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...

Hi friends, I sit writing to you thirty minutes before the plane boards. Only one slight mishap so far. I zoomed through security, only to sit down at the gate to write this post and SNAP! There goes the strap on my dress, completely off. Bad omen? I'm not sure. It forced me to buy a sewing kit (which of course I didn't pack), so fortunately this happened to me now, and not when a sewing kit wasn't in twenty feet of me. Yours truly, 2 1/2 hours before takeoff. This weekend has been a whirlwind, which I will briefly describe: Friday was spent in the car, driving from Kansas to Minnesota with my parents. It's not a bad route- just a straight shot up I-35. The last time I did this drive with my parents was in August 2009, when I first moved to Minneapolis to go to the University of Minnesota. The first time I did it was from 2002, when I went to Spanish immersion camp in Bemidji. It seems like driving up to Minnesota with parents usually signifies a new cha...

I HAVE A FARM! As of Saturday morning, the next leg of my trip has been established. I'll be spending 3ish weeks on the border of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, working on a farm and in a restaurant. I can't be more excited. Let me back up a bit. When I first hatched this plan, a main draw for me was going to a different country to learn about food and cooking culture. I did some research and found that one of the best ways to do this was WWOOF. WWOOF stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, and was first conceptualized in the seventies in England. The early premise was that farms would host urban visitors who would support the organic movement by working weekends. Photo courtesy beersandbeans.com (a great WWOOF blog!) The movement has since expanded to other countries and continents, and is a popular way for travelers to spend longer periods of time working with farmers and learning new skills or sharing those they already have. Each participating country ...

I write to you on day 4 of packing up my apartment- in the midst of this controlled chaos, or as my roommates would call it, chaos. I am most surprised by the number of canning jars I have accrued over the last year or so. It's as though they've multiplied, each born with a genetic disorder: a handful of raisins there, a cup of rolled oats there, and flaxseed. Oh, so much flaxseed. I don't know where it all came from, but I hope someone finds a good use for it. I preemptively dumped every nut I owned into the food processor on Sunday, and have been living off this "mixed nut butter"- mostly cashews and walnuts, but also six macadamia nuts, a tablespoon of almonds, a couple of pecans, and pinches of cinnamon and salt. It's ridiculously creamy, and I've been stirring spoonfuls of it into oatmeal and smoothies (practically all I've been eating at home). Hopefully by the end of the day everything will be packed up and stacked nicely in a corner ("...

On Monday I received my first site assignment for American Village, the English-immersion camp system I will be counseling at this summer. Drum roll please.... Miramont de Guyenne ! (cue frantically Googling where that is) ...Southwest France! (NICE!) ...an hour from Bordeaux! (NICE!!) ...adventure camp! (WHAT?) So yes, friends, I will be spending July at Le Saut du Loup  (which Google tells me translates to "The Jump of the Wolf"), an American Village "Adventure Camp" for 11-15 year olds. The website offers a few glimpses of camp life, including horse-riding, stargazing, and archery. I was expecting to be placed at one of the "original" language camps, so this is a pleasant surprise. I looked back at my application to see what could have caused this assignment, and this might have been it: "Outside of work, and depending on the weather, I try to stay outdoors as much as possible." Whatever the reason, it does not matter. I can...