psychology

15/12/14

This morning we woke up later than usual.  I think all of us were enjoying not sleeping in one big room all together! Plus we didn’t have to have breakfast at eight in the Main Chalet, we could have it in Stockli, whenever we wanted, as we didn’t have to be anywhere until the morning meeting at 9.30 am.  Hence most of us slept in!

After morning meeting, we started the day with program training; the hike to the Magic Tree.  This hike was supposed to be on Snow Shoes but unfortunately there wasn’t enough snow to need them.  Instead we just hiked as normal.  We walked down the driveway to the Chalet and turned right at the bins, heading into the next valley over.  Once there we walked up into the forest and found the Magic Tree. 

The Magic Tree is a tree which you can climb inside of and is over 400 hundred years old.  It is the only tree in this forest which is , meaning it loses its leaves.  It is said that if you stand in the middle of the tree and make a wish it will always come true.  Making a wish in the Magic Tree was also part of our Staff Challenge, so we all took turns to stand within the tree. 

Then we hiked a little further up the mountain until we reached the road.  We followed the road around almost to Baby Chalet and then we took the path that we would have taken if we had Snow Shoes on, down the edge of the field and around Stockli, finishing back up at Main Chalet.

 Before we had lunch Jen showed us how to carve wood and make kindling to make a fire.  Splitting the wood with a knife and another log was fine but trying to make the tiny kindling by scrapping off the edge of the wood and making it all stay in one piece was more difficult!  In the end we had enough but ran out of time to really get the fire going as the lunch bell rang.  Hint though: If you are going  light a fire on the snow, make sure you either scrape it away from your fire or lay some logs down as a base before lighting... otherwise it melts and puts you fire out...

After we had lunch, we had spare time until 2.30 pm.  I attempted to write yesterdays blog post and connect to the internet but it was still being temperamental... instead I consumed tea and chocolate....

Then was Reception and Shop training with Mara before we had to go make dinner at 4 pm.  Tonight was Chicken and Leek Pie.  

After dinner we had a meeting to discuss the plans for the Christmas celebration and our plans on how to entertain an unknown amount of children ranging from ages 3 up.  It is going to be interesting!! Considering most of them will not know how to speak English, it's going to be even more fun!!

We then moved to Stockli and had our first official 'House Meeting', followed by a game of Psychology.  

Psychology is played by everyone writing a random thing, object or person on a piece of paper and putting them all into a bowl.  Then you split into teams, we had two and you have a minute to pull as many pieces of paper out of the bowl as possible and describe them to your team.  When your team guesses whats on the page they get it right.  Each team gets a minute to do this until the bowl is empty.   Then the pieces of paper are counted and tallied up, then put back into the bowl.  The next round you can only use one word to describe the thing written  on the piece of paper and then you team has to guess it, and in the third round, you can only use actions.  It was an awesome game I would love to do at home... And just to make it better... we won :)