from reading this thing. It just happens that I learned English a long, long time ago, and with almost no formal training but with a lot of real-life training. My former girlfriend, on the other hand, was trained in English, but she wasn’t fluent and had a real hard time trying to speak with native speakers. That’s the reason I wanted to start a conversation club, because we needed to practise in a real environment and, let’s be honest, there ain’t a lot of places like that. At least, not cheap. I started this project because I know that there are lots of people in my situation (not ours, I’m single again, he he) that surely would benefit from this idea.
Whew! Look at that! Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose so let me simply add that it’s my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.
There are a few rules, however, to ensure a good and safe time for everyone:
1st RULE: You do talk about the GEEK.
2nd RULE: You DO talk about the GEEK.
3rd RULE: You only speak in English at the GEEK. If you speak in a language other than the official of your club, you’ll be kicked in the ass and thrown away.
4th RULE: NO DRUGS ALLOWED. Alcohol and tobacco don’t count as drugs, however, only the members of age are allowed to smoke or drink.
5th RULE: When discussing religious matters, remember that there is no other nutritive and delicious God than the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
6th RULE: You can wear what you want and even enter barefoot, as long as you pay your membership.
7th RULE: Games will go on as long as they have to.
8th RULE: If this is your first night at the GEEK, you HAVE to play.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me at vforvancouver at gmail.com if you are interested in joining The GEEK Society, or even better, to sponsor it. You can also fill the comment form below.
Cheerio, partner.
V.
