Day 2: Meeting Physics Teams from Other Countries (By Cristina)

In a matter of a few hours, we became very close to the Toronto team. Well, after spending 11 hours on a plane next to each other, it was pretty inevitable. The other teams here are almost just as welcoming. It is so exciting to meet so many different people that come from all over the world, and although there is a slight language barrier, we disregarded our differences and already became Facebook friends. We sit and talk about our countries’ differences, and quickly learned that other countries seem to think we say "aboot" instead of "about"… No worries, we quickly informed them of this faulty information. When it was time to view each others’ safes, we saw how each team had such vast differences in the way that they incorporated different physics principles into their locking mechanism. Since Cristina was the one to stay behind with the safe, she noticed the different approaches that each of the teams had. Some Israeli safe crackers came in with a smile, and worked together talking about the tactic they were gonna use, some came in and decided that they weren't going to use their knowledge and assumed they could just attack the safe. Then there was one team, where they had a genius who figured out the complete workings of the safe in a matter of 2 minutes without breaking a single sweat. All in all, it was really exciting to see these different cultures and this trip was a once a lifetime experience.