The Amazing Race

This blog post is coming to you from Malenovice.  Which means team HawaIreland all safely arrived at Malenovice!

On Wednesday morning we travelled to Krakow where we met our interns.  Thankfully the American interns made their flights ok and arrived safely!  After a few hours waiting for other interns to arrive we set off on the Amazing Race!  It was three days of clues to new places where new challenges awaited us!

The Amazing Race really served the purpose of bonding our team together and because Josh and I aren’t allowed to lead during it we got to see the personalities of our team.  We spent some time and debriefed the race with Rob and Audrey and it was great to think through the encouragements, frustrations, things we loved, things we didn’t love and where we saw God in the race.

I’m really excited to be serving with our team this summer, and I’m excited about what God will do in and through us.

You can see some of the things we did in this video – thankfully I don’t really make an appearance but you’ll get the idea of some of the tasks.

Some of the activities we did was:

-       travel to the Polish aviation museum where we decoded our next clue

-       find three JV staff in a (huge) shopping centre to get a modelling tip from each and then model on a catwalk with very random clothes (obeying the three tips)

-       match three Chopin pieces to their sheet music… when you have ten pieces of sheet music.  That combined with the five-minute pause penalty any time you got it wrong meant we were there for an hour!

-       Play human bingo in a town square

-       Make a to-scale model of the solar system using fruit bought earlier…

-       Thursday started with transferring M&Ms from one bowl to another using a straw

-       Memorise a speech the Pope made and recite it with each team member saying a word in turn

-       Have a stranger read us a Polish fairy story book

-       Counting different objects in fifty-two city crests

-       Had one person describe how some lego was put together and we had to copy it

-       Create a puppet show of the Polish fairy story that had been read to us earlier… (we rocked this one!)

-       Matching the names to the pictures of JV missionaries

-       Walking to H20, a JV training centre

-       Eating blood sausage and sauerkraut

-       Canoeing to different bouys

-       Interesting takes on shotput and relay races

-       Diving for a euro coin

-       Getting back to the nearest town (this was our downfall – we’d been fourth up to this point but many other teams hitchhiked or bused or taxied their way to the border – we walked for 45 minutes and caught a bus!)

-       Learn and perform a Polish folk dance

-       Do a word search of the five JV core values

I’m sure there’s some I’ve forgotten but you get the idea…  We also spent some time at the Oscar Schlinder museum which was really humbling.