Sojourn Day 1

It was awesome. The committee really outdid themselves this year, and if it wasn't for the not-so-agreeable weather on the first day, I'm sure it would've been perfect. Sentosa's such a great place to hold camps this like, where the seniors get to know the incoming IC freshmen and they get to bond between themselves.

The soft white (imported) sand hosted a multitude of team games, many of which unfortunately got rained out. I heard a lot of people complaining when I finally got there on the first evening about being cold and miserable all day, but everything was quickly forgotten that night.

The abandoned colonial derelicts overlooking the whole island messed with everyone's minds as they walked through 'the haunted house' in the dead of night, and with a whole bunch of special effects, it didn't take much for the screams to start. Nor did it help that they were made to wait in the shadows of one of the more impressive, forsaken mansions, with its gaping windows, skewed shutters, and bat-infested verandas, for what seemed like an eternity before they were made to walk, one by one, into the enveloping darkness. It wasn't long before people were letting their imaginations run wild.

I'm a self-proclaimed chicken, so I really couldn't help out inside the house itself and scare people (I'd have wanted to leave with the first ones). Instead, I was assigned to a particularly desolate stretch of road with flickering lights, to welcome, brief, and dispatch the freshmen one by one. Oh joy.

I had to warn them about the winding road and how you could walk right off the hill in the dark simply because I wasn't, under any circumstances, going to conduct a search and rescue mission on that night at that place. I could see the tension mounting in their faces and while ZS had a great laugh at their discomfort, he soon stopped laughing when it was reported that there had been a few scuffles inside the house. It is beyond me why anyone would flip out and then punch and kick the frightening entity...

Thankfully I had someone with me, a wonderful person who had to put up with the incessant whimpering and stay, all night, with someone on the verge of cracking. We waited there for the three hours straddling midnight, and everything was going well until something cold and slimey started up my leg, in which case my condition quickly deteriorated and I started screaming and couldn't stop.

To wrap it up, I couldn't wait to put as much distance between that particular area and myself. So I started out first in line at 1.45am, hurrying towards the blinking lights of civilization and the promise of sleep.