DEE-A-TEE-E: (Saturday, November 29, 2008!)
OBS POSTOBS was awesome! :D I shall spend the next... 4 or 5 hours trying to recall what we did and typing them down.
Day 1I didn't sleep much last night. This always happens when something umm special is going to happen the next day. Woke up at 6, carried my 8 kg load and assembled in school at 7.30. Ms Chua split Group 2 into 5 watches. Here's my watch :
Hanisah, Cleo, Monica, Shaun, Tian Lu, Desmond, Jonathan, Chen Yang, Yong Qin, Rion, Ronald, Jing Min, Dylan, and myself. Many people were waiting at Punggol, so there weren't many of us in our watch in school. We took the bus provided to the OBS place at Punggol. Lots of people were already there, including people from other schools. We took a ferry, where we met our instructor Haizu, to Pulau Ubin. He made that place sound so frightening, with the wild boars and rockfishes attacking you and stuff. D: We reached in 15 minutes. Actually, the place wasn't what I expected at first. They had nicely paved roads in the jetty there with decent buildings and a replica of the ship Raffles came in. I expected it to be... barren/totally uncivilized/desolate/covered with grass, trees and stuff. Anyway, our group was named Nehru, which was the first prime minister of India. Right. Learnt something new. We were briefed too, and our precious handphones and wallets were safekeeped aka confiscated. We didnt exactly like our instructor at first. He seemed like he just wanted to get his job done and not actually interact well with our group, like what the instructors from the camp last year did. He gave us really sparse instructions and was hardly together with our group and kept disappearing now and then.: /
[but we realised later in actual fact he's a reeeeally nice guy! like, the most awesomemost instructor. :D :D]
We carried our stuff over to the store, which was quite a distance from the jetty. Haizu taught us this game where you had to move by shuffling your feet to catch your partner. Mine was monica. The loser (me :P )did this weird Chihuahua dance where the rest said 'one, chihuahua two, chihuahua three, chihuahua' and the chihuahuas (losers) have to tilt their head with the rhythm. hah
We packed our stuff after that, the harnesses, helmets, tents, ponchos, bagpacks etc etc. Hanisah was really good with leading and organizing the group and we were really quick, and went to do the trial tri-yakking afterwards. The seawater was really gross at first, like water emptied from drains, but afterwards it seemed okay. I guess afterall, there wasnt anything we could do about it. Monica, Cleo and I rowed in one kayak, which was umm not a very wise thing to do. The waved would turn us 180 degrees around towards the barnacle infested shores. Haizu also taught us how to get back aboard after capsizing. Don't like the feeling of water rushing up your nose. : /
Jetty jump next. Not bad. We didnt need to shout out a commitment before jumping, though. And I guess our group was lucky, cus Haizu said that we managed to get the maximum jumping distance. Any higher and we'll hit the rocks at the bottom.
We had a shower after that. The washroom was way better than expected. Quite clean. We went to pitch our tents, which was a long way from our storeroom. Then, we headed to the dining hall to plan and pack our meals for the next three days. Some of the guys split this huge pile of snacks, fruits and instant drinks. Haizu called it the happy meal. yay.
We prepared our own dinner that day. Haizu decided to be mean and tied all of our hands such that we formed one line. It was so...restrictive, but we succeeded anway, and had our fill of rice, baked beans, sardine, peanuts, soup and orange juice (all RED). Our group is really love and coorperative, we got it done very quickly too. (I think we were the first group to have dinner :D ) thank goodness, our hands were freed for eating. c: The solid fuel tablets smelt really bad, though.
Afterwards, we were told to finish up with packing before a fire drill. but the only key to the storeroom happened to be with our logistics guy, rion, who was missing. walked all round camp 1 looking for him. 踏破铁鞋无觅处，得来全不费工夫 (hey i actually put what I learnt in chinese to use!) he came back to our storeroom eventually. apparently, he wasnt informed that firedrill was after packing and thought that packing was after fire drill, so he was waiting for the fire alarm to go off.
our school was the only one causing problems during the fire drill, with some late and some missing. shame, shame. :C some unlucky people were stuck in the toilet when the alarm went off. We were told off by Jackie, the course director. oh well...
We went back to our campsite. It was pitch black and pretty spooky to go in. :P the four girls shared one tent. the 10 guys had to squeeze into 2 tents. sad. yep. thats about day 1.
[I can't remember when we had lunch that day. Anyway lunch was provided and was pretty good. rice with fish, vege and curry chicken]
Day 2I think 1 hour would be an overestimate of how much I slept the night before. I'm like insomnia-tic or something. but its nothing compared to tian lu. apparently, he only slept for 2 hours for the whole of the 5D4N camp. poor thing.
Got up at 4.15 after some people next tent started lighting candles. stoned till around 6 where everyone else got up. We had pt in the morning. Quite exhausting, but still nothing compared to netball :D breakfast next, which consisted of catered bee hoon and sausage. oh have i mentioned, theres this peculiar tradition of OBS where the first mouthful of food in a meal must be for your friend. yep. so basically we had to feed the person across one spoonful of food before eating your own.
I cant remember which came first, this, or breakfast. We had a group sharing of, if i'm not wrong, what we didn't like the most and what we could improve on. Haizu told us a story called 'Mirror', and we were given a sheet to jot down our thoughts for the day. Haizu then taught us how to wear the harnesses, followed by belay school. Must remember to thank your belayers after your climb! :D
Next, we kept our helmets on and Haizu led us into the 'foresty' area. Yup and we got blindfolded [surprisingly, the bandana smelt good!] and formed one line. We walked like, really really slowly, shuffling our feet. Haizu said that we would cross a very narrow plank over a drain. And how neverending the plank seemed! [when we went back later non-blind, the plank was only like half a meter which only needed one step to cross it while we took... fifty steps? -_-] anyway, our blindfolds were taken out eventually after he lead us into this dark, dark, tunnel. we were supposed to find our way around the tunnel to the exit, taking note of how each path goes. I must really thank my helmet, without it, my head would have much more bumps than the mosquito bites i'd gotten over these 5 days. :P
We finally got out of the what-seemed-like-a-labyrinth-like-thing. from the outside, the tunnels looked like nothing more than a small kid's playground set. Oh and it started to drizzle, too. Wen went back to our storeroom to get our giant bagpacks and bottles/tanks of water. We took an extra tent so the guys dont have to squeeze so much. Haizu then lead us to one of the learning rooms, which was
AIR CONDITIONED! what an oasis! :D :D :D
We played some bonding games there, like trying to walk to the other end of the room with our legs tied up in a row. Another was trying to negotiate a ball around a sheet with holes, which our group was really bad in. but that was really fun, all of us were on the verge of shrieking when the ball was about to drop. oh and the helium hoop one was pretty hard, too :D
after those was some last minute packing. by then, the rain was really heavy [sad for tock seng (if i'm not wrong) ! heard that you guys had to trek in swamps of mud :C], and those who went back to the store had to wear ponchos. But we got lucky and the rain stopped pretty soon. Haizu took us out for our last game at camp 1 for the day. We were to form a line blindfolded and find our way from one tree to another tree at the other side of the land up the hill. Its shuffling feet time again! yep we made loads of wrong turns and ended up in weird places like a hairpin turn from where we started. :P
Okay by the time we set off carrying our elephant bagpacks, the rain had completely stopped. we're so blessed! haizu lead us through the forest and we reached camp two in like, ten minutes. after asking around, I realized we were super lucky cus most other groups had to navigate their own way through the woods and some took 4 hours! :O :O oh when we finally got to remove those bagpacks, walking around seemed totally weightless! :D
This time, we were one of the slowest groups, though. when we reached, most were already preparing dinner. We took a spot approzimately 100 meters from the nearest tap and started to chiong pitching tents and cooking dinner. rice, anchovies, baked beans, curry chicken, orange juice (all read again, hah). Tian lu then revealed to us that there were
maggots in our yesterday's rice. yuck. But i guess its a good thing though, ignorance is really a bliss. otherwise, we may have all went to sleep hungry last night. The toilets here were good too, but cleo moni hanisah and I didnt bother bathing since 1) we didnt have toiletries 2) too lazy 3) not much time 4) we're going to get dirty sooner or later again anyway. Thanks Cleo for those wet tissues :D
after dinner we planned our raft that we'll build later. it really helps to be a scout! :D ronald and some guys settled it quite quickly, and we went to sleep. We got this tent with a spoilt mosquito net cus the zip was jammed so there was this HUGE hole in the zip. We used hanisah and monica's hairclips to close up that gaping gap and spaaaamed insect repellent. haha. but sleep was much better in day 2 than day 1 c:
[oh did i mention i got to see a rainbow today? pretty pretty!! :D thanks to weijin! ]
Day 3Woke up feeling pretty good, since sleep was good. Had pt again. It was less tiring and more interesting this time round, since we only rain for less than 300 meters ( i think), did less exercises and played lots of games. There was mingle, mingle, mingle mingle mingle (basically a colour finding game) and left left left, right right right, forward, backwards, forward forward forward (basically, a game of scissors papers stone) and beauty and the beast (basically, something like 老鹰抓小鸡). We had one of the best breakfasts today. Not the food (buns), but the location. Haizu took us to the jetty for breakfast (we keep getting privileges, huh :D) where we sat by the sea and the mainland was just by the horizon. (so close, yet so far!) yep he talked about lots of stuff, like appreciating those around you and old sailors tend to survive better than young sailors and how everything goes back to the basics.
We did rockclimbing next. Haizu set us a target of 19 points, which we overshot by
twice the amount! what an achievement. Tian lu got to the very top of the advanced wall on his first try. clap clap clap! I managed to hold on to the slanted part of the wall for three seconds, after which i was really tired and got down. arm muscles aching :C Hanisah wanted to get to the slanted part, and it was really really nice to see the whole group helping to pull her up together c: awww. but it was also very sad to see people dropping but turning back, grabbing the rocks once more and keep trying.
After we went back to campsite 2, we realised we were missing one harness and one helmet. Cleo, monica and I ran back to the rockclimbing site (phew, tiring D:) and found the helmet, luckily. The harness was not lost, just miscounted. hahha. We played a game of modified werewolf, kudos to dylan, the most whimsical moderator ever. :D
shoved our elephant backpacks to camp 3, this time navigating on our own. Big thank you to Ronald and Jing Min and other who helped out in navigation, we didnt get lost, which saved lots of our bone cells. :D this time we walked together in one single group. c: reached in 40 minutes, 5 minutes faster than how much haizu said we would take if he lead us at his pace. :D campsite three is really... just a piece of land overgrown with grass with huge puddles of water. Haizu picked one clearing to pitch our tents, which he told us was one of the best spots because the sandflies were relatively lesser there.
Went to this store to get the pipes, barrels and ropes next for building our raft. Haizu taught us how to tie all those elaborate knots, which did not help me at all because nothing went in. :P so basically, ronald did most of the raft since he was the one thats the best at doing the job. like what hanisah had said, the rest of us who cant tie the stuff up are more of a hindrance than help... so instead of risking the raft dismentling in the water and needing a second attempt which wastes time, we should just leave it to the ones who can do it well. yup. so, the rest of us just pulled the ropes and held the barrels in place and gave moral support :D We kept on asking for time extentions, too. :P
That being done, we took our raft into the quarry. It floated nicely, even with all of us on it. We paddled/swam to somewhat in the middle of the quarry, where titanic was reenacted. Haizu toppled our raft, which slanted (almost) horizontally and all of us dropped into the water. I
LOVE the water!! The water was clean clean clean! Hanisah said it was the heaven of OBS haha :D It was really relaxing and refreshing, almost close to taking a bath :D We dismentled our raft in the water and lingered/swam in the water for quite some time. if i had a choice i dont hink i would come out of the water for the rest of the day :D okay when we finally did, it started to drizzle. Haizu said that we were the only group to get to go into the quarry and build the raft. :D lucky us:D kept the stuff back into the store and we, together with two other watches were briefed on kayaking tomorrow.
dinnertime. instant noodles, luncheon meat and mushroom. it was dark by the time we started to cook, and there weren't any lights,so we had to hold up the torchlights and cook at the same time. the water took forever to boil, and solid fuel tablets stunk. bleh. And i accidently put the instant noodles in with the raw water at the same time. :P so much for cooking instant noodles so many times. There weren't any taps at campsite 3, so washing had to be done in the sea. to save the trouble, we did away with the mess tins and all 14 of us ate directly from the two pots. made a mess out of the area, hah. We made a mini campfire with the left over tablets. after we finished, me, cleo and monica went to wash the pots and utensils into the sea. or rather, we
attempted to wash them. Tide go up, we shuffle back, scoop up a negligible amount of water, tide go down, follow it down, scoop up a negligible amount of water, and the whole cycle would happen again. A big thank you to utkarsh who helped us go into the sea and wash our stuff. If not, we could be there doing that forever. :D
bedtime tenttime next. Thanks shaun and tentmates for exchanging the broken-net-tent. I didn't sleep, thought since i couldn't and since it was terribly hot and since the four of us girls had sentry duty at 12. yup so at 12 mariel (i think, the light was too dim to see) came to call us for switchover. Cleo, Monica and I got up, but we couldn't wake Hanisah. So, we let her sleep and went out. bleh. i don't get the use of having a lookout, since most likely lots of people won't be asleep. The were lots and lots of mosquitoes and lots and lots of sandflies around, so when the three of us stood at one place, we would sway from side to side like we're doing some funny dance. hahahaaha.
we were walking down this small path to where the other tents were when suddenly we saw this dark figure ahead. I dont know why, but all three of us became frightened. (i actually felt my heart stop for a second) That dark figure turned out to be taiyu, who couldn't go to sleep too cus it was very warm.
Yup so we continued walking back and forth through the tents. Time passed pretty slowly. everytime i check my watch, only like 2 minutes passed, when i thought 10 minutes had passed. oh and the village across was playing some malay-like music. pretty loudly, too. Weird, who plays music in the middle of the night?
when 1 hour finally passed, we switched over the sentry duty to the people in tianlu's tent. It started to rain when we lied down to sleep. After about 1 hour, water started to soak through the mat i was lying on from the bottom. So, squishy and wet and cold. by that time, the other 3 had woken up too and apparently, water was dripping into the tent from the top, too. My side of the tent was totally soaked, so i had to moved over to their side. (sorry! :c It made it so much squeezier for you all :C ) we had to sleep curled up. but i couldnt go to sleep, so i decided to sit up for the rest of the night. but after like half and hour which felt like forever, i felt sleepy again and lied down. bad. my whole shirt became soaked in water. cold :c I shifted position to find a dry spot but gave up cus i realized it was wet all over so i just decided to ignore the wetness and slept on the wet mat. This was one of the longest nights i'd ever spent.. :/
Day 4Woke up at around 4 am. We were all freeeeeeezing (poor weining didnt even have long pants to wear! D': ) and didn't want to move. I changed into a dry top and we unpitched our tent. yup then the three watches dragged the kayaks into the water and we started kayaking. (our bagpacks were ferried over to camp 1. thank goodness! )my kayak group consisted of me, jonathan and chen yang. [big thank you to both of you for kayaking and synchronizing so well! And avoiding the branches and stuff! Good that we didnt capsize :D yep and thanks chenyang for passing food whenever i wanted to eat, too :D] I like kayaking! the only downside was that your butt would hurt after sitting for quite some time. I improved a lot from the trial kayak from day 1! at least now we could steer in the correct direction we wanted and could go forward quite quickly C:
The route we took was sea, swamp then back to sea. The sea part was nice, i like the waves. c: the swamp was nothing like what i'd imagines. when you say 'swamp', i would think of mud, dead leaves, crocodiles and more mud. but at that time the swamp place was more like a river, with mangroves on both sides. the water was pretty still and it was quite easy to kayak in. The weather today was terrific too! No rain, no sun, not too hot, not too cold. c: oh and a big thank you to ronald and jingmin for navigating so well again! We didnt take any wrong turns, and we didn't have to go through the muddy part which the instructor said we would have yesterday during the briefing. yay c:
after going back into the sea part, some people started to get seasick. We were then a bit against the current, so it was more tiring to row. then zhixin and some other kayaks started to chant "回家, 回家!" hahah. we returned to campsite 1 after 5 hours. got our kayaks and lifejackets and everything washed. we went back to the storeroom (finally! c: ) and hung our tents out to dry. But we took up too much space, and the elizabeth choy group got sort of angry and threw our tents back down. sorry sorry : /
After packing up the all the ponchos and stuff, we finally got to bathe.
3 days!
[i wrote one more big chunk of stuff here but for some reason it got deleted. yep so just to summarize, we had served dinner which was great, played a robot version of werewolf where the villagers are robots and the werewolves are humans wanting to destroy the robots. Haizu took us into an aircon room again where we did our reflections and did this draw a pig personality test which i happened to do before on http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/drawApig.asp. We then made a makeshift campfire using torches with a red cloth draped over them. Haizu said that we cant make real campfires here to protect the forests. He then told us this short touching story which i happened to read before too from a chain email. But it was still nice nonetheless. We had supper (red bean soup) and pitched our tents at this place furthur uphill the place where we slept on day 1. best night ever, i fell asleep right after i lied down. :D ]
Day 5!Woke up with my body aching all over and feeling a bit giddy. We were supposed to meet at 6.30, but we woke up at 6.30 and so we skipped our pt. (which was a good thing? :D ) We had fresh breakfast, as they call it. bee hoon, sausages and milo. By then i was feeling even more giddy, very tired and feverish. chen yang lent me a thermometer. 38.6. wow? didnt expect it to be so high. Must be that i caught a cold on the night it rained.
It was time to pack up everything back to how we found it on day 1. millions of apologies nehru! i didnt help out at all :C thanks desmond for lending me your wet tissue, and thanks cleo and desmond for making me the chrysanthanum (sp) tea (It was really nice C: ) and carrying my bags for me! C: after packing, the group went to play some games but i sat by the side cus of my fever. :C but luckily it came only on the last day :P Hanisah suggested making a card for nehru. Yep it was the papers we drew our pigs on previously tied up with cotton twine and with some flowers attached. quite pretty c:
We did trust fall next, our last activity for the whole camp. Basically one person would stand on a step and the others would stretch a large mat under him to catch him while he jumps to hit a bell ahead. Oh and we had to say a commitment before jumping. mine was to practise hard on the piano, cus i was quite guilty for not doing that previously. this commitment thing actually works. when i think about it, i would really practise harder! :D
afterwards, haizu returned back the sheet of paper he gave us to jot down our thoughts on the first day. We passed them around to get signatures from each of our group members. Then Haizu cooked us this super yummy apple crumble thingy :D Oh did I mention, he was a chef before this! :D We then stood up in a circle around him, joint hands and closed our eyes (was he freaked out by this? i would if i were him). We were giving him our thoughts! "Its the thought that counts! " :D Yep we gave our card to him, too.
later we received a group photo, certificate (joanathan and people were laughing over the Director, Nicholas Conceicao's surname. Apparently, it was pronounced as con-say-so but we thought it was con-chee-kau ahahhha-_- ), and got our wallets and handphones back. souvenir shopping next. I bought a black drifit polo tee and a notebook. after that, we went back to the hall with our stuff (My bag was heavier thanks to my wet clothes, even though i threw a pair of shoes away) and played lots of games. At 2, everyone assembled, and we were brought back to the jetty where we boarded a boat to punggol jetty. some nehruans went to hougang mall for dinner. I would have, if not for my fever. Chatted with debra and slept a bit on the bus back to school.
yep. thats about obs. i dont think anyone actually read it from the start right till the end hahaha.
Called my mom after i got back home, and fell asleep on the chair in front of the house phone right after that, all the way till my parents returned home from work. I had a 45 minutes bath and wanted to rest a bit more before dinner. who knows, i slept like a pig, all the way to saturday morning. Apparently, my parents were like: 昕元, 起来吃晚饭不得*shakes*
Me: No response whatsoever
Mum:算了, 一会儿让她起来喝粥和吃菜就好了
Later,
Parents:昕元, 起来吃晚饭*shakes*
Me: No response whatsoever
Mum:算了, 一会儿让她起来喝粥就好了
Later,
Parents:昕元, 起来喝粥*shakes*
Me: No response whatsoever
Mum:粥也不喝了,就喝一点豆奶吧
Later,
Parents:昕元, 起来喝豆奶*shakes*
Me: No response whatsoever
Mum:算了, 让她睡好了
-_-
ate like a pig on staurday morning too... like three meals into one. sorry siying and bryce, i totally forgot about the YEE thing that we were supposed to go today. :P
and wow, i greatly overshot the time i expected myself to complete this post. If you count from the time i started...that would be 76 hours! haha not my fault actually, the computer was not working from saturday until today, so yea. according to my dad, msn was making the comp go haywire and thus i'm sort of banned from using it from now onwards. boo.
This should be the longest post i'd written so far :D shall end here.
colors of the wind. ~xinyuan
