We arrived on Thursday, one day before the tournament started. Because of that, we had a free afternoon. We visited the Festung Marienburg and the surrounding wall. Since they are on a mountain, the walk was very exhausting, but it was worth the effort. The view of Würzburg was stunning. After that, we ate a very delicious and huge pizza and walked through the inner city. When we were back in our youth hostel, we prepared our speeches for the next day.  

We had two prepared and two impromptu debates (that means that we get only one hour for preparation). The first debate was about space programs. We proposed, which means we debated that governments stop spending on space programs. Sadly, we lost this debate. Tourism in Antarctica was an impromptu and we were again on side proposition. We won! Then we had a prepared debate which was about rails and roads: we convinced the judges to propose (vote for us) with strong strategy and great speakers =D. We got into the semifinals, where we debated against a school from Ulm. We lost this debate with a 3 to 2 split (that means that two judges voted for us and 5 for the other team). The motion in this debate was this house (our team) believes that inner-cities should be car free zones. We won 2 from 4 debates and the other debates were split decisions. In the end our team our team (the GSB debating society) got the third place. And two of our speakers made it in the top ten speaker ranking! We had a lot of fun and even if we didn’t win every debate, we got good feedback from the judges which was very helpful and often positive.

The debates about political and social terms like space programs, trains vs cars, tourism in Antarctica and cars in inner cities, were interesting to discuss because they affect our future. The whole trip was very fun, because we had a nice group and a cool coach. We met new nice people. And improved our language and debating skills. We hope that a lot of trips will follow!

Written by Nele Schröter and Touali Koré