I must admit that when I noticed the snow on the mountain side and saw the temperature on Chris' smart phone, I had one of those: Why-the-hell-did-I-sign-up-for-this moments. But in comically tight and thick wet suits, it is actually possible to stay in the (almost) freezing North Sea for hours on end! So that is what we did. We had two full days of surfing, and it was just what I needed. On the first day, the water was almost scary. There is not exactly much you can do, when you are paddling out into the water on your surfboard and then encounter a friendly little wave breaking 3 feet above your head. The result is usually a splash, followed by about 20 seconds of spinning around in the water and thinking "Please don't hit me in the head, Mr Surfboard!" Never the less, we carried on and tried our best to get on a wave for about four hours, before we went back to the cabin. The second day featured smaller waves and less wind. By the end, I actually managed to catch quite a few waves. I kid you not!
Oh and guess what we are studying in physics at the moment: Waves. There really is no escaping from school at this place! Chris has been a physics teacher for many years and actually wrote the Pearson IB Physics Book. I wonder if that was why I could spend most of my time splashing around next to my surf board, while watching him glide smoothly towards the beach. If he did bring a calculator to predict where the waves would break, he managed to hide it quite well! The real physics behind the waves in an ocean is extremely complicated. But IB physics can actually give quite a bit of input to our watery observations. For example: As a wavefront progresses towards the beach, its medium changes because the water becomes more and more shallow. This means that the waves travel slower and thus squeeze together. This increases the hight of the wave, until it eventually tips over and throws me off my surfboard. Hence, it is nice to know where there are big rocks and other objects lying on the seabed, because it can be used to predict when the wave breaks. No GDC calculator required! I have actually noticed a tendency that teachers often seem to see a lot of things through the lens of their subject. I guess that academics do not only aid your understanding of the world, but also change your perspective. Let that be an addition to the fake Nielson Mandela quote below.
And then there was all the other stuff: We had plenty of time in the cabin to watch (non-Swedish) movies and just hang out. We also had a lot of assorted food, which did not seem to follow any meal plan or logic. I think we were just given a random selection from the storage room. It was abundant never the less. We also walked a bit around in the nature and found a great, big rubber sausage to jump on. That made for a good physics blog post. In general it was just nice to get off campus for a while. Even though we are a tiny community of 200 students, it can sometimes seem hard to find an opportunity to just hang out and do nothing in the middle of all the fuss. Getting up early for a long breakfast works quite well, but it is not nearly as relaxing as a weekend away. I got back on campus, finished my extended essay, caught the flu, got all better, worked on a project with UWCs in Swaziland and Canada, had an economics test, watched a scary movie, filed a load of papers for college, skyped my mom and now it's weekend again. The great times are rolling, but they're roiling towards the shore!
Links: Chris Hamper's Blog & Physics Site
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