There is no Try. Only Do

Kids, I'm trying...

So this here is the gist, I work for ten days and then I get five days off. Really, I get three days off and two half days. I suppose I could just say I get four days off, but that's not entirely accurate either. The moral of this story truly is that I'm here now armed and ready with a now-empty bottle of red wine and a big ol' bag of 750 grams of gummy bears. (What's 750 grams in American? I have no idea, probably like a bah-gillion pounds of gummy bears. Just trust me; the bag is huge.)

So I don't want this post to be a huge recap of ten days of summer camp with a bunch of German kids, and as of yet I'm not totally sure how to go about it. I haven't actually gotten my head around the whole experience, and it's only just begun. My story sort of comes out in random intervals as I remember it in spits and sputters.

Every night the counselors would take our camp mascot "Hugo" to every cabin with a basket of candy to wish the campers goodnight and to ask them how their day was.
 Not that we did it, Hugo the Parrot did. Hugo is a cool guy. He's learning English too, so we have to speak a bit slowly for him otherwise he'll get confused.
 The older kids still wanted Hugo to come because he brought candy, but it was interesting to listen to them tell my hand disguised as a German-speaking parrot their thoughts.

"Hugo, today the swimming pool was the best. We learned how to play Chicken and Rebecca and Julian carried us all on their shoulders"

"Hey Hugo! Today we went mountain biking before we had a camp fire and made bread over the fire. Yeah, toss me a Lindt chocolate, please"

The younger campers would whisper secrets in Hugo's ear about their stay; who their new friends were, what they wanted to do the next day, who their new boyfriend was. Many were surprised to learn that Hugo was a really good secret keeper, so you also have to whisper it in Rebecca's ear or he wouldn't tell her. What a champ, that Hugo.

After all the kids were asleep the "adults" would unwind outside together, mulling over the day, and otherwise enjoying time as grown-ups again. It's amazing how quickly you get used to a dozen interruptions in your meal from a light tap on the shoulder and a quiet, "I have a question..." One thing I haven't yet gotten used to is how little, if at all, we discuss cancer. Without my handy-dandy camper information sheet I don't know how often I could guess which camper was a "sick kid" and which was a "sibling kid". If nothing else, we leveled the playing ground there and everyone is just a kid. Some of them were good kids, some of them were not so good kids, but over seeing a game of ultimate frisbee they were all indistinguishably kids. I like that.

 Check us out. We made the evening news, I mean, I didn't, but the camp did. That day I was leading a mountain bike tour, you can kind of see us biking away at one point. For all you non-German speakers, it's essentially about a woman who donated a butt-ton of time and money for the camp. So go ahead and check out the camp, and I'll try and be back as soon as I can.

Right now I need to eat something else besides fruity gummy bear goodness.