monday monday!

we had our first day with the kids on monday. it was pretty kick-ass :D! all we did is play two games with the P7's. they're the smallest class, and the one with the best english, so it was pretty easy to get along with them. the first game was one i picked up at camp, and we used it to get to know our kids and learn their names. we got them to throw my hacky-sack around, and the thrower had to say the name of the catcher, and say something they liked about them. we were surprized by how easily they complimented each other, the vocabulary they used, and the fact that the boys didn't mind throwing to the girls and vise versa. cool.

then we played red rover. for hours. we had such a good time with that one. one thing that i find so charming about kids here is that they get so engaged with games, and their teachers don't mind being thrown to the ground. they were competitive in a playful way. by the end of the day, i think sean and i somewhat knew everyone's names, and had a feel for most of their characters. we're mostly happy about how easily they warmed up to us, and how honest they were.

on a very different note, yesterday sean and i went white-water rafting. it's an entire day thing,.. you show up at backpacker's for breakfast, get a run-down of what the day is going to look like, and get fitted with lifejackets and helmets. then jump on a "bus" (the kinds of trucks they use to cart soldiers around... pretty much a trailer with a metal frame to hold onto). so we split up into groups, thank god, that suited us well. on our raft there was sean and i, a scottish guy, an italian guy, and a couple of girls, one from the UK and one scottish. on the other raft: a group of obnoxiously talkative and loud,... incredibly typical americans tourists.

we went through 11 rapids, most of them seperated by a couple of kilometers of still water. they conveniently start off easy and end with the hardest. so for the first one, we flipped over the raft, practiced the safe way of floating through a rapid without the raft (they call it the crusifix, you go down feet first with your arms in an X on your chest), and then after the rapid we practiced getting back on.
our raft, for some reason, mastered fucking up incredibly easy rapids (we flipped at the grade 2.5 rapid, and not at the grade 5 ones :S). at one of the rapids i got the shit scared out of me. well, at all of them, but particularly one. it was a grade4 rapid, and i got thrown off the raft, and somehow ended up far below the surface, with no idea of which way was up... i remembered, though, hearing the instructions, "when you're underwater, don't move or try to swim, just let the lifejacket bring you back to the surface." but shit! when you're down there, and you don't see people, or the raft, or the sky, you downright panic. regardless of the instructions i knew, i kinda tried to swim for what i thought was up, which i still don't know if it was up, and eventually gave up and let my lifejacket save me.

i showed up at the surface way after i ran our of breath. at took a good gasp when i got up. and turned out to be right in a standing wave. right next to the upside down raft.

the way they set it up is that for every raft there's a handful of kayakers who are there to rescue you. because everytime the rafts flip, a decent number of people end up pretty far away from it. and swimming in the Nile's current is pretty much useless. one thing that i still don't get about these kayakers is that as soon as you get to the surface of the water, one of them is -right- next to you. it's like they know exactly where everyone is going to show up. the same guy saved me three times.... we got to know each other through our chatting while he was carrying my back to the raft...

you should have seen, though, the skills of the guides and the kayakers. they know every nook and cranny of the Nile for a stretch of like 20km. the way the kayakers skillfully work the waves is absolutely insane. and the instructions of the guides are pretty impecable. the only instructions we had to remember were, "FORWARD!!!" "FORWARD HARD!!!" "GET DOWN, GET DOWN, GET DOWN!!!!" and "LEAN IN!!!"
my personal favorite was "foward hard" when we were trying to gain momentum climbing into a huge ass wave. your paddles barely reach the water, and you're looking up at this 8ft wave, thinking, "shit, when is he going to yell at us to get down so that i can hold on for dear life!!!"

Silverback, the best rapid we hit, had one huge dip, and then three ~7ft standing waves. and we miraculously made it through without flipping. man, if anything fosters team spirit, it's making it through something like that.

alright, enough about rafting. we didn't bring a camera to that bc it's not waterproof, but i'm going to bring the camera to this internet cafe next time we come, and put some pictures on facebook.

we're thinking of playing the Human Knot game with the P6's today. and the radar game. let me know if you can think of any games we should play with the P5's tomorrow.

i think that's all i wanted to say today..
see ya!