Day One

It was about what I expected. They stress punctuality so I saw to it to get there early… two hours early. Their personnel chuckled and sent me off to get lunch. That was good because their instructions were quite poor and I never did find the place they sent me to. I ate at Moe’s in Somewhereville instead. When I got back there was a German lady there. Exactly German. Fem-Power type. She told me a lot of the things I had looked at were too small, or the various parts were too small. She told me the best one wasn’t what I needed. I needed the other one I had considered. That’s the one. She said she’d show me places it could be used. Told me some names. I didn’t write them down though so now I’ve forgotten. But they’re near here. Being from Germany, she had been to Switzerland too so she told me a bit about Interlaken before everything got started. Eventually 9 other people showed up. One of them was this girl Gabrielle. We had to introduce each other to the rest of the group. So we had this little interview before the work began. Turns out she’s been to Spain, Central America (Nicaragua), and a bunch of countries in South America too. She thinks she met Ed. But I don’t believe it was Ed because she saw this person in Nicaragua a few years after Ed had been through and the route was different. But she’s going to look it up. That was all great until the part about the fiancé. But I think she speaks a little bit of that Vinny-lingo so we’ll see what else she knows. The rest were all older people. Most had done this before a long time ago and were getting back into it, to be safe. I sat between Gabrielle and a guy named Larry. You know Jaws from the James Bond flicks? That’s pretty much Larry. Except maybe a nice, friendly Jaws, not a metal-toothed one. The only hobby his presenter mentioned was playing the banjo. Seriously. Nobody else mentionable really. The guys running the show, one’s definitely got ‘Nam stories but a great sense of humor. The other hasn’t been doing this very long and so he’s the “rookie” with merely 6 years experience. We learned how everything works first of all, the rules. What’s expected of us, that sort of thing. Then we had a question answer session… with 100 questions. Larry and I were teamed up for that. Like I said, nice guy, but not a conversationalist. So we divided our questions up and went our separate ways. This went on for 4 hours. Roughly every hour we’d get a 7 minute break. But somehow the breaks were always too long. Tomorrow should be intense. I have to get up at 5am. There is no food served. We get an hour for lunch but we’ll continue until its done. Some people may be asked to leave based on their performance. It’s pretty serious stuff. If they allow cameras maybe I can take some pictures on Day Three. But I doubt it.