Day 9: House of Feelings

During the morning, AIESEC Prague had a workshop with the students. I took a nice, long, two hour nap and finally got to shower in the nice shower for us leaders. After the workshop Unicorn University came to do a workshop on logic. This was another perfect opportunity to start working on my blog during the free time. By this time though, the facis, students, and everyone else was getting pretty tired. Camp life had taken its toll, mentally and physically. I know, that even though we were sleeping before 1:30 (latest) every night, waking up at 8 AM and having to use your mental capacity at all times, is a very hard thing to do. It wears you out! After the day was done and the university left, the students were too tired to even do anything during the break. They were complaining that the day was too intellectually challenging and that their brains needed a rest…guess what we had planned for the night activity? A scavenger hunt!
The scavenger hunt was not what they wanted to do, but they did well. Usually when a night activity ends early, we just hang out and watch a movie, but tonight we had something special planned—The House of Feelings. Since the last time we tried to do this we all fell asleep and failed to wake up, this time we thought to do it right and we stayed up until 2 AM until the moment was just right. The House of Feelings is one of those typical summer camp moments where we wake the students up in the middle of the night and blind fold them. We take them out of their cabins and make them do a series of tasks, in which they have to trust us and let us stimulate their senses. First was the sense of taste. We make them go the to plenary room (the common room) and here we made them crawl under a table and go to the other side of the room. In the corner, we had four bowls, one with salt, one with sugar, one with ketchup and the other with hot tea. We made them taste each one, blindfolded. Then we moved on to the sense of smell. Here we had incense from India and a sheet of paper, sprayed with my cologne. Then they left the building and went to the grass, where we laid out corn flakes for them to walk barefoot across. Immediately after the corn flakes, there was some leftover watermelon, smushed up and ready to be walked across. I’m sure they all hated us for using watermelon (again!) because not only were they sick of it from the Amazing Race challenge (the best challenge ever in my opinon!), but it made their feet sticky and gross. They love us anyway. After the sense of touch, the moved on to the listening station. Here, we had two iPods. The first had Enya playing, which is calm relaxing music that is almost dream-like. The second was heavy-metal screaming smash music. We had them first listen to Enya, then to the metal, and then one in each ear. After the listening station, we walked them back to the cabin.
On the way to the cabin, we had pulled out two mattresses and for the last station, we pushed them onto the mattresses. This was the most exhilarating station, because not only were they completely trusting us to do something scary, they were all so relieved to hit the mattress. When all was done, they went back to their cabin to finish their sleeping. There was absolutely no point to doing any of this, but with all their energy in the evenings, we had to think of something to make it a special night with a great surprise.