Twenty-two completely unfamiliar faces curiously looked at each other for the first time in a hot classroom on Monday 31st of August. They were the new 1st year students of the BSc Tourism programme and had no clue what was going to happen to them that week. Only the theme of the intro week was known, which was ‘Typical Tourists’, including the Chinese, Americans, Backpackers, Posh and the Bingedrinkers. Everyone was divided into these categories. These would be the groups in which most games the coming week were going to be played.
The rest was still new and unknown. The only clarity seemed to be that there was a huge variety in the classroom. Age, gender, nationality, you name it. This promised to be one exciting week full of surprises.
Already on the first day this appeared to be true. After our first ever BSc Tourism class an extensive campus tour was organised. Several questions had to be answered while we walked from place to place in the NHTV building. Right from the start we got to know our new learning environment.
On the second day we had two interesting lectures and afterwards we would have an “activity” in the city centre. The second years divided us in groups of four and told us what the activity was going to be. It was a game, a “swap game”, in which we would all start with one egg, and see what we could exchange it for on the streets or in shops. The lesson learnt in that game was: from oranges to expensive wine, you can get it all if you kindly offer an egg.
In the evening we ate dinner together in ‘T Hart Van Breda. A lot of ‘saté’ was eaten that day. When our bellies were full, the time had arrived to start our pub crawl. We danced and jumped around that night (and morning) at a few different pubs. All in all, a good start in getting to know Breda.
Wednesday arrived. It was the day we’d all been waiting for: the start of the intro camp. Sleep-deprived as we were, we showed up to have lunch together in Breda. After that we got divided into cars and brought to a small village close to Breda, guided by second year students. From that point we walked towards the campsite. While walking we played games against each other in groups of four. Every time a team won, they got picked up and brought to the next place, while the losers had to walk. The total distance was 8 kilometres, so the competitiveness was high.
When everyone had finally arrived at our camp house in Loon Op Zand, we played some games, had a nice dinner and afterwards went to the forest to play “Levend Stratego”. At night we made a nice campfire and after that we went to bed.
Thursday was the day of sports, games and partying. The day started off with a nice breakfast and then running a couple of rounds as a warming up. After that, the sports games started: volleyball, parkour and a water balloon game. The water balloon game was fun, but wet. (Somehow not that surprising.) In the parkour one person would start and walk/climb the track and in the next round take someone with them by holding their hand. In the end you would do the parkour with four people holding hands, which isn’t too easy, but hilarious because of that. Volleyball was fun, especially when the last group suddenly got attacked with water balloons.
Next we had lunch (“knackwurst!!”) and recovered our energy a little. A drinking game decided what Typical Tourist group was going to do the dishes. The others played funky ball, Pictionary or just chatted “gezellig” in our bedrooms.
After that we walked to Loon Op Zand, to play a game of “Levend Cluedo”. We had been told the story of how one of our teachers had been killed by another teacher and now it was our goal to find out who did it, how and why. Walking around the village we gathered clues by fulfilling different tasks as “Get me a banana” or “Create a clothing line”. In the end we all performed our ideas on the murder as a little piece of high class theatre. The group whose theory was the most off, had to do the dishes this time. (We didn’t always solve everything with drinking games.) But at least it’s always good to know if a teacher is a murderer. They say you have to be extra careful around them.
Before the dishes we ate burritos. Delicious. Slowly but surely the preparation for the party planned for that night started as well. It started off with a very tense game of beer pong. All teams focussed on throwing their ping pong balls as perfectly as they could. Lots of talent and ambition was shown, but there could only be one winning team. They won a gorgeous pink wine glass, with which they could get ten free drinks.
As we had to be quiet in the house after way too early o’clock, the second years came up with a brilliant idea for the party: a silent disco. Everyone got a headphone and we could all hear the same music at the same time, just like in normal clubs. The only difference was that when you’d take off your headphones, the whole group of people dancing would suddenly look absolutely ridiculous. Especially when a second year student starts making comments about the people on the dancefloor, as: ‘and now the male shows off his dance moves to attract the females.’ It was great.
The night went on and so did the party. Not that many students got more than three hours of sleep. In the morning we had a nice breakfast and then it was finally time to leave the place. After cleaning a bit we got brought to the nearest station to go home. There most of us just slept almost the whole weekend, to regain our energy so we would be completely ready on Monday to start the rest of the school year.
We had an amazing time, a big thank you to the second years!
Written by: Joëlle de Raaff
