Washington Conference. Heard of it? History majors might know what I'm talking about. It was basically a conference, from 1921-1922 (it lasted months because the various parties and delegates had to keep deliberating or referring back to their governments back home and technology wasn't that advanced yet then), which dealt with the subject of naval limitation and disarmament.

For my History class, Dr Farrell decided to have each tutorial group re-enact some historic moment; my class got the Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament, other classes got things like the trial of Yamashita's war crimes and such.

So, for the mock-Conference, Farrell split us into five "delegations"; there's the American delegation (also the hosts of the conference; Washington, see?), which Hock and I were part of, the British delegation (which Ivan was in), the Japanese (of course; they're the ones who caused the problems that made the conference necessary in the first place), and then Farrell decided to make an Australian delegation just for the fun of it (during the real thing, they'd actually have been under the British delegation, since they were still a Crown Colony), and a Canadian delegation just because he's Canadian (they'd have been under the British too, really). Talk about being house-proud. :)

I actually thought that we (my American group, that is) were going to be dressed in formal wear, so I wore all black (which is what they'd actually said); my nice black sleeveless top and black dress pants, and I brought along another black top with three-quarter sleeves just in case it got cold.

Then when I reached school, I found out that Hock was just wearing a black polo tee and jeans. Oh man. Well, I felt quite stupid, but never mind, if everyone else turned out to be wearing jeans, I could still change; I'd brought jeans to change into later when the whole thing was over. (I ended up not changing, however, coz one of my groupmates, Glenn, was wearing a black, silky-looking, long-sleeved shirt, and jeans which were dark-enough to look like dress pants, so I thought, well, all right, then.)

Then Ivan came into the clubroom; the "British" had decided to *all* dress formally, and um, seeing Ivan for the first time in full formal wear was a little strange. Haha. He looked kinda nerdy. Or maybe it was the sling bag that he was carrying, slung across his chest, and he was actually hunched quite a bit. Otherwise, without it, he looked quite all right.

He kept saying I looked very nice in what I was wearing. Haha. Feeling a blushy moment coming on. I seem to blush easily. Dang. :P

I don't have pictures of us, so you guys can't decide for yourselves whether to agree or disagree with him. The two of us are poor, sad, little souls who can't afford good digital cameras. Sob. (Ponders setting up the "Gerri and Ivan Digicam Fund" :D)

And the long-and-short of the Conference proper? Well, the bloody Jap delegation refused to sign the 5:5:3 agreement for the ratio of the tonnage of American: British: Japanese ships, so in our rendition of the Conference, World War 2 started in 1921. :P

And the room was freezing; more so for myself and my "American" counterparts, because there was an air-conditioning vent directly above us, so by the end of the whole three-hour debacle, I was actually shivering. Which made Ivan start fussing over me. :D

I like being fussed over, haha. May sound like a selfish and horribly self-centred thing to say, but hey, I'll bet everyone likes being fussed over, haha... Although I did start to get worried myself when after lunch, in clubroom, I was still shivering rather violently. I find it very hard to believe that NUS has received zero complaints about the temperature of the air-conditioning. -_-

But anyway. The whole thing is over, and when Hock met Farrell in the canteen while buying lunch, he did remark that he was quite impressed with us (the "Americans", that is); Hock told Ivan and me that Farrell said that he could tell that we'd done a lot of reading and stuff and had discussed the whole thing.

Hopefully that means we'll be getting good grades for this thing. :D I need all the good grades that I can get for this module, man. I am seriously not history-inclined.