NARWHALS NARWHALS SWIMMIN' IN THE OCEAN~ [Part 1]

**Disclaimer: this is really, really, really long. Really. Kinda like the KICK-ASS FACIAL HORN on a narwhal.**

So today is Tuesday. We left Thursday afternoon but I am already forgetting everything -_-; I will try my best to remember everything.

So turns out that there was a diffie test on Thursday. Naturally I did not start studying for it until around 10 Wednesday night. When I gave up on that, I realized that I should pack for my trip... My mom had already placed 5 days' worth of neatly folded clothes and a pair of dress pants and dress shoes in my large bag (and also my AWESOME Korean pajamas). But of course, I never count on my mom to pack any of my electronics, aka the "fun stuff." So I had to do that myself. After numerous trips to Duke Math Meet, where the hotel had internet, but only through ethernet, I have always carried two ethernet cables with me whenever it was unclear whether wireless internet was available or not. So I stashed them in my clothes and also stashed all of my battery chargers for my camera, cell phone, and mp3 in the large bag. And of course the actual cell phone, camera, and mp3 were in my "carry-on" bag, along with laptop and power cord.

I check over what I have packed obsessively. For a typical one-night VMT trip I spend about 1-2 hours checking over everything I have and making sure I don't leave out anythinig important. Since I was packing for 5 nights, I felt that I had to pace around and open and reopen my bags for about 3 hours before I was satisfied. In fact, I spent more time packing for the trip than studying for math. naturally, I massively failed the test. In addition to arithmetic errors, I failed to read the T/F questions correctly and flipped some of my answers.

So after getting minimal sleep, I went to school, and school on Thursday was pretty uneventful. English was pretty boring as usual and same with compphys. But drd did decide to let the class just not work on anything the whole class. He decided to just shit around with the rest of us and talk about college. After dk initiated a discussion about college with him, he got carried away in the momentum and eventually just ended up talking the whole period. Of course, I spent this valuable time shitting around with Akinator and guessing random people. Ask Arvind for details (read: I forget the specific people we tried). After sleeping through geo, we finally left!

So yeah, the drive there was pretty boring. Greyson drove his own car there, and the rest of us crammed into Mrs. Webb's car. Since she drives a sedan, we spent like 15 minutes figuring out how to pack the trunk with our luggage. After that the four of us squeezed into the car and drove off. The ride itself was uneventful. We listened to the radio and talked about swine flu. After about 40 minutes, we arrived at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center (4-H means Head, Heart, Hands, Health. Yeah, don't ask) at Chevy Chase, MD.

Hmm... So maybe I spent too much time talking about the events leading up to the actual competition. I can sometimes get carried away when I'm writing, so bear with me... heh ^^;

So in the afternoon, Mrs. Webb and the four of us (me, Aaron, Hanwen, Dan) met up with Greyson and registered in the main lobby. There was a blonde woman sitting there registering the teams, and for some reason I thought that I had seen her before somewhere. And then when she said hello, Hanwen tells her that we are Thomas Jefferson High School, from the Virginia regionals. And then the lady says, "I know. I was the one who sent you here!" Talk about epic fail. Her name is Jen Tyler, and she was the coordinator for the Virginia regionals. We even took pictures with her dog at the regional competition. -_-

[stuff you should know before you keep reading]
So the format of the competition is like this: each team is placed in a random seat in a random division. There are about 64 teams (66?), and there are 8 divisions, some of which have 9 teams. The divisions are Arrhenius, Bromery, Curie, Darwin, Einstein, Fermi, Galileo, Hypatia. The 8 or 9 teams within each division compete with each other during the round robin. A team is awarded 2 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss. (The "normal" point distribution should be 1, 0, -1, but my guess is that the people at DOE don't want to discourage all the bad teams from competing ever again, so they decided to keep everything nonnegative.) Anyway, the top two teams from each division get to move on to the double elimination round. Ties in score are broken by each team's rank in the Division Team Challenge, which can be thought of as a lab; the five team members are given general instructions and a problem with equipment, and are expected to perform the experiment to determine the answers, and also provide a short write-up. In an attempt to be cute, the Science Bowl people decided to make it so that each division, which is named after a scientist, would have an experiment in a field of science related to that person. For example, the Einstein division had an experiment in physics.
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So after registering the team, we pick out an egg from a bowl full of plastic eggs to determine what division we would be placed in. Greyson opens the egg and there is an SD card in it that has "E8" written on it. So we were placed in seat 8 in the Einstein division. We then received a book filled with the self-written biographies of the members of each of the teams and a booklet with a schedule of the events. We also got lots of freebies: a shirt, a polo, a backpack, a deck of cards, a pen, a VERY STYLISH poncho, a rubbery skull that can be squeezed for stress relief, and best of all, a frisbee! But ladies and gentlemen, this is not just your average every-day frisbee! Though it looks like a standard white frisbee, this seemingly ordinary disc turns pink, thats right, PINK when exposed to ultraviolet light! They also gave us a plastic bag that had a digital camera, batteries, and a case for the camera. We were told that this camera would be used for the scavenger hunt at DC on Friday, and we were told to return the camera and the SD card the moment we got off of the bus after the trip on Friday.

So yeah, after getting our goodies and squatting down on the floor in a corner of an adjacent room to examine them, we received our keycards and nametags that would give us access to the rooms and the food in the cafeteria. We all received our things... with the exception of Aaron. Apparently they forgot that he existed. So we waited around while the staff tried to figure out what happened, and after a few minutes they were just like yeah, we gave up; we just got a new one for you. So then we took all our bags into our room, which was fairly inconveniently on the second floor. Since all five of us were in the same room, we assumed that the room would be fairly large, but of course, the room was tiny. There were two bunk beds, a bathroom, a large closet, and a small table. I thought the room was rather small at first, but it was comfortable and cozy. The one unbearable thing about the room, however, was the A/C that made really loud and obnoxious noises when turned on. Greyson and I each took a top, and Dan and Hanwen each took a bottom. Aaron took the random mobile bed they provided.

We only took about 10 minutes to unpack, and then decided to go to dinner. At this point i took a bunch of picture of the room from different angles, which I may decide to upload at a later time, if ever. By this time Dan had already disappeared. (Unless we were playing tractor or competing on Sunday, there was no point in time at which we were certain we knew where Dan was. Even during the competition, he sometimes just left. -_-) Dinner was okay. I kept my expectations extremely low, especially since I have a very low opinion of Maryland in general. (Despite the fact that where we stayed is actually a fairly rich neighborhood... apparently, everyone knows everybody else, so at night, the cops will pull over anyone on the street that they don't recognize. Scary, eh?)

So yeah, Hanwen, Aaron, Greyson and I get in line, and then we start randomly talking to some people. We find out that they're from New York, and then after talking for a bit we find out they are from middle school. So then we're like, oh, you guys are middle schoolers. And their response if like, oh, you guys are high schoolers. It was a brief moment of awkwardness. Apparently they've heard of TJ before (just like all the other people we met there), and then this Korean girl on their team is like hm... did you guys go to that thing in Boston... and then Greyson's like HMMT? Yeah, TJ went there. Apparently they knew my name from HMMT or something. -_-

The lines for getting food were extremely long. It kinda reminded me of food at Penn State. In fact, it was just like at Penn State. They had the salads and the desserts in a separate place, etc. Once the four of us got out of line and started looking for a seat, Dan comes up and is like hey, I'm sitting over there, with Inyoung. Hanwen and Aaron don't know her, so they're just confused as fuck, and Greyson and I are just like, ...wat. Apparently Exeter randomly decided to do SciBowl this year, for the first time! They had two seniors, Inyoung, and a frosh. As we spent more time with them throughout the weekend, I noticed how at TJ, there is almost no frosh abuse... while at Exeter, things were different (more on this later). So our team and Inyoung eat dinner, and Mrs. Webb joins us eventually, and gets to know Inyoung, and we all pig out and talk. Turns out that Inyoung would eat with us more often than with her own team... I dunno what the story is behind that, but whatever.

While we're all still eating, Dan gets up and is like, I'm gonna go to our room. And we're just like, wat. So he leaves, and the rest of us, after talking for a few more minutes, get up and go outside for some fresh air. The teams are all offered a chance to tour the monuments in DC Thursday night. Naturally, we declined, and opted to stay at the center all of Thursday. This is why later, while we were playing tractor in the rec room, it seemed to me like the place was larger than it really was... In the following nights, the rec room would be packed full of kids. -_-

THE WEATHER WAS SO NICE THURSDAY AFTERNOON. There was really not a cloud in the sky, but the sun was not too hot. It was the perfect day to run around, so that's exactly what we did. After shitting around by ourselves, we see a bunch of kids at the outdoor volleyball court. (I was confused about this. The court was sand, like beach volleyball, but it was adjacent to 1. the basketball court, 2. the driveway, and 3. grass.) We go up to them and we're like oh hi, wanna play some volleyball? And they're like sure! At this point I call Arvind and Tim, and I'm not going to bother writing about what we talked about... I will just say that you guys are really really loud, and I could barely hear the person talking on the phone. Anyway, after a while, our team is getting destroyed because we're playing 3 on 5, and I'm just walking around in our side of the court talking on the cell. So eventually Greyson walks up to me and is like blargh! and then I'm like blargh! and then he closes my phone. So I just stash it in my pocket and join in the game. Eventually we all get tired of playing, and decide to head to an open grassy field to play some ultimate. At this point we realize that none of us had introduced ourselves, so we do that. Turns out that there is a junior on their team, and his name is Kevin Zhou. When I introduce myself, he's like, oh, are you Men Young's brother? and I'm just like ... ._.; and he's like, oh, he was my teacher. I went to Ross. kekeke. There's another Chinese kid on their team, and his name is Roy. When he introduced himself I was just like holy shit your name is awesome. But of course I didn't actually say that out loud. =p

So we play for a bit, and we're all sweaty and tired and disgusting, so we decide to stop. Their team had a meeting at 7, so they go ahead and leave. Our team stays around in the grass for a little while and then decide to walk around some more. We decide to go to the Rec Room to relax indoors and maybe play some cards, and then somewhere along the way we run into Dan again. And naturally, the first word out of anyone's mouth is, TRACTOR?!?11oneone!!1!11

We get a table and play. This is where I snipe a picture of Dan (he had repeatedly escaped from my camera because he did not want any picture of him to be taken) while he shuffles the decks. We play for a while, and we realize it's almost 9. So then we're like, okay, let's like study some science so we don't fail on Sunday (which happened anyway -_-). So until curfew at 11, we practice astronomy, earth science, and general science. Greyson is an extremely fast reader, so we get through like 300 questions. After that we're all tired and decide to head back to our room.

Back in the room, not much happens. While one person showers the other 4 wait in queue. Everyone is tired, and goes about their own business with their laptops. Hanwen plays Advance Wars while watching anime, Dan plays classical music from his laptop, I play kpop from my laptop, Greyson gets a proxy through Sam to get faster internet, Aaron studies for his APs... Eventually everyone falls asleep one by one.

~END DAY 1~