January 28th, 2004
Sunday January 25, 2004
Hallo Again!
What a week! It was so intense jam-packed with tons of information. Quite overwhelming at times. I think we covered about 15 subjects in four days….and we and to really know everything we covered because we had a written assessment on Friday. So, for the most part the hallways were pretty quiet because there was all sorts of studying going on after dinner. Except on Sunday night when we ran out of beer in Bryce’s room (AKA “The Lounge”) and one of the boys from Liverpool brought out his bottle and a half of Jack Daniels. I must admit that JD started to taste even better by the 3rd shot! Monday Morning was really rough and the class was pretty quite, just trying to get through the day….
However, after class, right before dinner about 9 of us made a beer run into town, where each of us purchased an 18 pack each. It was an amusing scene as each of us filed in throught the front door of the accomodation block with a case each! I even was I.D’d at the store (In England they sell booze in their grocery stores…how convenient!!) Almost everynight a few of the boys had a few beers over studying notes from the day….sometimes it got a bit out of hand….perhaps the “stress” got to them??? Well, maybe…
I tried to behave, and only had 1 – 3 beer each night.
Wenesday was by far the coolest day so far! We spent the day on the fire ground putting out real fires.
We started with the fire screen. It stands about 15 x 20 feet and its full of fire. We stand about 5 feet away with our hoses (2) in two teams of two. One team hold the fire back on one side of the screen and the other team controls the other side by sweeping the flames off the screen! I was so nervous at first cause I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to hang onto a fully charged hose thats pumping out about 10 Bars of pressure. But I was fine…in fact our teams put out the fire really quickly. After lunch we moved onto putting out Undercarriage fires using different methods and found out which was best that way. Approaching the wing from the rear was the hardest because you had to get the water up and underneath the flaps of the wing to get to the fire. This means that you had to get even closer to the flames almost right under the flap itself! I LOVED IT! I was made for this! Cna’t wait til week 5 when we get to deal with an actual aircraft!!! Like I sadi this was the best day yet. Might be able to get some pictures from one of the other guys who had a camera that day.
Back to Friday (the rest of the week was just classroom and insane hours of studying), in the morning we had our final inspection (YAY! No more marching of parade inspections, ironing, polishing!!!) by a higher ranking Officer who gave us very high marks, as they have been for the past 2 weeks. Then we tried to get through our study period, but no one could concentrate so we had an early Tea. Some us us went to our rooms and had a beer….I only had coupla sips to help one of the other boys. The test went great. I found a lot of the questions were already mentioned throughout the week…so if you were sharp in class, you would have done alright! But you would still have to study. Most of the class improved from the last test, as I did. I got a 92% this time, but I worked really hard. We had about 45 mins to kill before luch so we went to “The Lounge” and had a coupla beers. It was 5 pm somewhere in the world! After lunch we went back to class to go over our tests and our marks, and we watched a video on an air disaster that happened here a few years ago…you could learn a lot from these things.
Friday nights activities included….drinking beer. We didn’t go to “Tall Trees” like last week, we went to the “Crossed Keys” because the boys felt that the women were better there. I really didn’t see the difference, and the boys wern’t much to look at. Besides, it was very expensive to drink there. I paid 3 LBS 20 for a schmirnoff vodka…. ridiculous! At least at Tall Trees you only pay 15 lbs and drink all you can! I’m going there next Friday…..screw the “good looking girls” at the Cross Keys….
But I paid for my evils on Saturday morning….A realtive of Johnny’s family picked me up to take me to York for the day and then to their house for the night. I was violently ill on the car over and asked to “pull over” How embarrassing! I think i’ll mellow out on the booze for now and let my liver recover. the City of York was stunning!!! I dont have enough words to describe the arcitecture there. It was unbelievable. I took some pictures, but it’ll be a while till I get them developed….I’ll post them on my website later hopefully! If any of you get to England, make York one of your stops…highly recommended.
I’m going to sign off…..meet the rest of the crew that just flew in today. Nine more Canadians showed up for two weeks of “Supervisor Training” They each will be in charge of a crew of 6 when we finally take over the Fire Hall at home. We are beginning to out number the Brits here…hehehehehehe!
I miss you guys….
Until next time,
Cheerio!
Barb