This past weekend I spent all day Saturday and Sunday with our rebound/exbound (Rotex) counselors and the inbounders apart of 4730. The weekend was full of team building activities and all kinds of competitions. We traveled to Colombo, Parana and stayed in a house full of dorm rooms, an inside and outside pool, living room and dining room and a basement with pool tables to play cards. The first activity we participated in was a relay race…. first step you had to spin 10 times then try and run in a straight line, second step you had to answer questions the Rotex asked you, the third step was bobbing for an apple, fourth step was finding a wood pick in a plate full of baking flour with your mouth, fifth step was carrying an egg on a spoon with your mouth and final step was to crawl under a ladder in mud.
The mud was the highlight of my weekend because we weren’t supposed to get totally covered in mud but that escalated real quickly after the competition. The inbound exchange students started the mud fight with the Rotex counselours. The mud stuck to you like marshmallows in your hair, stunk like animal food and hurt wh
en it hit you because it was so heavy packed in balls. Most of the exchange student including me avoided getting in our mouths or eyes so we could still take photos all dirty. You could tell some kids didn’t mind getting it everywhere on their bodies because they rolled around in it and jumped in the pile of mud. This activity was dirty but fun because every man was for them self so you interacted with more and more kids with the same idea.
Later that night we separated in little groups by nationality to talk 1 on 1 with a counselor about how our year was going so far. Some thoughts were sad but others were fun to laugh about. This is when I really connected with a new group of girls because we gave each other useful advice to help one another. Those girls and I never saw each other outside of Portuguese classes until this weekend, rooming together and spending every waking moment together for two days brought this relationship to a whole other level. After the heart to heart stories, we had a pool party in the dark, unfortunately, after you jumped into the pool it was surprisingly freezing because it was supposed to be a heated pool. With the lights off we hooked up a playlist with songs in every language and blasted it on a speaker. My roommate and I didn’t last very long in the freezing cold water so warmed up under the hot water in our shower and finished the night out playing cards in our pj’s until it was bedtime.
Early Sunday morning we woke up for some breakfast and split back up into our teams for more competitions. The first game was trivi
a about Brazil and once you knew the answer you ran down to the other end of the room to grab a water bottle in the middle of a table. If you were the one to grab the water bottle you had to share your answer to the counselors. The second game we lined up in our teams outside the house and they would pick an object you had to find in the house but they would only say it in Portuguese. The third game was a tournament of tug a war and last but not least some exchange students climbed up in a tree house to tipline into the outside pool.
My team won the relay races and the retrieving the objects inside the house. The prizes were discounts off the next Rotex weekend!
