Saturday, December 17, 2005

This post was originally extemely-obscenely long, but in the end, it got to the point where I had about a full essay and I basically hadn't covered what I wanted to. As such, I deleted the entire damn thing and started off on a clean slate with this.

First of all, if you've been reading my blog, you might be wondering if I've stopped blogging for good. Well, the good news is, I haven't. The reason why I haven't been blogging is well, not because I haven't been typing anything, but as I mentioned above, my original post was unfinishable and I had to save a ton of drafts without actually posting anything. For that I apologise profusely.

Anyway, here's a highly gisted version of what I wanted to say. Two weeks ago, I went for an Outward Bound Course, held at Outward Bound Singapore on Pulau Ubin Island. If you don't know what that is, I'm not going explain. Just go over to www.obs.pa.gov.sg. Anyway, our course was a mobile one, which meant that we were staying in the great outdoors in pitched-up tents. All of us were a kinda disappointed, since we were so looking forward to slacking like hell during the course. Oh well. Anyway, a total of 8 people from my squad went for the course, namely Hao Bin, Wei Bin, Jing Feng, Chor Theng, Baikar, Marcus, Zi Xian and myself. Haobin, Weibin, Jing Feng and I were together in Marco Polo watch.

Well to cut everything extremely short, we had activities such as kayaking and a sea expedition, a land expedition, rock climbing, you know, all the outdoor stuff. But what I'd like to mention is that Marco Polo Watch was special for three main reasons:

1) We were an all-boys watch. 9 of us from Maris Stella High and 5 from Jurong West Secondary.

2) For the first time ever in Outward Bound Singapore history, a watch, namely ours, managed to finish all the food rations given. That's saying a lot, since all the other groups had tons of food left at the end of the camp.

3) Again, for the first time in Outward Bound history, this time not just Outward Bound Sngapore, we had three instructors for our watch. Not together, as one watch is supposed to only have one, but one after another, due to a magnitude of reasons. Our first instructor, Serene, took us for half of the first day, before coming over to tell us that we were going to change instructors, as there had been a glitch with the management. So, along came Angela. Well, everything went fine till the second evening, when Angela came over and told us we were going to change instructors again. Apparently, she had aggravated her old back injury earlier and had to see a doctor. So, from the third day onwards, we had Wilfred. It's been a good experience, having not one, but three different instructors, as we got to have a taste of three different leadership styles. All of them were great, I'm happy to say.

That's it for Outward Bound. Here's a picture of my watch: