What the heck is a schlick tour you ask? It has something to do with mud I think. Either way, I was invited to the north of Germany for my first AIESEC reception weekend in Oldenburg. A reception weekend is an event organized by a local committee of AIESEC at any one university for their trainees and others around the country to see a part of Germany and German culture. This time out, all the trainees were invited to stay at a kind of summer house that had been rented out for the weekend. You pay a small fee of 50 DM which covers room, board and parties for the weekend, and of course the schlick tour. Oldenburg is Janik's home university, so he was going and invited me, Kivanc, Liviu and Fernan from the Philippines to go along. We rented a car and set our for our journey 500 km north. This was my first time traveling on the autobahn, and it is fast. It doesn't seem like anything exceptional is happening, until you realize that somehow a Ford Focus is going 200 km an hour, and people are passing you. But it's still quiet inside the car, nobody is panicking, and nobody else is looking at you. Although, the calmness of the situation was quickly broken when somebody told Fernan how fast we were actually going, he seemed pretty agitated every after, occasionally shaking the back of Janik's seat whilst screaming something along the lines of 'I'm going to vomit, we're going to die'. We slowed down.
We arrived on Friday night just in time for a big German dinner, lots of cheese, hearty soups and bread. This was perfect since it was getting pretty cold. We were also let in on the secret of the next day's activities. We would be driving out to the North Sea to visit a part where the tide goes out a long way, nearly four kilometres I think. Far enough at least that you can walk to a small chain of islands and visit a restaurant that is otherwise accessible only by boat. However, we were going to be lucky just to get off the shore. By the time our bus arrived at the coast, a fierce wind was blowing from the North. Thinking that it would be summer weather at the beach, most of the trainees, myself included, were ill prepared for the torrential downpour and freezing gusts of wind that would soon bear down on us. But we took off our shoes, rolled up our pants and headed off into the muddy shoreline left behind the outgoing tide. Luckily, the organizing people were smart enough to hire a guide to go along with us, and he quickly showed us why we were paying him. Apparently humans have a natural tendency to walk to their left slightly, and when you can't properly orient yourself, say when a fog blows up off the water, you start to walk in circles. One of our group volunteered to be blindfolded, and try to lead the rest of us towards the island chain. After about three minutes, we had turned 90 degrees to the left. So our compass wielding guide got a big cheer, and we carried on with our tour of the marine life that the tide leaves behind in the schlick (mud). There were so many different types of worms and muscles, enough actually that the area has been made a national park to preserve the bio-diversity the schlick offers. It was interesting, but it was also really, really cold. Some of the trainees from tropical countries were having second thoughts before even leaving the bus, now they looked an inch from death, their hair soaked and blown wild by the growing storm, walking knee deep through streams of rain that were collecting in the paths carved previously by the retreating tide. When we were all back on the bus, still soaking since many of us didn't have dry clothes to change into, we decided to chalk it up as an experience. And everybody still talks about it, so I'll call it a successful weekend.
