The second international organized -Monday trip had a free choice topic for the day. The main activity the organizing group had set for the day was practising of building shelters. In order to keep our blood flowing they also implemented some relays and tags to the program.

After warming up with a relay, we were divided in groups, and headed to the woods to look for a shelter spot. The shelter building was good practise for us, and with a few Norwegians in our group, they initiated a creative way to build a shelter. We found a nice spot up a small hill with some trees to attach the shelter with. The ground was quite even, and there was already some rocks forming a fireplace. We in fact used two tarpaulins to build the shelter. One was naturally for the roof, that we attached to three trees, and some branches, and the other tarpaulin formed a windshield wall, and was also used as a floor.

This shelter really turned out to be almost better than tent, and we were very proud of our throughput! Our group didn’t spend much time talking, but as soon a the main idea was established everyone pitched ideas and tried things, and if it worked went with it. A good technique to attach the “loose ends” of the tarp was to utilize acorns and sticks, and then tie them up with some rope. There wasn’t that much time for “group development” but it showed that we had a few experienced shelter builders, and with their lead and other’s support the outcome was very impressive.

After 30 min. The productions of different groups’ were evaluated. The evaluation was done by “selling the house” style, as in one of the group member had to pitch the shelter to the organizing group. This was really funny, and naturally caused a lot of humor among the group, thus it was a great way to build the atmosphere. Despite of our crazy good shelter, we became third in this competition, I guess the other groups then beat us with the pitching.

Finally, we played some weird version of hide and seek. Our mission was to hide one of our group member in the ground, which in these weather circumstances didn’t seem such a good idea. In my opinion it was also a little off the topic, as maybe it would have been more consistent if all the tasks had something to do with shelter building. I think this way the day would have been more educational all together. It was good that they had implemented some games to warm us up every now and then, but maybe some other parts, in terms of the shelter building, could have include something like learning different knots or attachment techniques etc.