Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Manchester YSA Conference 2009: Saturday afternoon " If it is to be"

Some of the workshops ended a bit earlier then expected and combined with Lunch being late the YSA found themselves with sometime on their hands.

Some lads from somewhere ( real precise I know!) set up a tightrope between two trees and proceeded to try their hand at walking across it. As you do! As you can imagine it wasn’t long before other YSA decided to try their hand at the challenge. Not many proved successful unless your referring to falling off at which most YSA proved to be highly successful. Including the one unfortunate lad who rather then falling off to the side fell straight down with legs either side of the rope. He caught the rope on the way down and it then bounced straight back up.

I’m sure you can imagine the painful result.

One of the workshops in the afternoon was snowball fighting. Yeap that’s right, snowball fighting with actual snow! Or rather actual fake snow or it could have been fake snow produced the same way natural snow forms….. Oh I don’t know I’m not a snow expert! Anyway a huge pile of snow was dumped in the car park and as you can imagine some YSA were drawn to it pretty quickly until the organisers surrendered to the inevitable and declared “ Fight on!” leading to the surreal site of several hundred people having a snowball fight on a fairly warm day in a car park in August!

The Lunches arrived and a queue formed pretty darn quickly and with several hundred YSA it took a long time to get to the front of the queue. I don’t know what it is about lunches at conference but the search for the perfect lunch distribution system continues!

I was looking forward to the first workshop as they had announced in the morning devotional that one class had been missed from the schedule. Yes the massage class was back on! I resisted the urge to do a Homer Simpson style shout
“ Woo hoo!”

I was hoping that their wouldn’t be a repeat of last years fiasco where two girls fought each other not to go with me and the looser then left. And my hopes proved correct that didn’t happen.

There was only one girl this time and she left as soon as she was partnered with me claiming she had changed her mind. At least she did it fairly subtly so it wasn’t as embarrassing, as there was no one else I gave a philosophical shrug and decided to come back and try again for the second session.

As this was a few minutes into the workshop it was a bit late to join another workshop so I headed over to the hotel to see what was going on there. I ended up running into a couple of girls I had met during the speed dating session and sat talking with them for ages. So I spent most of that workshop timeslot having a very pleasant conversation with some rather nice girls.

As the time for the next workshop dawned I decided to muster up all my bravery ( or stupidity I still haven’t decided) and give the massage class another go. As the class was running late I was able to watch the preceding class and saw the former Elder boyd thoroughly enjoying himself. As the preceding class came out who would happen to be there? Why the girl had changed her mind and didn’t want to do the class. Well at least she had the good grace to look embarrassed when she saw me.

Still the 2nd class was a lot more successful and I met an extremely nice girl from London who kept apologising that she wasn’t very good. I had to disagree as she almost sent me to sleep several times. Then in a change to the usual ‘program’ rather then the guys giving the girls a hand massage after then had done the Indian head massage, the guys gave the girls a Indian head massage as well. Apparently some of the girls have complained previously that the hand massages didn’t involve much work and if the girls had to give the guys a head massage then fair’s fair.

After the class I spent a little while chatting to the girl who then introduced me to some of her friends. Networking’s great isn’t it? As the class had started late it finished late meaning I had just enough time to pop back to my room to grab a drink before dinner.

It had been a good afternoon

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