Dunrovin

They kept us uber busy at Dunrovin! Dunrovin is where we spent the first three days of RA training. We have to wake up at 8 am, and can't go to bed till 10 pm. Luckily I forgot my phone charger so that I don't have to worry about an alarm clock (sarcasm; I'm kicking myself!)

Day 1
So I pack 3 days worth of stuff in a bag and go to the information center on campus. I see some people I know, but not enough to feel comfortable. Like usual, there is a group of guys that sit together, acting super guy-like, which makes me totally avoid them. When we are getting on the shuttle, I intend to go on this one shuttle with some girls that I know, but it runs out of space! So I move to a different bus, sit in the back with 3 people I don't know for crap, and head towards our destination.

I learn that we are driving up to the cities (2 hr drive) WHICH I HAD DONE JUST THE OTHER DAY!!! lol. I become friends with the 3 other girls in the back of the shuttle with me. Whew.

We get to the camp, and walk in. We are told topick a room, guys on bottom, girls on top. I pick a room and sadly notice that there are humongous crucifixes nailed in each room to the cinder block walls. Yikes. The room looks like a place where brothers or nuns live. I am glad I did not listen to them when they said they would provide bedding, since their bedding absolutely looks bad.

We go outside to play those "get to know each other" games. I was surprised how social I was being. A lot of them were stupid games like throw the ball to a person and shout their name out, but my favourite was blind dodge ball. Its just like what it sounds. There is a person on the outside of the border and is shouting directions at you while you try and pick up the balls on the ground while avoiding ones flying through the air completely blindfolded! It was so much fun! With Darrell's help I won a round! It was so scary! I was so afraid of getting hit in the face! Next game I get out in literally 5 seconds hahahaha

We then have the more boring stuff where they talk to us. This creepy old teacher from our school starts reading us these excerpts from the bible and stuff and inwardly I groaned. I had hoped that this retreat would not be one of those catholic brainwashing things :/ :/ :/

Then we had a history lesson on what it means to be lasallian. I seriously had no clue before this. This is because nobody really talks about it. After that history lesson I realized that my whole freshman year I had been shown what it means to be lasallian. Unlike the other orders in the catholic faith, it seems this order lives their words and actually sticks to their ideals. I still don't know what I think about this, since I have decided I don't like Catholicism anymore but we will see.

We then had dinner (it was very good!) and then a bonfire. OMG! We made the biggest fire ever! It was so tall it shot burning coals up into the air like a volcano probably 20X it's height. We had smores.

There are 3 guys here that I am totally crushing on, but one more than the others since I know that the other two have girlfriends (one is even engaged!). Sadly I think he has a girlfriend back home, but hey I can't really control how and where cupid shoots me. One is even an Abercrombie Model. Now do you understand the temptation? lol

I then sat outside with some other people watching the meteor shower. It was so cool! Just laying on our backs looking for any sign of movement in the sky. We could see so many stars there! I could even see the band that goes across the sky that is made up of our "milky way". Did you guys even know about that? Because I didn't until I had come to MN.

Day 2 and 3

The second and third days were just as fun! The only reason I am going to write less is because I didn't have time to write about it back then. We played more games, had more talks and powerpoints. We even went out to swim on the river. Even though I brought a frisbee to play with I don't think people wanted to play with me at all because I was wearing a speedo. People are really into their gender roles here in the Midwest. They didn't like the speedo at all I think. And to tell the truth, I much prefer the ocean anyways. Salt just tastes better and sand should not be red, and you shouldn't be able to stand up in the middle of a body of water!

We had a board with points, and they separated us by our dorms' locations into houses like a knock off of Harry Potter! We are La Skeffron (a combination of La Salle, Skemp, and Heffron Halls.), our color is yellow, and our animal is a Platypus! ( Don't ask, I can't tell you why). It is definitely better than being the ladybugs or the bambis or the earwigs XP

We made shirts to wear for this one day when we had to wear all yellow. But no one in our group even has yellow clothes! So we did Tie-Die! It was amazing and it turned out way better than the Tie-Die party we had Ariell! I made a swirl Tie-Die and it is unbelievable! Laura (our HD [Hall Director]) bought this paper that if you print an image onto it, you can iron the image onto your shirt and it stays there! We now have our cartoon of our Platypus and it rocks!

We also did this one project (for points, because almost everything is for points) and we were given a huge sheet of paper, and three objects. The three objects given to us were a hanger, a fork, and a notebook. We had to come up with three programs for our residents that used or represented these objects in some way. We pretty much kicked ass in this. Ellen (from our group) teaches dining etiquette to people back home, so she came up with a program to teach people that. I drew the poster (which doubly kicked ass) and the hanger was used to represent clothing and donating old unused clothes to the salvation army. The notebook was used to write poetry in, which lauren did, and the poetry (both Haikus and Limericks) told the audience to go to a poetry bash that we would be holding. I got to read the poetry alongside Lauren. It was both a hit for the audience and the judges and we won! Our group is beyond amazing!

We had been winning for points, but then we played this game where you had to blow a ping pong ball off a table on the opponent's side. It was worth a lot of points (I think it was to make things more equal, but it still sucked) but it sucked because everyone on my team was super bad at it including me. I really think it was an excuse to give other teams points.

Thats all for Dunrovin!