Back from OBS (: Broken but undefeated, asleep or deaddddddddd!

There're so many things we did there, and so many memories I'll keep forever, but I'll try to list the ones I remember here.

Watch 27, Tenzing FTW <3 Ariel Shawna Mala Cheryl Hanqing MaChang Fengjing Kim Sarah Rachel Denise Xinyuan Yvonne Crystal LeeVoon Hannah!

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Day 1 was pretty unremarkable; we reached school really early and listened to Mrs Wee talk for a long while, then tried to hide from Mr TJ Lee's camera as we waited for our bus to come.

We reached the Punggol reception area a few hours later and split into our watches. We met ZIPPY, our awesome instructor :D Lunch and icebreaking games, then we headed onto the ferry and set off for Camp 2.

(Camp 1 was the first stop on the ferry. It looks like a freaking chalet next to Camp 2.)

We got there, unpacked and repacked into the OBS backpack, dragged stuff out from the Tenzing store and pitched our tents before heading for the beach to cook dinner.

Dinner was interesting. Zippy taught us how to use the jackknife to open cans, but Denise with her incredible arm strength was the only one who successfully mastered the skill, and became the official watch can opener lolol.

Happy Moment Number One: Sitting under the stars at the beach eating slightly wet rice and leftover curry sauce from a shared mess tin while chatting to your classmates.

After dinner we talked a bit, then went back and slept. Sleeping in a tent with Yvonne, LeeVoon and Hannah was pretty peaceful since they all don't shift around in their sleep, but Hannah kept poking my stomach and complaining that it was growling so loudly it was making her unable to sleep. We couldn't really acclimatize, so the first night wasn't very restful.

*thinking it's 6am already* "What time is it now?"
"3.11 am."
"WHAAAAT?"

Halfway through the night I kept hearing faint strains of some sort of obiang music, and I thought it was due to a supernatural cause until we told Zippy the next morning and she started laughing and explained that it was the music from the crazy kelong people at JB who hold karaoke parties at 3am every night.

Day 2 was SeaEx(pedition) day. PT first thing in the morning was pretty easy, and we cheered random cheers to keep everyone's spirits up.

Next was lifevest testing and Jetty Jump. For all the hype about it, it was...nothing much. We made a commitment, jumped in and that was it. I forgot how to swim in my anxiousness at not being able to touch the ground with my feet and Xinyuan and Hannah had to push/drag me to the ladder, sheeet. So paiseh.

Kayaking lesson and subsequently kayaking and T-X rescue was fun. Hannah and I turned out to be perfect kayaking partners, since she's a really good navigator and I have, um, arm muscle. We cut through the water more easily than the rest, though when we did the actual SeaEx later we slowed down a lot because of fatigue.

SeaEx started out okay but it started storming, and we were getting super tired so we slowed down a fair bit. Switched partners halfway, Hannah kayaked with Rachel while I kayaked with Xinyuan. It turned out to be a really bad decision, since Xinyuan and I were obviously not the dream team Hannah and I were during T-X rescue - we couldn't navigate properly anymore and wasted a fair bit of time turning. Plus Xinyuan was grumpy and I was a little too hyper, so we couldn't coordinate our strokes either. I kept getting impatient and paddling faster than Xinyuan no matter how much I tried to synchro with her. (Oops my bad.) But we got to the shore in the end (:

Happy Moment Number Two: Racing across the water with Hannah and feeling my arm muscles work to paddle the kayak through the water (:

Next we trekked to Camp 1. It was one of the most awful experiences of my life, but the dinner waiting at the end of it - plus the chalet-like camp we got to stay in for the night - was enough to make up for it. I did get a bit pissed, though, when Audrey happily walked over and said her watch got to kayak to Camp 1. Sheesh. Dinner was the best we had in OBS; we got a proper meal at the cookhouse from a caterer.

The trouble started when we headed to our campsite to pitch tents for the night - my group realised we left our tentpoles and groundsheet back in Camp 2. Uh-oh. After guiltily telling Zippy about it, we squeezed into everyone else's tents. LeeVoon and I were taken in by Denise's tent, the nice people :D We slept quite well that night, except for one time when Xinyuan woke us all up by saying frantically that the tide was coming in and our tent was going to be floated away. (Our tent was the closest to the sea and the breakwater.) It didn't in the end, and the tide receded.

Day 3 was LandEx. It was probably the toughest day of OBS, but the most awesome, because after we trekked for around 4 hours straight, stopping by the shrine of a dead German girl popular with punters and singing to cheer ourselves up, we reached Kekek Quarry (: (Yes, the famous quarry from the Integrated Science module worksheet last year.) It doesn't look like the place where a brutal murder can take place, seriously. We had to build a raft out of barrels, ropes and pipes to paddle across the quarry, but after Zippy was done testing our raft's seaworthiness and finally let us float the raft, we realised that none of us except Shawna could get onto the raft because we built the platform too high. Yay. So we just splashed around in the wonderfully clear, sweet water and dunked/splashed Zippy. Having to change back into wet attire for the activity was really gross, though - our changing room was a clearing filled with spiderwebs and red ants.

After that, we continued trekking for a short while to our open campsite and cooked dinner. Maggi Mee, Sambal Ikan Bilis, Sardines and Luo Han Zhai yay (: Being Food I/Cs with Xinyuan meant we could choose what we wanted for dinner, but we mostly followed the menu. It was good anyway.

Happy Moment Number Two: Sitting around two fires with Denise's and my tent cooking Maggi Mee and warming canned food while laughing at inane jokes about entrenching tools* and Hannah dropping her mess tin while giggling madly at my constant "Oh, shit!"s whenever I made a mistake or dropped my mee. She ended up spilling the entire contents of her mess tin and Denise had to clear it up while Hannah went in search of the Entrenching Tool.

*Entrenching Tool = euphemism for shit shovel. The shovel you use to dig a hole to shit in when camping outdoors.

After we were done entrenching all our leftover food, we walked to the beach to meet Zippy, because she promised us she'd cook popcorn for us after dinner :D

Happy Moment Number Three: Sitting under the stars with Tenzing while listening to Yvonne lecture about the Belt of Orion, and Ariel squealing about how she found the Little Dipper in the sky - stars we'd never be able to see with Singapore's major light pollution. The skies at Ubin are so clear and pretty, I could cry just thinking about it.

The other group was having a kayaking briefing at the beach, so Zippy decided to move the group nearer to our tent in case we made noise and disturbed them. Her first (small) batch of popcorn was successful, but the second was not, so we sat around talking and eating about 3 kernels of popcorn per person.

Happy Moment Number Four: Listening to Zippy tell her life story to us (in response to Xinyuan's and my question about why she became an OBS instructor) and singing Superman with Tenzing with accompaniment from Zippy's iPod (attached to speaker). Laughing at the jokes we swapped around the circle. Wishing the moment would never end (:

Day 4 was basically just trekking back to Camp 2 (via a much shorter route) and repacking our stuff back into our personal backpacks, plus groundsheet and poncho washing and store arranging.

Celebration dinner was awesome. We took forever to cook the apple crumble and the group doing the Magic Fried Rice had to work with uncooked rice, but the fried rice turned out better than my mum's and the apple crumble finally worked with Voon's perseverance in singing this song to the filling:

"Why are you still not gooey
Can you please turn gooey
If you do not turn gooey
I will be the one to turn gooeyyyyyy"

While waiting for the filling to turn gooey, we taught the scholars to sing the school song. Lol.

The apple crumble turned out great in the end, but Zippy kept laughing when she took her first bite because we were staring at her anxiously to see her reaction.

Some instructor told us it was Zippy's birthday the next day (aka today), so our group, being the sweet people we are, decided to plan a birthday surprise for her. Denise's tent stayed up to draw a huge birthday card for Zippy using markers and mahjong paper, while my tent stayed up to finish the script for our finale performance.

This morning, we woke up at 5.30 am to unpitch, neaten the store and chionged everything to make it in time to wish Zippy a happy birthday at 6.30 am.

So we trooped up to the instructors' lodge, Rachel and Sarah holding a birthday card and one of Sarah's anti-mozzie candles, and shouted for Zippy. Then we proceeded to sing her the birthday song, but that's when Zippy said:

"I'm sorry to break your hearts, but it's not my birthday :/"

MAN DID WE FEEL LIKE STRANGLING THE INSTRUCTOR WHO PLAYED THE PRANK ON US. Sheesh!

After that was this long emoing/reflection session; Zippy got some modelling clay for us and told us to create our group's most memorable scene (we chose rafting and the Entrenching Party scene*). A fair number of people cried, sigh.

(*The Entrenching Party happened on Day 4. After returning to Camp 2, Sarah and Xinyuan realised they never had a chance to use the Entrenching Tool at all during the past 2 days, and decided it was an experience not to be missed. So they prepared for the Entrenching Party by eating lots of raisins and pitted prunes the whole day.

At night, they grabbed the shovel and a roll of toilet paper, and determinedly marched up to the Instructors' Lodge to ask Zippy where they could, um, entrench. They ended up choosing a place halfway up the stairs to Heaven. But Xinyuan ran down a while later, saying something like "COULDN'T ENTRENCH. NEED TOILET. NAO."

Sarah clarified the situation: "We tried digging for half an hour, but the ground was too hard and the hole was too small to shit in.") Then she ran into the toilet too, while everyone else nearly died laughing their asses off.

Anyway, after the whole emoing session, we went for the finale performance. Amundsen's was particularly memorable, thanks to their "husband and wife + lover" team. Tenzing was the first to go up, but we were too engrossed in singing to realise that nobody could understand what we were singing about. Whoops.

Then we said goodbye to Zippy and headed back to Punggol Jetty, sigh D: Bought OBS memorabilia: OBS shirt plus keychain.

I heart Tenzing, yay (: I'm so glad we'll be in the same class for two years, seriously. They're such fun people to be with.

"Zippy like to tell stories. You like to listen?" - Zippy
"Entrenching tool, entrenching tool, entrenching tooool~~~ (repeat 100x)" - Tenzing; the Entrenching Tool song

"I wish you enough." - OBS instructors

OBS: To serve, to strive and not to yield (:

Tenzing <3!