I have to write one separate post for my best Princeton experience.

Outdoor Action 2011 was rather an unusual one. (Note: Outdoor Action is a wilderness program at Princeton University, which brings a groups of 10 students and 3 leaders each to the woods for a week). There was continuous thunderstorm and rain for three days straight in the Pennsylvania and Virginia region, resulting in the evacuation of all OA groups. As people joke around the fact, OA 2011 is the first time ever in the long history of OA that our wilderness explorers ended up staying in the hotels and eating pizzas for dinner. It seemed - to an outsider - as if the purpose of the trip, i.e. bring the groups together through the difficult time in the woods, had been ruined. Some people even laughed hard at the fact that our OA lasted for 3 days, instead of a week, and in their laughter they wondered "Poor guys didn't get anything out of the ruined trip".

We, the insiders, understand the matter better: Before we got evacuated to the hotel, we stayed for more than 2 days in the non-stop rain. Even now when typing this note, I still can visualize the raining days, the unclear vision due to dripping water onto our disrupted eyes; I can feel again the wet clothes sticking to the body and the water running from head to toe; I can remember clearly the disappointment when we had no way to light up a fire  for all the woods collected were drenched in water, or the self-asked question "How are we to sleep tonight with our sleeping bags wet?". Since we hadn't brought that much clothes to the wild, in order to make sure we had dry clothes to sleep with every night, we had no choice but to put on our wet clothes again during the day-hike. It means, there's a pair of wet clothes that you had to constantly put on every morning, even though it felt like the grossest thing ever. Never before have I missed home, pitied myself and wanted dry clothes so much.

LADIES OF THE TRIP
A few minutes before the thunderstorm commenced a week of raining and a potential flood.

Yet, there's always light in the darkest moments. If it hadn't been for the severe weather, we wouldn't have got so close as a group. Our group - LH98 - started off our trip as complete strangers playing awkward games; yet, after only three days we felt like we had been best friends for long. One night, we - 13 people - had to sleep altogether in a shelter that had a maximum capacity of 5 people. None of us could lay down our tiring bodies entirely, and each of us had to sleep in a weird position. Alvina - a dancer - felt comfortable in her yoga style: slept sitting and laid her head on her toes; Alomi slept sitting the whole night; Evan slept between Julia's legs (this sounds very inappropriate); some leaned against the wall; and I and David just slept one on top of another. That night I couldn't imagine how I would get through the long night, but eventually everyone passed down due to exhaustion and woke up the morning after finding each other in a weird position. It was in no way a comfortable experience - but it was fun though. What's worse that night, there were only 4-5 dry sleeping bags for 13 people, and the night was really cold. We ended up sharing the sleeping bags, using them as blankets to cover more people at a time. I could only get the "blanket" to hide my toes, considering my wool top kept me comparably warmer than others.

This is the first night when we can actually lie down.

Then there was that one afternoon we were waiting for the support van in the windy cold. The wind just made everything worse: it penetrated into our clothes, made the cold colder, made what's wet wetter. I no longer remembered how long we waited, maybe almost 2 hours. Those 2 hours may have been the worst part of OA - and the most desperate moment for me - and it may have been the best part of OA at the same time. There are several things people can do when they are extremely desperate in the cold: they can huddle and kick a nut around the circle (pretending to be playing soccer while not being able to run around), they can play pokemon (just act silly), can play human Tic-tac-toe, or do the simplest game: throw rocks at the tree. That said, it should be clear how cold and desperate we were; but at the end of the day, it turned and transformed into the best moments one could have in life.

Okay, this can go on and on if I can't control myself. There are tons of other things that made OA the best thing that could ever happen, and hopefully even though they are not written here in this blog, I won't forget them.

I think I'm just bad at concluding things. Let's just leave it the post unconcluded.