Runaway Train, Runaway Schedule

On Saturday, the gap years went to Gold Reef City to see Nick Abrams, one of our classmates from high school. Yet despite the improbability of the reunion, the entire trip belonged, without a doubt, to Julia.

Gold Reef City has a casino, hotel, and restaurants, but we focused on its medium sized amusement park. We went on a few rides, most notably “The Anaconda”, which was incredibly disorienting and full of twisty loop-the-loops. Gaciru could barely stand afterwards.

Actually, that was a complete lie, because as adrenaline filled as it was, the most notable event was not The Anaconda. No, it was the “Runaway Train”, a ride that could only have been aimed at children aged thirteen and under; the biggest drop was about 30ft, and we were “held” into our carriages by a bar about six inches our thighs.

Yet if you’d been going by Julia’s cries, you’d have thought the Runaway Train was worth three Anacondas. Actually, you’d probably have renamed it “The Basilisk”. She screamed the entire time with a terror normally reserved for bungee jumps, and a look of absolute horror painted her face. Julia was genuinely petrified, and if my eardrums hadn’t been telling me otherwise, I would have thought she’d seen Medusa. On the plus side, she gave Gaciru and I the funniest two minutes of our stay in Africa; as long as she was screaming, we were laughing. Thank you Julia!

Out of all the cartoons I’ve drawn, that one required the least imagination.

Just as I thought my week couldn’t get any more eventful, the new schedule arrived. And my God was it difficult to understand! Apparently we’ve converted from a leadership academy into an espionage school. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to receive my classes in code. We are leaders, not crytographers! It feels like we’re living in a gigantic Sudoku puzzle. Expert level.

Anyway, I opened up the document, and found that some of my blocks had been coloured in. Delightfully aesthetic as it was, there were no actual classes in it. So I set to work with diligence and hope. But after staring at the four Excel matrices we’d received for an hour, I had only managed to fill in French and Swahili (in Gyampish, orange and pink). I was determined to find the other 2/3 of my classes though, so I went and found Mr. Gyampo, and he explained his colour-coding system with pride and his trademark dignity. Unfortunately, most of his instructions involved “blue”, “pink”, maths, and English, none of which I had, and I left the conversation even more bamboozled than I had been going into it.

ALA should include its schedule in the admissions process, because if you can understand it in less than three hours, you definitely deserve to use it. And if you can understand in under one, you are pretty much the textbook definition of "the power of one".

On the other hand, I entered the first day of the Gyampo-cipher-mystery-schedule with only two of my classes down on paper. I wasn't unique though; students and teachers alike surrounded the notice board with all of the scheme’s different components posted on it, and the whole morning was a chaotic battle for classroom privileges, with a little bit of hide and seek thrown in.

Even more unfortunately, I missed my Yr2 African Studies class. The good news is that during my ‘free’, I created a parody timetable to depict of what students actually see when they look at their schedules:

This makes more sense if you read it day by day, not from left to right. Definitely click to enlarge.

Three caveats:

1) This wasn’t actually my idea. My high school once created a test week centered entirely on lacrosse tryouts and meal-deprivation, and the newspaper published a satirical schedule the next day. I daresay it was also much funnier than mine.

2) The actual schedule has Saturday classes. Yuck.

3) The real problem turned out to be that the Mr. Gyampo hadn’t sent out the Leadership, Entrepreneurship, African Studies (LEA) matrix, and those were the missing 66% of my classes. And he didn’t do that because his all-school email was down. So in that sense, the whole thing was much more complicated than it should have been. That having been said, I still think it would have been easier to decipher the Rosetta Stone whilst writing with my non-dominant hand, warding off a tickle attack, and filling myself with absinthe. And since nobody will technically ever prove me wrong, I stand by that.