What a wonderful surprise! On September 25, 2025, we had the pleasure of welcoming outstanding artists from German-speaking countries to CDSC. Every few years, the embassies of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany organize a joint cultural event in Bangkok and Chiang Mai – and this year, they again visited our beautiful school!

One artist from each country came to visit us to get creative with our students. In exciting workshops on literature, music, and art (see testimonials), grades 9 to 12 were able to discover their talents and gain new perspectives.

A huge thank you goes to the three embassies for their organization and support – and of course to EDB (Switzerland), Toxische Pommes (Austria), and Dima (Germany) for their inspiring work.

We had a lot of fun and gained many new creative impressions!

**** LITERATURE ****

The creative writing workshop focused primarily on humor. It all started when we students talked to the instructor, Toxische Pommes, about what we found funny. All sorts of things came up, from political satire to AI cat videos.

Then we were given a writing assignment: Imagine your teacher was an animal. Which animal? What would the lesson be like?

We all had different approaches; some drew pictures with captions, others wrote short stories. In the end, everyone expressed themselves creatively and we compared the results. But what none of us expected was the next assignment. We were told to burn our results. The explanation was that you shouldn’t get attached to your work, but that you always have to keep going in order to develop further. This applies not only to writing, but to many aspects of life; you always have to move forward.
So we took matches from the science room and burned the papers near the parking lot.

The final task was to present our own humor in the form of a short video. We divided into three groups and shot a video we had come up with ourselves, which we found funny as a group, and the results were really good. Each video was unique and reflected the creativity and humor of the students from all the grades involved.

Sarah Armstrong, Klasse 12

**** MUSIC ****

We had the great pleasure of spending Thursday’s project day with Eddie. Eddie is a singer-songwriter from Switzerland who is best known there for his dialect music.
After a brief round of introductions, we got started. We quickly noticed that Eddie has a very unusual sense of humor and likes to make jokes. His openness and the relaxed atmosphere he brought with him made it easy for us to strike up a conversation with him. We talked a lot throughout the day and got to know each other better.

At the beginning, he introduced us to one of his songs called “Punk Rock.” Our task was to change parts of the song. We were asked to write about something that connects us, so most of us wrote about school and were able to give free rein to our creativity. In the end, we came up with some real masterpieces, which we were then allowed to perform. Eddie was very impressed with our abilities and surprised at how quickly and confidently we mastered the task.

Our joint product, which we presented to the other two project day groups at the end of the day, was also the song “Punk Rock.” We rehearsed it a few times, which wasn’t so easy because most of us didn’t know Swiss German. So it was a bit bumpy at first, but the performance went very well in the end and the audience liked it.

In summary, the project day with EDB was a complete success. We will particularly remember his message that songwriting is less about the exact words and more about the feeling you convey. Every interpretation is correct because it triggers something unique in the listener.

Euphemia Peter, class 12

**** ART ****

The project day enabled us students to showcase our creativity at CDSC in an art workshop. Dima Ilko, a talented artist from Germany, had something exciting in store for us: a graffiti artwork to cover the outer wall of the sports hall. His idea was to write “CHIANG MAI” in large, bold letters so that we could fill it in with words we associate with the city.

Everyone was enthusiastic and highly motivated, but before we could start, Dima explained the graffiti process to us and then we had to do a bit of brainstorming. All kinds of words came up, such as durian, motorcycle, night market, coffee, rain, and much more.

To better understand the concept of graffiti, there was a short practice session where we were allowed to spray on large plastic sheets. Holding a graffiti can our hands for the first time and shaking it so that it made the classic clacking sound was pretty cool. Of course, we also enjoyed the spraying itself.

Then it was time to get started. We stood in front of the huge wall, picked up our colors, and just got started. Everyone showed their creativity and cooperation. We had a lot of fun, especially because we were completely free to design the artwork as we wanted. Brightly colored words in different fonts were sprayed on the wall everywhere, and every now and then, a few small paintings were added. Slowly, the space filled up and our masterpiece was complete.

Sonya Schurter, class 12