Portsmouth in VT - the first repping experience

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Most memorable bits:

• Beginning my first ever coach trip out, and gritting my teeth trying to remember all my training. Only to look behind , about 8 minutes into the journey and find lots of naked students...which relaxed me a lot. In a strange way. What also was pretty funny was the really, really drunk girl at the front of the coach, discretely telling the driver about her bike accident and resulting toilet problem. As she got progressively more drunk this story was discretely (or not so much) told to everyone, one by one. Colin, the oh-so-patient Snowsports President good naturedly put her back in her seat literally every five minutes, seat belting her in every single time. I also distinctly remember thinking Jones was hot but rude.

• When I got out there, we met all the whole team - me, Plummer, Deano, Cat, Jim and Alice. All living together in the most comedy, chaotic, cramped apartment in TDS. You could not move without standing on a ski or a dressing up hat or paperwork.

• Room rounds were fun, but bloody cold around the Macchu/Picchu section of the hotel - I had to run through the corridor. There was a room full of snobby, complaining girls that were a bit of a nightmare, so I went to them first every time and spent less than 3 minutes in there. Then left my room of cool girls till the very end, to maximise drinking time with them. They were well funny, got all the gossip off them and played drinking games and all that. I ended up telling them that Plummer was a magician, to stitch him up and it worked a charm...put him in a few sticky situations, a few times!

• As the week progressed the flirting between me and Dean resulted in us getting together....which I kind of regretted soon after. It was nice, like he was real cute, holding my hand as we boarded down. And I remember him being real sweet when we all got pizza downstairs from Le Grange. I just wasn’t really interested to be honest, as mean as that sounds .

• The Valley Rally was a really fun day actually. We all woke up hungover and hyper. It where all the reps are at various ‘checkpoints’ on the mountain, and teams of students board (or ski) and have to complete like task things at each one. There’s a big prize-giving thing at the end and it should theoretically be a cool thing/ But it just gets like...a bit minging. Like a sports team initiation kind of minging. Anyway so Plummer delegated people to go to various checkpoints , looked at me, and gave me his camera and was like ‘errr, you take photos of the day...’. What was pretty funny was that he took his camera off me about three minutes later (when I think he realised I still had a fair bit of Jager in my system) so technically I just went boarding that day. Recruited Dean and this other lad later on in the day and we went off. At one point I was at the front, and admittedly my sense of direction is not the best, especially with only snow and chairlifts as landmarks, so we took a bit of a wrong turn. One way or another we’d ended up at the bungee jump. We had to do it. I went first and was well excited. It was the most gorgeous place to do something like that, all you could see around was so much snow, sun and mountains and the resort lights further down. They strapped the elastic harness thing around my boots and I stood on the crane lift, going up with the little French guy. It was then that I started to question how tight my board boots actually needed to be, to not, like, let my feet fall out with my bodyweight when I was upside down. I kind of didn’t really know how to approach the subject with this non-English speaking guy so I didn’t. When we got to the top, predictably, it looked so so much higher looking down. I could see the shape of dean at the bottom, squinting up at me. The French guy told me (or rather mimed) to hang my toes off the end and stand up straight, arms outstretched. Then, when I was ready, just fall forward towards the ground. There wasn’t really any other way, so I followed his instructions before I could think about it. WOOOOOO. The next two seconds all I could see was the snow covered floor coming at me, faster than I could have ever imagined. And just, JUST, as it felt like my face was gonna hit, I felt myself spring backwards towards the sky. It was sensational. Nothing like anything I’ve ever done before. The adrenalin was unbelievable and lasted for ages. The boys did theirs (secure in the fact the elastic worked) and we went straight to Moo bar. We had to have a Jagerbomb after that, and felt a resurgence of adrenalin as soon as we did. It was a brilliant, brilliant day.

• The week was full of great nights. The Portsmouth fancy dress was Rubix cube (lots of clothes swapping), Noah’s Ark, Disney and a fair few more. There was the great little bar, I forget the name, where they insisted reps never paid (the BEST type of bar I feel) and at some point in the night I distinctly remember doing shots of cheese as part of some kind of game.

• The Mountain meal was a cool night. That’s where everyone gets the last chair lift of the day up, about half 4/5 and goes to a restaurant up on the mountain. True to form they get pretty inebriated throughout dinner and stagger outside, in the black, to find their ski’s, poles and the like. Which would be easier If it wasn’t dark and there wasn’t 250 of them in the same place. Then they ski down with torches (like drunk students....with open fire...in ski wear....) It’s always funny.

• The final night was the one I remember most. I’d been talking to Jones a lot of the night and we all ended up back in the committee room having a bit of a mammoth drinking session. We got to flirting a lot more openly, maybe after about 3am. Then abandoning all subtly, made our excuses and ended up getting together in the bathroom. That was (of course) the moment when Dean walked in. It was a bit of a killer moment, coz everyone was just so drunk at this point....so I think I went to bed.

• I woke up bright and early the next morning, my last memory of the night before, challenging Jones to a boarding race. Looking around our (very lived-in) apartment, everyone was everywhere...various randoms in our room and no one in the bed they were meant to be. No one was wakeable anyway so I gave up and went to the committee room. Walking in brought back a lot of the night before and seeing Jones and Colin snuggled cosily in bed, was pretty funny. No one there was wakeable either. So I went to get the first lift. Pretty stupid really, as I was still probably drunk, hadn’t had any water, and no one knew I was even up the mountain by myself. I started to realise this after a bit and boarded back down to face the final day carnage.

• The coach trip back was a lot more laid back than the coach out anyway. I knew everyone so well by then and sat at the back with Jones (and bloody Chirag). We spoke for the majority of the 20 hours and I knew at this point, I liked him a lot. I suppose, wrongly, at this point I thought I had kind-of knocked off for the week. The ferry joiurney showed me how I was oh-so-wrong. The drunk girl....from the journey out...was just as drunk but ten times worse this time. The coach drivers carried her from the ferry coachpark, up the stairs, where they dumped her near the restaurant entrance, promising to fetch her and put her back as soon as we got near Dover. The next time I saw them was about an hour later, when they tapped me on the shoulder at the bar, ashen faced. The girl was gone. The thing is, on the ferry, the vehicles have to drive off in order, whether or not the passengers are on or not....they cant hold everyone up behind them. So if someone’s left behind they have to walk off the ferry and find us somewhere in Dover terminal. Only this girl couldn’t walk. It was horrendous and I very quickly realised I was actually working and in charge of this horrible, horrible situation! We had people looking everywhere, running around like madheads, getting progressively more panicky. Anyway, to cut a long story short...she was found, locked in a disable toilet, unconscious. Literally at the last minute, we were on and ready to go. Jeez louise, talk about leaving with a bang.

• Anyway, it was ever such a sad goodbye to everyone, I honestly thought I was never gonna see Jones again and I left them back at Portsmouth student union. Then the coach drivers drove me back up to near Notts, where dad picked me up...ready to recover from the unforgettable first OTP week with the excess of Christmas.

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