Chapi-Chapeau

Last night we had some people come over to our building, "we" being me, Matthieu, and Melissa, who all live in Holly Grove 1. We played this game called "chapi-chapeau" (which sounds likes "sha-pee sha-poe") which the Belgians told us translates into crazy hat in English. Anywho, it's kind of like taboo mixed with catchphrase mixed with charades. Everyone writes down a name of someone famous (that everyone, even internationally, will know, which was a bit hard) on a piece of paper and they are all put in a hat. You are separated into teams, where one person draws a name from the hat, trying to get their teammates to say the name. The point is to get through as many names as possible in the time limit.

During the first round, you are allowed to describe the person in any way you want, as long as you don't say the actual name, itself. We had people like Brad Pitt, Michael Jackson, Obama, Queen Elizabeth, and even Shreak, Winnie the Pooh, and Snoopy. We switch between the teams in round one until all the names are gone.

Round 2 forbids any speaking. You must only mime a way to describe the person. For example, earlier that night I was sitting on the counter and my slipper fell off my foot. Jen came and got down on one knee to put it back on for me - haha - and we talked about Cinderella for a few seconds. Then, during Jen's turn, when she had to mime, she pointed to her shoe, and I shouted out "Cinderella!" It was so funny, all the stuff she did. I think she went through the most names of the whole game during that one turn.

Round 3 came, and with it the most difficult rule: you can only use one word to describe the person. Thankfully, we were using the same people we had been all game, so people knew there were only a few options if a person said musician, and would go through the list of Beethoven, Mozart, Shakira, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, etc. It was so much fun!! My team won, of course! (Although, we were at a pretty huge advantage, having 3 native English-speakers on one team, where other teams had none. Oh well. Haha!)

So, hooray for chapi-chapeau!