On Wednesday, we had our final day of competition. I was feeling a bit sick for it, but once in there I started feeling fine. The problems were a lot like the first day, and I got the first two out quite quickly, and then spent the remaining 3 hours on the final 2 questions. One was an output only task, which means that we didn't have to submit a program for it, just the output data. This meant I could do a few of the test cases by hand, which was quite fun. After finishing it feeling pretty confident and meeting Bernard outside, I realised I had achieved a bronze medal, an achievement I felt pretty happy with.
The rest of the day was spent playing Bartog, Sticks and the Hat Game with other teams. All of this was fun, and I went to sleep very easily after a late night.
Unfortunately, the next day I was meant to wake up at 5:30 am to catch a bus to Niagara falls at 6:30. My alarm failed, and so I was awakened by knocking on my door again, after it was realised that Evgeny had stayed up the whole night.
After hurriedly bolting my breakfast, I rushed to the buses and just got on one, only to wait for 1 hour before the bus actually left the university. It took us 1.5 hours to get there, in which the rest of the team slept, but we all seemed to gain a bit of energy after first seeing the falls.
The falls themselves were quite spectacular. The sheer power of the water just floating off the edge of cliff was amazing, and we all took lots of photos. We then went under one of the sides of the falls, and looked up into it, which was again amazing. We then had lunch at an all-you-can-eat place, which served fish and chips, a nice reminder of home.
The next attraction we participated in was a boat ride in the lake under the falls. We got extremely close to the falls, such so that we got quite wet and only the ponchos which we had put on before hopping on saved us from being drenched. Again, there were spectacular views and lots of pictures were taken.
After going back to the buses, I played a variant of Masters and Slaves with the French, which was very fun as they spoke commonly in French. Once back on the bus, I was shown Black Magic and showed others Sticks, both which were quite annoying to work out for the parties who did not know the rules. The rest of the day was similar.
I slept in till 8:30, and quickly had breakfast before meeting up with the Irish team and going to the shopping centre. Here I bought a number of gifts, and also saw some of the Canadian culture. After rushing back and just making it in time for lunch, I met up with the Australian leaders, who told us the plan for the next couple of events. I then got changed into my blazer in preparation for the closing ceremony.
The closing ceremony was very entertaining. We began by having a very high quality dinner, and then going through the medals. I was awarded my bronze, and when the Belarus guy was awarded his first place, a standing ovation was displayed for a full minute. Afterward, we had photos with the teams we had gotten to know over the event, such as the Irish, French, Russian, USA, UK, New Zealand and more.
Arriving back to the university, we played some games and then I went to sleep.
