Rotary District Conference- Part "the rest"

So I decided it was too much work to give you the play-by-play of my weekend. So here are the highlights in handy bullet-point format.

Saturday

• Sat around all day.
• Talent showed. Ostensibly supposed to begin at 8:30, the award thingie preceding us went long. Very long. By the time we started, the buses were waiting to take us to...
• Back to the house. Primped to go to...
• The "dance". Which was actually in a bowling alley. The plan was for us to stay there all night, partying. However, I and several of my cronies raised Cain, saying that we had AP test this week, and we could possibly stay up all night, thank you very much. So around 2:30, the most praiseworthy Giff rescued us whiners and took us to...
• Their house in Sunriver, where, upon entering, he informed us we could avail ourselves of the hot tub if we chose. So, for all my moaning about staying up all night, I found myself at three thirty AM in a hot tub with three guys, only one of whom had thought to pack some swim trunks. The scene was thus: Me, in my 'kini, which was all I had thought to pack, that kid Gary, bound for Sweden next year, in his undies, Victor, who's going to Chile, wearing a pair of trunks, and Albin, from Sweden, also in his undies. Yep. It was a good time.
• Next morning-slept all the way home.

Now, I'd just like to say that I probably didn't represent this event fairly. I exaggerated some elements for dramatic effect and probably totally forgot about others. Don't hate Rotary just because they locked me in a dungeon all weekend. Don't be a hater in general.

Now, for something completely different, I will relate a tale related to me, in turn, by my dear sister, Tanner.

Apparently, Kerry came up to her in dance and said "Can you say I'm the coolest thing since sliced bread? "Tanner, in her infinite wisdom, recalled a statement I had made recently, and responded, "No. Aubrianne is the coolest thing since sliced bread."
"Oh." Kerry said morosely. "Well, can you say I'm the coolest thing since Aubrianne?"

Yay for Kerry. That was exactly the best answer possible. You will receive your free t-shirt in the mail within 6-8 months.

On a similarly random note, I am going to Prom on Saturday.

Rotary District Conference- Part Two

For part one, see yesterday, for parts three through ___, see tomorrow.

Friday, we woke up and, for a time, the house echoed with the sounds of girls showering, blow drying, make-uping, eating, and whining about the polos we were expected to wear- some of which came down to the knees of their unfortunate wearers. Finally, we piled into the car and drove back to the conference center, where we sat in the dungeon until called forth into the meeting. We were paraded across the stage with the flags of our respective countries, then sat through several hours of Rotarians telling other Rotarians how great Rotary is. We were finally released back into the dungeon for an hour or so before lunch.

"One student to a table," they said. I found a table to myself near the corner just in time for the doors to open and the room to flood with hungry Rotarians. I ended up between a man from India and some guy named Bill. Throughout the meal, Bill would occasionally go on a tirade about the political party he was planning to set up to revolutionize the world, using Rotary both to promote his system and as a model for the way things would be run. Since I was being paid, essentially, to make a good impression, I sat and listened politely, nodding and making listening noises occasionally. Since I felt as though I had done noting but eat all weekend (even though it was only Friday,) I only ate about 2/3 of the food offered. During desert, some terribly important guy from Thailand came up and spoke for a very long time. All the while, the remaining 1/3 of my cake was sitting on the table (on a plate, obviously. They were at least that classy) tempting me.

After lunch, we were permitted to go back into the dungeon and change back into real-people clothes before setting off for a nearby bowling alley, where I played a couple of frames, getting steadily worse as the afternoon wore on. We eventually returned to the conference for "talent show rehearsal". In other words, we sat around in the dungeon for a very long time.

We finally were driven back to the house, where we ate a nice meal and sat around talking about different countries' attitude toward nudity, which lead to several embarrassing stories. Before you ask, I have no idea how the topic came up. Ultimately, after some ice cream, we slept.

Rotary District Conference- Part One

Thursday, I went to school for a couple of hours, having spent much of the previous night packing. (I was very proud of having fit EVERYTHING into one bag, including sleeping bag and pillow.) I hopped into the car with my parents, drove across town, picked up a bunch of other kids, including inbounds from Germany and Belgium, and drove for about three hours, stopping only once for a visit to the world's most vomit-inducingly unsanitary rest stop, and finally arrived at this nice, new conference center. We all disembarked, said goodbye, and lugged our luggage inside, where, near both a prodigious fireplace and a waterfall that spanned two floors, we received nametags and packets full of junk inexplicably advertising this conference we were already attending. My nametag, unfortunately, was misspelled "Aubrienne", so I spent a good quarter-hour trying to get it fixed by a particularly loquacious registrar-type guy. Finally, with my slightly smeared, but correctly spelled nametag in tow, we were ushered downstairs, past the silent auction and behind a curtain into a very odd space indeed. The walls were lined with empty cardboard boxes with "Office Furniture" stamped on them, and a large section of the floor was covered in neat rows of these boxes, perhaps two hundred in all. The floor was cold, plain concrete, but at least someone had thought to use one of the mysterious boxes as a table for some store-brand granola bars. Throughout the course of the weekend, whenever we were not needed, we were herded down here into what I will affectionately refer to as "the dungeon".

Shortly after our arrival, we outbounds were pulled aside to be given our official Rotary blazers, complete with an embroidered Rotary Youth Exchange logo, a unisex (aka elephant-sized) white polo with the same logo, and a name badge in the shape of Oregon. Interestingly, my name was spelled "Aubriann" on the badge. We were told that we were to wear these all the next day, along with the khaki pants we had brought and the "rotary smile" that we were expected to be able to muster up, despite looking like four-year-olds playing dress up with their dad's old clothes that went way out of style a decade ago ("Mommy, look! I'm a pilot!").

In all fairness, these people are paying thousands of dollars to send me and my comrades all over the world. The basic point of the weekend was not that we have a good time, but that we be paraded out on stage to show these people who their money's going to.

We were then given several hours of "free time", where we sat around the dungeon, sometimes sneaking out into the silent auction to nab some of the chocolate, popcorn, coffee or tea that had been set out for the Rotarians. Over the course of the weekend, I managed to make off with six teabags of assorted flavors. Eventually, we were told to come upstairs to meet with the families that would be hosting us for the weekend. One by one, my fellows were picked up by strangers, until finally there were only fourteen girls left. We were told that we would all be staying in a rental house that Rotary had managed to acquire for the weekend, since they couldn't get enough host families. We arrived, unloaded our suitcases, and left to get dinner at the Mongolian Grill.

This particular establishment provided relatively decent foodstuffs, but as I poured my sixth ladle-full of lemon sauce on the stack of noodles I had pieced together, my converse slipped and stuck in the remains of others' Mongolian endeavors. Leftovers in tow, we trooped back into the cars and set off for the house, where we were offered yet more food, mostly desert-like. Eventually, we settled in to sleep in various bedrooms around the house.

To be continued...