International Girlscamp 26 Blog
The annual girlscamp in collaboration with Germany and Poland took place in Wrocław this year. The Swiss delegation consisted of Laetitia Orglmeister, Seraina Maag, Ela Irmak, Ava Guyer and Myriam Faltin and was accompanied by Hannah Oss, Priska Steinebrunner and Yaël Arn. In this blogpost you can read about our experiences in the camp.
Monday, April 20th (Seraina)
At the entrance (since there is only one, right?) of Zurych (yes, it’s written like this) Airport, we met at 8.30 a.m. Our flight departed at 10.30 but it turned out that it was necessary to meet this early, as we walked reaaally slowly and had to overcome few obstacles before we were able to board the plane. First, most of our bags were checked at security because of our card decks, even though we had made sure to store our metal Tichu boxes in our suitcases. Once we arrived at the gate (with ten minutes to spare), the real trouble began. Ela’s and my seats were in the emergency row, which turned out to be a problem as Ela is not 18 yet. I wasn’t allowed to board either because it was registered in their system that I’m a minor (which I’m not). After waiting for quite a while, Ela got assigned a seat in row 3 and we were already celebrating her upgrade to Business Class. The rest of us also got our seats eventually and we all boarded with a tiny delay (everyone on the plane had to wait for us). Unfortunately, Business Class was only in the first 2 rows, so Ela missed out. The flight was uneventful (like this [1] ) and we thought, we’d finally broken our streak of bad luck. Wrong. We got our suitcases pretty quickly, however, Yael’s backpack was still missing and suddenly the baggage belt stopped. We were all panicking and went to the lost and found office, where Yael was told rather rudely to just wait longer. Eventually, the backpack arrived and we were relieved. We ate delicious sushi bowls for lunch and then boarded the train to Wroclaw. After around five hours, we arrived at the hotel (the rooms were unexpectedly quite big), where we got sandwiches for dinner. Unlike usual, we went to bed rather early.
| [1] | https://soi.ch/blog/ceoi2025-blog#footnote-reference-2 |
Thursday, April 23rd (Ava)
Wooow the first camp where we got enough sleep, crazzzzyyy! As usual we had to be at breakfast at eight which wasn’t really a problem, you’d had eight hours of sleep instead of five. Today was a little bit special. After a great breakfast we had a city tour instead of writing a five hours contest. We were all really sad and confused about it but at least we had a team contest to look forward to. The city tour was great we saw a lots of the old part of Wrocław and the city is really beautiful. It was also nice to talk to the people from the other delegations and to get to know them better. Fun fact Wrocław has over 2000 dwarfs and there’s even an app that shows where they are and lets you count points for finding them. After the city tour, we went for lunch. Of course we had to play Tichu until the food had arrived. After lunch it was time for the contest, we had all been looking forward to: The team contest. We were split into groups of two or three people and we had five hours to solve thirteen problems but only one person was allowed to code. We had a lot of fun! After dinner, we played Tichu again to round off the evening.
Saturday, April 25th (Ava and Seraina)
As usual, we started the day at eight with breakfast, before going to the university at nine to write a contest in a contest environment. Unfortunately, things did not go according to plan at the university. First, we arrived ten minutes late, which is actually on time, but then we had a lot of problems with the computers. For those who wrote the contest with VScode the debugger was not working and there was also an issue with the output. Anyway, with a delay of one hour and fifteen minutes, we started the contest. Thanks to Paulina, we had four great problems. For some of us the contest went great, for others it was one of the worst contests. After five hours of contest, we were really tired and hungry, but fortunately there was pizza. Until the camp’s closing ceremony, we had great discussions with the other delegations. During the closing ceremony, we all received a flower, which made us really happy. In the evening, we had free time, and of course we played Tichu and Blood on the Clocktower. With these games, we ended the camp and went to bed a little too late to wake up at 7:30 the next day.