Hi everyone, I’m Sophie Bishop. I like playing ultimate (Frisbee), learning languages, and most things musical. I can play – to a certain extent – piano, marimba, and drum kit. I started playing the marimba – a Zimbabwean xylophone – in grade 5. I really liked learning new music and getting increasingly harder parts, so I stuck with it. A couple years later I joined the performance group, Kunaka, and played with them in some really cool venues, and also a few miserable ones. Playing the Chan Centre was a great experience, but we also performed beside a cooking demonstration once, and I’m fairly certain the cooking demonstration drew the larger crowd. I played in Kunaka up until last summer.
Right after choosing UBC in grade 12 I decided I couldn’t bear going straight into university. So I looked at gap year programs and found an opportunity to teach English in an elementary school in Costa Rica, which was perfect, since I had learned some Spanish in high school. I headed down and was quickly thrown into everything. In the family I was staying with there were three siblings; two brothers and a sister, who then became my adoptive siblings. At the elementary school I was volunteering, my youngest “brother” attended grade 5, and I taught all grades, so I had the chance to teach his class several times a week. Because of me living with him he took advantage of homework help, which resulted in a few perfect assignments. All the kids I taught loved an excuse to get out of the classroom, so I took out my (Frisbee) discs and taught them all to play ultimate, before I came home.
I first learned to play ultimate in elementary school, but didn’t pick it back up until grade 9 at Kits. Our team always did relatively well each year, until grade 12. We went to Spring Reign – a tournament in Burlington, WA – and got ninth, while our rivals from Saint Georges – who everyone hates and always loses to – won the whole thing. Then came provincials. We massacred all our games on the first day and the first game on the second. All that was left was the final: Kits vs Saints. We finally won, after 4 years of losses, 13-9. Sweet revenge. Actually, it was a bit sad, because a couple of them were crying (and I’m not exaggerating).
With all that, pretty much all the interesting points in my life are covered. Thanks for reading.
