Matura Ball. Revised.

In Austria when you graduate from high school (it's a lot more complicated than high school though, basically you choose what track you want to be on when you're 14, or your parents choose for you, and you go to either a school that will prepare you for University or a technical school, which can specialize in anything from business to cooking to tourism to the wine industry to music, etc.) you take a test called the Matura. You are tested on many different subjects and for each subject you must take either a written or an oral exam. Each exam can be up to five hours long. Biology and Chemistry are almost always oral exams. Languages can be both. Oral exams are presented to a panel of teachers and directors from your school and province.

Once you've passed this test, you've earned your high school diploma.

To celebrate the Matura class, every year, every school has an open ball. Anyone over the age of fourteen is welcome to buy a ticket. Parents, teachers, friends and families all attend. The class picks a theme, choreographs dances, creates awards for teachers and basically throws a huge dance party. The girls wear long, white dresses and the boys wear suits for their choreographed Polonaise. It's amazing. The dancing lasts until five in the morning.

At this ball in Amy's town, there were three floors and three rooms for dancing. Beer, wine, champagne and mixed drinks were sold on every floor.

The first picture is where the Polonaise took place. There were formal walzes, then dances from the stone age to the present. The Stone Age was their Matura Ball theme. So they dressed up in costumes and danced a stone age-themed dance, a Renaissance dance (the boys dressed as women, the girls dressed as men, which was pretty halarious), a flapper dance, a dance to a song from Grease and then there was hip hop.

After the waltzes, the other rooms opened up. Downstairs was pretty much chaos. It was basically a diskothek; it was dark, loud, chaotic and very fun. In another room upstairs a band played mostly Irish music? The band that played in the formal ball room was pretty incredible. The girl singing was from Star Mania (the equivalent of American Idol), which of course made them all the more special.

I loved it.