Residential

Back from camp! :D

Frankly, I don't have any interesting/exciting/sensational stories that I'm bursting to share.
This is one of the least eventful (and shortest) camp I've ever been to, which was only made worse by the fact that we were sent to live in a forest.

Sort of.




Partly due to the heatwave last week which killed half the plants in Victoria, La Trobe University had the appearance of a dying village.
All the grass was yellow, the buildings were brownish and unattractive, and it was deserted (although that is probably because it's the holidays but anyway. It was like a ghost town!)



Despite the not-very-promising look, the rooms turned out quite reasonable.
I was quite surprised that we all get our own rooms, because that would mean that they need to provide us all with about 300 hundred rooms- not a very small number.
And the keys were really cool, they didn't have jagged lines like most, but instead, it was just a plate of metal which seemed to look the same as the other 300 keys, but opens only specific doors!
Much like those hotel keycards, just that they are metal.


I guess they have achieved the whole point of Residential in the first place: to let us experience and feel how University life is like, staying in dorms, walking around the campus and such.
It's just that they chose the wrong location to do it.






We spent the day with quite crappy talks (There was a relaxation exercise where we laid on the floor and imagined we were at the place we wanted to be. Most of us fell asleep), VCE administrative stuff (where they crammed about 100 people into the tiniest lecture hall on earth and made us sweat our heads off), and "team-building games" (forming a perfect square with rope while being blindfolded. Yes, very exciting.)



Probably the most interesting part of the camp was where we had a guest speaker, Glenn Manton, who told us his life story which was very cool and very exciting and totally unlike all the other droning motivational speakers who go on and on reading different variations of "YOU CAN DO IT!" from a powerpoint slide.


Although I later found out that practically everyone has already heard the same story 2 years ago when he spoke to them as Year 10s, so it seems I was one of the only ones who heard the story for the first time.





We all trooped over to a perfectly nice and air-conditioned movie theatre at night to watch Coach Carter, an inspirational movie starring Samuel Jackson and the guy from Step Up (I forgot his name, but everyone was whooping whenever he appeared on screen half naked, so I guess he must be quite famous)
The movie wasn't that spectacular, but it's alright.
At least we didn't end up watching a documentary about plants... Or the sea. Or VCE. (the horror!)







Normal as the camp was, there was something about it that made me really feel like I was part of the entire Class of 09'.
Maybe it was because just for these two days, we were no longer jumbled up together with the rest of the VCE blue sweater-ed Year11s anymore. Or maybe because we were all suffering together in a deserted area with yellowing grass, but it occurred to me suddenly that we were a Class, we were a team (omg I cringe at the cheesiness, but really lor!) and we were graduating together! :D


It does have a certain bittersweet feeling to it, that although I know only about 40% of all the people, it is going to be sad to see that we were all going to go our ultimate separate ways at the end of the year.
That we weren't ever going to camps together anymore.


It's strange to think we are only 3 days into Year12 and the Last's were already happening.
It was our last camp, soon it's going to be our last swimming sports, last sports day, last Valentines' Day, last yearly social event (Formal), last casual day, last SAC, last assembly, last lesson, last day, last time wearing the uniform, last exam. D:


I don't know why I sank into such a sappy mood but it feels quite dumb to be going on about the end when the it is barely the beginning.





For now, my only concern should be finishing my Oral draft.
I have a feeling msS will eat me up tomorrow.