Day 5 (27/7)

Paul Nicklen was his name. A NatGeo wildlife photographer stationed at the Artic he was. To see the jaw dropping high definition pictures of the Emperor Penguins, Polar Bears, and the Narwhals wasn't what I expected to see early in the morning, but I guess that was the most memorable morning I ever had. I also found out he was very much like me. He loved being outdoors, whenever he had troubles or problems he found peace in wildlife, just by walking in nature will do good, and that was the same for me. One of the very first things he said was "you gotta love failure" and that got stuck in my mind instantly.

After that inspirational talk, was the final GAT meeting. We had final preparations for the presentations on the afternoon. We had this video idea that was already being filmed by the Singaporean students from School of The Arts. Everyone was being filmed, and only one person editing the whole video, I felt really bad for letting her do that by herself, but her reply was true, I couldn’t help much for I know nothing on editing.

Presentation time. All the GAT teams had amazing presentations to give to us and most importantly to bring back to their own countries. What we presented was a video -  a video on what we learnt and what we would do and bring back to our respective countries.

We ended the whole conference with a nice farewell party at the beach. Although we had fun, one of us was already missing from the group - she left in the morning to Hong Kong. What's even worse is that, we were already starting to miss each other even though we were standing in front of each other. To think that the conference is coming to its end was a sad enough thought for all of us. Standing by the beach, staring out to the endless horizon in silence, thinking of what is to happen to all of us was pure agony. "Conferences always end when we get very close to each other" and "if only it lasted for one whole month!" was pretty much everyone was thinking about.

We went back to Totem Park, most of us decided to have more fun and hang around. I decided to pull an all-nighter with my friends. All of us had so much fun on the last day. We had card games, a movie, even a support group all in one loooong night. The highlight of the night was the game of Dai Di or Big 2 (an awesome asian card game), bursts of laughter just came from that game as we found out our friend's weakness - past 4am his brains become jelly (you go Desmond!) 

Paul Nicklen.
"you gotta love failure"