Before I left, I had to purchase most of the gear that was required. I had to buy snow-pants, a proper snow jacket, and boots. I feel that I was well equipped for the conditions. It was incredibly cold, especially overnight in the quinzee. I’ll talk about that in a bit.
We did a lot of winter activities like snowshoeing, skiing, broom-ball, tobogganing, orienteering, and whole bunch of other stuff. This was the first time that I had snowshoed or skied, so that was quite an experience. I fell down a bit too many times, overall it was great fun :D
We started to build quinzees, which are basically mounds of snow which harden, and then are dug out. One of the nights we got to sleep in one of the four that were built. All I have to say about that is that I was cold. yeah.
One of the coolest things that we did was write these letters to ourselves throughout our days at Wanakita. The first night we went out with these adorable candle-lit lanterns, into the forest, and wrote a letter to ourselves. We found out that the letters that we wrote would be sent to us in exactly a year while we are on exchange. All the outbounds couldn’t write an address because we didn’t know where we were going. It was all really exciting because in a few weeks we would know where we would be going.
It was also really awesome speaking with all of the inbounds who had been here for about 7 months, a couple (New Zealand + Australia) had only been here for 2 weeks. They were really helpful telling us about the whole experience they’d had so far.
It was also really anxiety-provoking because all the Rotarians were watching everything. I obviously had my preferences (which country I wanted to go to), so I didn’t want to do anything that was going against me (whatever that meant. What does being -insert country name- even mean?). That was a really foolish thought, which soon disappeared because I was so caught up with everything that we were doing. I completely forgot about my whole ~masterplan~ and was just myself.
The Rotarians found out that I really like space, and one of the Rotarians came up to me and said “We have to send you somewhere you can see the stars!” and then she asked me where I could see the stars, and I replied with somewhere in Scandinavia. :D
The last night there was a dance party, which I wasn’t too thrilled about since I’m not a ~dancer~, and I’m not into pop music. Thankfully the camp counselor, Matt, played Arctic Monkeys, I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor :D WOOOO! Then at breakfast the next morning, he played a bunch of Stars songs. *awesome*
Overall Wanakita was a lot of fun, and I have many great memories from those few days.
Here are some pictures:
on the snowshoe trek, on top of a beaver dam
the snowshoe trek group that I was in
the entire group jumping on a quinzee, trying to break it down on the last day
a group of girls jumping on a quinzee
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