AFS Late Orientation Camp

So.

Camp was not bad.

Cons:
Bad timing.  It would have made more sense to do it last weekend- this weekend kids are finally starting to get busy, last weekend there wasn't much going on.  Also, this weekend was the only weekend of the extremely small Okotberfest here in Lubeck.

The camp was in English!  I don't know why, but there was very very little German spoken at the camp, even by the leaders.   I would have welcomed the chance to practice my German, but... oh well.

Dinners were very small.  Most of us bought candy bars after dinner.

I didn't get much sleep, but that's to be expected- it's not really a con, it's just the way things are when you put  a bunch of kids together.

Many of the workshops focused more on our home countries than Germany- I feel like I learned more about Italy and Canada from the girls in my group than I learned about this country.

Pros:
We all got to meet each other- everyone from the Lubeck chapter and the Kiel chapter  was there, 17 kids total, so we have all have a bigger network.

The leaders were all kids, 17 or 18 years old, which was nice.

The location- a Jugundherberge (Youth Hostile, and I'm sure I spelled that wrong) was very nice.

One of the games we played, Ein Apfel und ein Ei, was really fun- they split us all into groups and gave each group one apple and one egg, and then dropped us off in Scharbeutz (which I also spelled wrong), a nearby town.  There, we were told to trade the apple for something and cook the egg.  This was problematic, because it wasn't very nice weather, so nobody was outside, and only one or two of us spoke any considerable amount of German.

Anyway, we did pretty well.  My group, which was me, Kita, and an Italian girl, ended up going to twelve houses- we traded our apple for three candies, we offered to trade our three candies for two pens, but the man just gave us the pens, we traded the pens for a shell, but the lady told us to keep the pens, we traded the shell for some honey, we gave the candies to a lady and she cooked our egg, we traded the pens again for a candle, and then traded the candle for the lamp.  By the end of the day we had turned an apple and an uncooked egg into a jar of honey, a lamp, and a hardboiled egg.  Not too bad.

The other houses told us to go away.  But in general, people were very nice!

And the last pro- Vincent.  Or Phat V.  Or Vince the Prince.  Vincent is a student for China- he's in my Fremdsprache course- and he's pretty cool.  Spending the weekend with him was fun.