On Wednesday the 13th of May we went to Maynooth University for our annual retreat. this year was very different to years previous as it wasn't religion orientated. We started off by all sitting on our chairs in a circle whilst we were told what our first activity was. We were told to all stand up and link arms with the person beside of and clasp our hands together so that the link wouldn't break, we were given instructions to almost kneel down and bend our knees so that we were only barely balancing on one foot. The first four to fall were then brought to the middle. Afterwards it was explained to us that the four people in the middle would be the "dentists" and the rest of us that were sitting down on the floor normally were the "teeth". The dentists had to pull us by the legs so that the links would break. if you were torn from the link you automatically became a dentist. I feel like I was an easy target because I'm small and come across as weak but I managed to last until near the end he he. It hurt our arms a lot, I had red marks on my arms but some people had cuts from other peoples nails but nothing too serious.
We moved on and played a game where we had to pretend we were on the Titanic and to get on a lifeboat but only a certain amount of people could be on the boat or it would sink but if there wasn't enough people it wouldn't be released from the boat, so basically if you didn't get into a group with the correct number of people you would drown. I think we all found out today that we are all extremely competitive people.
We were also read a passage called "What we have left" which in my opinion was not fun, we were basically told how many days of our lives on average we spend eating, sleeping, watching TV etc. and theoretically we only have about 2000ish days free to do whatever we want like go travelling or to a party.
We then had a small break but after we split ourselves into eight groups of 10 and were all given a topic to discuss in our group and our groups final opinion on the topic. For example some of the topics discussed were "If you could change one thing about your parents/parent/guardian what would you change?" and "Who has it harder men or women?" We discussed all of these for hours until it was time for us to leave.
During our lunch we were allowed get Starbucks from the college library, I got a hot chocolate that tasted really weird but was still nice, it resulted in an in depth conversation between Emily, Laura and I.
I was expecting this retreat to be really hard and emotional because people said we all had to tell each other our deepest fears and secrets but it was nothing as bad as what I had thought and I really enjoyed it in the end.
