End of October

      This past month has felt completely crazy. Somehow with everything else that has been going on, posting on this blog got pushed to the back of my mind.
    The first unfortunate event occurred when the wi-fi stopped working in my room. Up until a month ago, I had a really fast connection but it suddenly became very weak. One of the other girls reported it but Gilwell Park has a bad track record of fixing the internet in a timely manner. It is almost embarrassing how much I was bothered by the whole situation. It is not like I spend all my time on my laptop but when you're far away from home, having a reliable connection does a lot to prevent homesickness. There is internet in the Den but for some reason all of us who have MacBooks could only get very weak connections. So with some advice from Eric, who has been here for many months, one after the other we bought wi-fi boosting USB dongles from Amazon for 10 pounds. Mine arrived two weeks ago, so I now have a very strong connection in the Den. The connection in my room is still less than reliable, which makes it difficult to use Skype. I have taken to Skyping in the Den's laundry room while sitting on a machine.
   This is the reason I have not written a blog post for quite a while. Besides bemoaning my lack of internet what have I been doing? Well, on the Monday and Tuesday after my last post we had two days of team building. Technically they were work days but on Monday we were split into four teams, given rucksacks, blindfolded and led onto a bus. From there we were loaded off the bus at Chingford Station (even blindfolded we know our way there) and put on a train to London, still blindfolded. When we finally removed the blindfolds all the lead instructors had left the train and we were surrounded by strangers who were obviously looking at us weirdly. We opened up the rucksack and proceeded to race around London, trying to solve the clues which led us to different landmarks. Here are a few pictures of our team, Francisco, Nicholas, Patrick and Johnny.

Outside of Baden-Powell House with "a famous person"

I think this is my favourite picture of the day.

   Tuesday was more training about customer service, team building games and setting up house rules in an attempt to keep the Den clean. Tuesday evening we were split into different teams and had to cook a three couse meal from an assigned country. Patricia, Rox, Sujin and I cooked Spanish food, which was really the easiest since both Rox and Patricia are Latin American and knew quite a few Spanish dishes. This was probably why we won, it may also have been due to Sujin's superior food presentation skills.

  The weeks all begin to blur together here and time seems to slipping by quickly. We threw a pretty awesome Hallowe'en party on October 30th. Everyone cobbled together costumes from whatever they had available without spending any money and I was quite impressed by the creativity.

The Boys.

The Girls

The Mario Brothers.

The Pirate and the Superhero making spiced brandy.

Yes, I went as a Canadian, thanks to Deborah for sending me the stickers!
   
   After everyone had a costume and Johnny had got home from London we all trooped out of the Den and across Gilwell Park to go trick-or-treating. We knocked on lead instructors' door and yelled, "Trick or Day Off!" Dave and Phil laughed and gave us drinking straws, tomato sauce, a can of sliced peaches and a pinata. We then knocked on the door of Kerry, the Deputy Centre Manager. He was very confused and said he didn't have anything to give us. We partied until late that night and I confess it was difficult to get up for work the next morning.

   I have much more to write about, but I think I will leave it for another post.