life begins at the end of your comfort zone

 

Holding hands on the dock and jumping in to the lake with all the girls makes me happy. This is how I imagined summer camp and nothing makes me happier than to realise that another one of my weird ideas turned into something good. When I hear other girls complain about missing certain food or their family or not wanting to go swimming because the water is too cold, or moaning because the horse ranch is too dusty or other crap like that, I am just really glad that I can deal with new situations really well.

So what if I got a spider bite from going mud bogging?

 I would rather go than sit inside all day and complain about being bored.

People like that drive me crazy and thank god most of the girls are quite happy here- I love how the English girls enjoy everything so much here and it makes me remember how I felt coming here for the first time. 

♥

sad times

 

the day my sunglasses fell into the lake.

was today.

days off

part of the waterfront

Having a day off is SO nice- it just takes me a couple hours with the girls and I forget all about the stress in the kitchen. We went to Walmart as usual, buying weird and useless stuff mostly. I bought a new watch which is humongous, it is like a proper clock on my wrist. At least it is water resistant and will survive daily dishwashing.
After that Puddin and I went to the waterfront to tan a little bit- it ended with me sunburning my knees. And only my knees. Fail.

I am soo looking forward to the 4th of July- we are going to have three days off in row- SO EXCITED!

Being a Girl Scout

On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.





I will do my best to be
Honest and Fair,
Friendly and Helpful,
Considerate and Caring,
Courageous and Strong, and
Responsible for what I say and do,
And to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.


Before I came here, I kinda imagined Girl Scout Camp to be full of girls in vests with loads of badges on it.
Well, it is not. 
The cookie part is true though- the girls go from door to door and try to sell their cookies. They taste pretty awesome I must say, so it is not like selling boring cleaning supplies. The girls who sold the most cookies get a reward and this time they could come to camp for free. Last week we had two sessions of girls who sold around 300 boxes.. Craaazy!!!

What I like about Girl Scouts is that they do not dictate anything in terms of religion or sexuality, for example.They have nothing to do with that and I think that is pretty good to start with. Their aim is to make the world a better place (haha cheesy) but I think it is pretty neat to teach girls to be leaders, not dictators but strong girls who have the power to change the world. They might not know it yet, but all the cool stuff you can do at Camp cannot do anything wrong I guess.

(by the way, I am kind of a Girl Scout now aswell- I paid 12$ of membership fee, so it is on!)

the nature part of camp

So as you can see, the Camp is pretty much in the woods. No concrete paths but trees and everything that comes with that. Bugs spider mosquitos squirrels bears loons and so on
So clearly, it is not like home. And I am not really the hiking in the woods kinda girl, so bugs and spiders and all that stuff freak me out.
 pretty welll (haha).

So the other day I woke up with a spider bite on my ankle, then a tick on my EAR (!!!) and now every shower turns in to a tick check.
But not just that, we recently discovered that we have wolf spiders and .... here at camp. They are freeeaking big and creepy and gross and they can jump on you. Not so cool.

But despite all this yucky stuff, I LOVE the squirrels, chipmunks and ground squirrels, especially the baby ones. TO DIE FOR!!! And the loons that make funny noises. And the hummingbird I just saw today.

MMC #2

the cabins in the big forest

These are the cabins for the girls or counselors. My cabin for example has electricity but these don't. They all have different names and I reeeally want to live in Gryffindor!!!!

kitchen vs counselor

So here at Camp I am working in the kitchen- I applied for this job because I did not really want to be responsible for kids this summer, the job is better (not well though) paid as the counselor job and you have more time off. When you are a counselor you basically have to be with the children 24/7. They can wake you up at night when they need to pee or when they are scared. The 2 hours off you get every day is not a lot to recharge your batteries.

Sometimes I wish I could be playing with the kids outside and be more involved in camp life when I have to wash their dishes. But then again, when the dishes are done I can go and do whatever I like.
Since we are a small camp, counselors and kitchen staff (I mean, it is just me and the Ukrainian girl (see in the picture!) and the Cook) are not seperated like it can be at bigger camps. So I try to do as much with the others as possible.

So toooday, we are going to play in the mud.
Oh yes.

meet my camp...

MMC (meet my camp) is going to be a picture series from now on- internet is soooo freakin slow here, i can barely open more than one website at a time. So I will show you the camp one by one...
sooo here we go, the entrance to camp!

yesterday

...I FINALLY went to the horse ranch and cuddled with some ponies!

and then we went out to dinner ...

it smells like...

HAIR DYE!!!!!

summer is upon us

the waterfront at sunset

We are finally at our Camp again, after 5 days of staff training at a partner camp. I am so happy with my girls and my camp and I feel so blessed that I did not end up at a horrible camp with horrible people. We are about 15 girls (and one guy, our cook) and they are the funniest and nicest people I could have asked for. There is me, one Ukrainian girl and two English girls (one is still to come), the rest is American. Everyone is completely obsessed with the British accents and everyone is secretly copying Puddin's Londoner accent.

Tomorrow the first group of kids is coming and I cannot wait!!! Until now everything just felt like a big slumber party/field trip with friends and in fact, Camp is all about having fun with friends and I am so excited for the summer- the horse riding, the archery (I already tried it and I LOVE IT), the canoeing and just fun with the girls.

woop woop!

creepy turtles

 

 

 

CREEPY!

they are EVERYWHERE!!!!

camp name

  

Every staff member gets a camp name- not a real name name, but more like a fun upbeat word that kinda describes you. On our way to camp we talked about names and the other girls suggested like 120842354 names but I did not like any of those- and then they forced me to pick one in the next 10 minutes and I panicked and picked 'dazzle', because it sounds nice and there is no other dazzle yet.
so here we go, my name for the summer.

so the other girls picked: puddin, lloyd, firefly, harmony, giraffe, nat, bear, acer, alien, disko, goose....

trip to lake superior

On our way to staff training (which takes place at a partner camp) we stopped at Duluth, MN. You can see Lake Superior from there, which is the largest freshwater lake in the world (!!!).

camp ahoi

Mir gehts gut! Camp ist so ein Klichee, es ist genauso wie ich es mir vorgestellt hab.
Aber dann gibt es auch noch Plumpklos bei denen man 3 Meter in die Tiefe pinkelt, Zecken Paranoia, Girl Scouts Cookies, peinliches lautes Gesinge bei allem was man tut (ich bin froh dass ich kein Counselor bin), viel zu fettes leckeres Essen und hach, Amerika.

Wir sind im Nirgendwo. Aber wirklich- im vorbei fahren haben wir eine Bar gesehen, wo Jess meinte,dass die ganz beliebt ist. Ich dachte dann, das das Camp jetzt um die Ecke ist. Nein nein, 15 min mit dem Auto nochmal weiter. Die nächste "Stadt" ist doppelt so lange weg. Ich dachte ja eigentlich ich hätte das mit der unendlichen Weite von Amerika verstanden, aber irgendwie wohl doch nicht. haha

Die anderen Mädchen sind so cool, meine Co Workerin in der Küche sowie der Koch sind auch super und ich bin sehr happy. Und ich bin die einzige Deutsche, was noch nie vorgekommen ist.
Und deswegen werd ich glaub ich ab jetzt in Englisch schreiben-
und jetzt hab ich erstmal 5 Tage Staff Training vor mir. Mal sehen, ob ich beim Bogenschießen mitmachen kann. Dann komm ich als Katniss wieder höhö