Escape Routes & City Buses

About a week ago, we had our first official training weekend.  We took a day or two of class time to talk about being ready to leave at a moments notice, how to avoid being surveilled, and plans of escape.

In other countries that are potentially dangerous, we HAVE to be ready to leave our "home" at any time.  We learned how to set up escape routes, alternate escape routes, and escape destinations.  It's like setting up a fire escape plan, or practicing tornado drills, except that this is no natural disaster situation.  We have a cool phrase here that reminds us to be always ready: STAY ALERT. STAY ALIVE.

So we did some fun (maybe a little stressful) exercises during the weekend that helped us practice evreything we learned.  Then Sunday night, our second training segment started.  We stayed the night in *PEANUTBUTTER* (if you remember my ground school post, you'll know that peanutbutter means that information is confidential. top secret stuff. you know.) and the next morning, with our camelbacks loaded with snacks and water, we headed out in our teams to travel our city.  Walking and city buses were our main mode of transportation.  Let me tell you what, city buses are FULL of, what we call, very interesting people.  (Ask me about that in person if you really want to know).  We had a number of interesting destinations to go to throughout the day, while taking pictures of ourselves at each site (to prove that we were there).  Here's a few pictures:

Can you tell we're a little tired?  We walked to this cool little Jazz Museum.  There was a janitor there who saw us taking a picture and called to us from the door, "Hey you!  I can help y'all wich yo map!"  Our first instinct was to walk away, but he added, "I saw yo other groups earlier!"  So we decided he was trustworthy and got his help with our other destinations.

This is a very large badminton birdie.  Who comes up with this stuff?

This is our full team trying to do one of those cliche jumping photos in front of this amusment park called Worlds of Fun.  If it hadn't been closed, we would've tried to get a free ride by telling the park that we were doing an Amazing Race... well, maybe another time.