5.7.2014 – Saturday, last day and farewell party

So this is the last day of the competition. I was wondering; why the competition feels in the beginning like you have a lot of time to do this and that and meet new people – and then suddenly you notice that you have only 2 mornings left. That happened to me. I was counting mornings on practice week, forgot about that on second week when we had four flying days in a row and the routines overtook me, then it was raining in the beginning of last week and suddenly the end of the competition was there.

Quite many people were saying to me today “so, this is the last working day”. I replied “yes it is” and then realized that “actually it isn’t, as we have to wake up early tomorrow morning for the prize giving ceremony and then clean the place up”. They were looking at me like I would have poured bucketful of cold water on them, hmmm…perhaps I was being too realistic and should have smiled instead.

Standing ovation

Something overwhelming happened in the briefing. It was normal briefing, but in the end Heikki said that this was the last briefing and said his “thank you”s to all. He got a loud round of applause from everybody, and I mean loud and long, people were standing and applauding. If this would have been a play, he would be back at stage 5 times or so. I am glad I was standing outside, otherwise I would have bursted into tears. Do you know if this has happened before in the competition?

The flying day was again really nice, it was great that the weather was showing what Finnish summer can be like and that we don’t have continuous winter and rain.

I am sorry that I haven’t told you much about the results or how everybody flew, since I think that you can find that out from the results. And being Finn, I couldn’t follow the results objectively, because Antti and Nikke were on the second position on the 20 m multi-seat class. So we all had our fingers crossed for them, of course they couldn’t win, as the Jones brothers were doing history by being daily winners every day (except on the last day). I am glad that Jones brothers are so nice, I think they deserve to win :-P

Farewell party

The farewell party was quite well organized, but it was a shame that they couldn’t have more than 400 people inside due to the safety regulations. Of course the doors were open for everybody later when we were dancing. Oops, sorry, they were dancing. I still don’t understand what happened to me, as I really enjoy dancing, but I wasn’t at the dance floor and I was looking for someone to talk with instead. I mean just someone to chat with, no-one particular.

It was too late when I realized that this was The Farewell Party of our competition and I didn’t go dancing. How sad is that. I found a person to chat with, someone who had heard one thing from somebody who had heard it from somebody who had heard me saying something day before, of course the story had changed “a bit” and the end result had hurt his feelings. It was like a “broken telephone”-game, hopefully you know what I mean. And I had to explain what I had said. We also talked more about why he had hurt his feelings. His feelings were coming from deeper than from my altered comments.

This was also the first farewell party when we didn’t go to sauna, stay up too late or I didn’t have hangover next day. But I have to admit that I hurt my feelings as I saw this guy being hurt from what I’ve said, I mean what he thought what I had said. Sounds like soap opera, doesn’t it.