This one time, at RYLA (part 3)

Tuesday: (Edit: removed)

Surprise visit (not!)

Mario was the daily coordinator for today. One of the roles the daily coordinator does is setting the evil Shannon Noll alarm. Signs of insanity began to show when some of the guys in our dorm thought Shannon paid a surprise visit to give us a live performance for the wakeup call. That’s because Mario kind of looked like him.

High ropes & egg drop

This is the alternative activity to abseiling. As there was not enough room for the ~20 of us to climb around the high rope obstacle course, we split into 2 groups with half doing the high ropes and the other half launching eggs.

The task for egg drop was where we had to design a mars lander with the egg as the precious cargo and straws, balloons, and paper as the materials for the lander. Ours (Dan C, Jeni R, me) was the only egg that survived. We used a combination of principles- slow down the approach and increase the impact time. Most groups did either of the principles, not both. So some had landers that just plummeted but absorbed all the impact, and others had ones that floated down. Good fun. We never got to do any of that in TEE physics.

High ropes basically involved climbing up a ladder, or rope ladder, or a knotted rope, and then monkeying along a horizontal rope, pole, wobbly bridge, or cargo net, and then let down by your partner(s) who were controlling your safety line. Holding the safety line sucked. You had to keep looking up, so that and wearing a helmet led to a sore neck.

The highlight of this would be the “Leap of Faith”. You had to climb up a pole- much like a power pole, onto a small platform. When you’re at the top, the pole wobbles… A LOT. Then you had to jump off and grab a trapeze thing. This was another challenge I got all wimpy on in primary school. Back then I managed to get to the top, got freaked out by the height n wobblyness, and simply walked the plank. This time round I got up, got freaked out by the wobblyness, but ignored the height and jumped. W00t! I got hold of the trapeze. Oh, and the superman harness had to be fastened really tight coz I’m a “skinny lil bugger” as said by the supervisor (forgot her name =( ).

Disability Awareness

This activity gave us a more involving view on what certain disabilities are like and how to deal with them. It was a role play activity where we were in small groups of 3 or 4 and rotated between the disabled and the person interacting with the disabled. The disabilities we looked at were blindness, being wheelchair-bound, ADD, cerebral palsy, and schizophrenia. The ADD one gave birth to the RYLArian injoke, well… a Nugget/Clare joke:

How many ADD kids does it take to change a lightbulb?

I wanna ride my bike!

(EDIT: Removed)