No, our team excursion wasn’t meant to get to the zoo. Though suggestions from the team like this or i.e. paintball appeared, I took my job as a production assistant for Shift! to organise an active, funny, not too expansive and team building excursion very serious.
So we decided to go to the Climbmax in Stuttgart. You’re right, this sounds like some sort of ape/animal as well. We stumbled into this huge climbing hall and finally reached the part we wanted to go to – the bouldering area, which means climbing without harness, just with big mattresses on the floor and walls not higher than 2-3m.
Oh my gosh – so many professional climbers around and we brought this group of crazy people and nerds here who spend most of their time in front of their computers! But you wouldn’t have thought that as soon as the first one of us was courageous enough to climb the first easy blue route, you could see our whole team up the top!
Of course right away we started to compare ourselves to animals – Nora looked like a harvestman, Marsl did find his monkey arms very useful for climbing. What we didn’t expect was that everyone had so much fun bouldering – so that our big picnic waited for us a long time. And all complaining about our destination from before was gone.
Another surprise: those professionals around us really started kind of philosophical discussion below you when you got stuck somewhere in the height about where you should put your right foot next and how much you should angle your left knee. Because though 2-3 meters doesn’t sound much – when you’re at the top and have to jump, it IS high!
…and very very subtle we discovered by ourselves how it is when you are able to shift between two levels of your world… 