Sophie À La Carte!

There's a hornet the size of my thumb disrupting our nightly meeting. #adventurecamp I found a tiny spider in my contact lens case. #adventurecamp I drank sausage grease at lunch last week, much to the horror of onlooking campers. #adventurecamp I'm in Paris, and my hair smells like campfire. #adventurecamp On our way back to camp from Bordeaux, the door underneath the bus opened and five suitcases tumbled out onto the highway. #adventurecamp I've been really "getting into camp," as they say, so a last minute trip to Paris was a little jarring. Two days before our campers were due to go home, I was told I was assigned to convoyage , the process of escorting campers to Bordeaux by bus and Paris by train. Some campers are brought to and picked up at camp by their parents, but the majority meet at a regional hub and come to Miramont as a group.  So, on the last day of camp, I and two coworkers, Curry and Ozzy, left at noon with 30 campers and tak...

It's Day 8 of Adventure Camp, and it's Pirate Day. I just spent the last two hours devising an elaborate game to hunt for buried treasure. Six teams much each find ten clues in the camp, decipher the code and visit a hermit to receive map pieces. Once all teams have finished, they put the pieces together to find the treasure. Classic counselor pose Each day has a different theme: Explorer Day, Everglades Day, Mission to Mars Day. Yesterday was a big day at camp: Valentine's Day! During my ESL class we made envelopes and valentines. We had a "fancy" dinner and a dance for the evening program called "Boom." Everyone dresses up- the counselors are almost unrecognizable, a far cry from the daily ponytails, Tevas and jean shorts most of us wear. It was great to see all the kids dress up and dance- reminded me of my time in middle school, except they do a lot more jumping up and down and less awkwardly standing on the sidelines. There's this one song...

My Teva/Toms tan is already getting very intense, along with an increased tolerance for sun and bugs. I'm becoming a true camp counselor. It's Day 4 at American Village and it's hard to describe what I've been up to the past couple of days. We've been setting up camp, unrolling handmade posters saved from past years, practicing our improv, and sorting through sports equipment and things to sell at the "general store." Just a reminder, I'm working at an English immersion camp in the south of France in July. In August I might be moved to another camp location, but this place is pretty beautiful. It's part of a larger compound of campsites, situated along a lake near Miramont de Guyenne, a small town an hour Southeast of Bordeaux. Our cabin-tent-daytime saunas. The campsite is very rustic. My camp director describes it as the "most American camp-like" of the site. There's only electricity in a couple of locations, the headquart...