After our busy day on Tuesday and our late night, Wednesday started in a leisurely fashion. Instead of being summoned to breakfast at 8am by a bell, we had a casual drop-in brunch from 9.30. It had the usual breakfast items of toast and cereal but it also had two baskets of miniature croissants and a fry-up. I had four croissants with jam.
At half past eleven we gathered in the little yard between the Main Chalet, where we lived and ate, and Spycher, which is the newest building. It was opened in 1999 to provide more office space and accommodation and also meeting facilities. We were going to start with a little orienteering, so we started with a game to make sure we all knew how to use a compass. It was not entirely unpredictable that the shape we drew by marking our points with a length of string was a five-pointed star.
Having established that we could all work the compasses, we paired off with a map of the grounds and went to hunt for letters. We very quickly discovered that you really don’t need to know how to use a compass for this particular activity. All you have to be able to do is match the map to the real-life buildings to find each point. Four of the points have a bonus picture and some of them use compass directions to point you to the picture but I found one by accident and the second by the instructions “look on the other side of the path” and I could have got the entire picture from just seeing that second. I won’t tell you either what the picture shows or what the letters spell but my pair was first back to the T-Bar and the only pair that gave the two answers. It was a beautiful day for orienteering, or exploring the grounds. The area directly around the two big chalets was fairly snow-free but Baby Chalet hill was both crunchy and slippery and we found ourselves at one point on a surprisingly precarious ridge above the trees that bound the area to the east, in pretty deep snow.
We sat together in the T-Bar for a while, waiting for the other pairs to return, drinking tea, warming up and talking. Our two guides/instructors for the day made valiant atttempts to get us over to Spycher’s big conference room for our next activity but the group was quite resistant. I was looking forward to this – we already knew that there were crafts on offer and I knew that one craft would be traditional Swiss papercutting. One of the long-term postcards available in the shop is of a very elderly papercut of Our Chalet but more importantly, it would one of my “choose from four options” for the Our Chalet Knowledge section of the Our Chalet Challenge, which I’ve wanted to do for a couple of years now. You trace a template onto coloured paper, cut it out with scissors and a craft knife and then stick the result onto different coloured paper. I wanted to do mine onto black, as is tradition, and soon discovered that the downside of doing that is the difficulty in seeing your pencil lines. I moved around the big table to sit directly under the spotlight but most of it was still done by copying my template rather than cutting over my drawn lines.
Scissors are no good for such a fiddly craft and you have to try out various knives before finding a suitable one. My finished papercut has some very raggedy edges in the top-left corner before I found a good knife that cut really cleanly. Once I got going, it only took an hour or so to do. I admit to accidentally and deliberately cutting off a couple of really small fiddling trees and goats and I got very confused near the bottom where trees in the background turned into trees in the foreground. But as the rest of the group pointed out, no one would notice there was anything “wrong” with it unless they painstakingly compared it to the original template and they’re absolutely right. It looks pretty good. It doesn’t look as good as the ones they sell as postcards in the tourist shops in the village but having tried it for ourselves, we realised those were laser-cut by a computer – not least because you can’t sell something that fiddly that takes that long for the price of a postcard. I even got ambitious and cut “Our Chalet” out of the bottom.
Most of the afternoon was passed in working through our Our Chalet Challenge. We’d been joined by a group from Chicago who’d been delayed in Paris and joined the New Year’s Break late and they were determined to finish the challenge and so even those who’d been lukewarm about it originally caught the spirit and we spent the afternoon demanding for Kate to listen to this or that so she could sign something off and I found myself repeating the history of Our Chalet, which we’d had in our presentation on Monday evening, four or five times – once to get it crossed off my own challenge and a few more times so the rest of the group could learn it well enough to repeat it for their challenges.
Our evening activity was a games night. We split into two groups and we had forty-five minutes to complete as many little logic games across the two main chalets as possible to earn points. These ranged from our first activity, to copy a Lego model from spoken instructions without being able to see it, to making four units of water from a three- and five-unit bucket, to building a kind of raft that could support human weight, to turning a triangle of coins upside down in three moves. We abandoned a couple of them because the time it would take up outweighed the value of the points we might earn from them. I feel like three quarters of an hour wasn’t long enough but we only abandoned two games and failed to find one and if they’d given us a whole hour, we would probably have had more than enough time. On the other hand, we had to get shoes on and off when we ran between the chalets because you can’t wear outdoor shoes inside and you also can’t run over barefoot and then track the dirt inside, so that lost us some time. Also, we had to find the games. We would never have known there was one in the laundry room if not for our designated leader telling us or know there was one in the upstairs toilets if one of our group hadn’t spied it by chance on the way downstairs. I’ll be stealing a few of those games for my Rangers.
It felt like a slow lazy day but on the other hand, we spent a long time on the papercutting and we all put some serious effort into the Our Chalet Challenge. I’ll tell you in the Challenge post but I’ll tell you here also. We all completed that challenge and were given our badges. And when we were, one of our group asked “Do most people who stay here complete this?” and they said no, because people don’t realise how much time and effort they need to put in it. If we hadn’t spent a huge chunk of Wednesday on it, I doubt we’d have finished in time either.