ASL Adventures!

This weekend I had an ASL weekend. It was a ton of fun!! I learned some more ASL and met some great people :)

I got there around 6pm on Friday evening after work. As soon as I entered there were people standing around chatting, but it was completely silent aside from the odd hand slap or laugh. It was cool. I set up my bed and meet my roommate from university. She introduces me to this girl she drove up with.

We had supper and played games until 2AM in complete silence!! We WERE allowed to write things down if we were having a lot of trouble but we rarely needed that, fingerspelling sufficed.

Saturday morning we woke around 8AM. Had breakfast, had a short lesson and then had some freetime where we went skating and sledding. After lunch we had several challenges that we needed to complete in groups (signing the alphabet backward, sliding down the hill and telling the instructor to act like a particular animal, blindfolded hand-over-hand signing, describing to an instructor where we hid two spoons, and phrasing an English sentence into ASL). My team came in THIRD!!

Later that evening the teachers put on a performance that had everyone crying with laughter. Then we played some more games until bedtime.

This morning we played some outdoor games including a snow sculpture contest. My team created the "I Love You" hand sign. It was neat. The instructors put on another performance, told some jokes and invited everyone else to tell a story or a joke as well.

I left around 3:30 today. It was such an amazing thing to be completely immersed in ASL for a weekend. It was challenging for sure especially since so many people there were more advanced, but I did learn a lot and am hoping to take another course soon :)