From the Laken canteen to your embroidered initials
1) Go to buy the material from the list suggested before the landing of Decathlon: It involved a whole afternoon in the English Court or a pilgrimage through different shops in the city center in search of the Laken canteen perfect.
two) Prepare a backpack with the most battle clothes in your closet. That when it is finished your parents and you realize that missing to put the Chiruca and having to redo the whole thing.
3) Obsessively testing the flashlight at home and receive reprimands because his batteries were going to run out.
4) Wear your written initials with indelible marker on personal belongings.
5) Wear your embroidered initials in underwear.
6) say goodbye to your parents trying to avoid crying without even suspecting that they are having a worse time than you.
7) choose well to your seatmate on the bus on the way to camp, because he becomes your best friend for the next two weeks.
8) bus transfers that last eight hours during which you have time to learn the names of all your new companions, forge alliances and create staunch enemies.
9) If it is a camp with children from other provinces, hallucinate when hearing for the first time exotic names to your ears like “Oriol” , “Endika” or “Uxío”.
10) meet you with very urban children who for the first time get pricked by a bramble and see a cow up close.
11) Being so naive as not to know the joke of the gamusinos.
12) Learn to use a compass. Get very excited and use it months later in the heart of the city to check if from your house your school is to the north, south, east or west.
Learn to use a compass
13) The campfires. In which clouds were never roasted although you were dying to do it after seeing it in so many movies.
14) The boy who pees. There is always one and it is always a boy, not a girl.
fifteen) The child who cries because he misses his parents and they have to come get him after five days.
16) The handsome monitor The one all girls between the ages of 10 and 13 fall in love with.
17) Community showers. Possible conflicts at a complicated age in which a few months can make the difference between having or not having hair on the private parts.
18) Going to bed in a panic for fear that they will put your hand in a glass of water to make you pee or put toothpaste on your face.
19) The smell of the barracks in the morning . Inexplicable, indescribable and unforgettable. If you sleep in a tent it is even worse because you concentrate.
20) The morning sun cooking you over low heat inside the tent. Axiom: there is never enough shade.
21) The mess of the place where you sleep: be it a barracks, be it a store, be it whatever it is, it is like looking into one of the vortexes of hell.
The typical handsome monitor
22) Rainy day games. The essential resource of the monitors to avoid triggering a riot between hyperactive children who have become accustomed to constant movement.
23) Having all your clothes inexplicably wet , even though a week has passed since the last rain.
24) Multi-adventure camps. The most extreme are like military training in which they carry out marches of 40 kilometers a day and survival activities in which there is a suspicion that survival is really at risk.
25) Take trips to the nearest town in which one is the object of the hostile and/or envious looks of the local children.
26) The girl who gets her period for the first time. She suffers the typical pubertal embarrassment that the rest of her classmates find out that she has had her period; she has to rely on an almost unknown monitor to take care of her and has her first experiences with tampons in community toilets that never have a lid. It's hard to decide if she has it worse or the boy who wets himself.
27) Camp songs. A whole genre unto themselves. Especially remembered are "Walking through the forest laralalá", for its dramatic story set in the Civil War, and "Smell of sweaty feet", for its rabid topicality in camp life.
28) Camps of schools for priests and nuns: essentially identical to the rest, but they use Christian rock songs like “Open your store to the world, open your heart” to wake up the kids and anti-abortion songs like “You know, mom, I'm inside of you.”
29) Wear with pride the horrible camp merch : which can consist of full color t-shirts (in the most pro) or a cap with the logo printed bizarrely.
the tents
30) The food. Be aware of how well you eat in the parental home and suffer first and traumatic experiences with ranch food. Getting the hang of rice when it is prepared for 500 children can be really difficult.
31) Familiarize yourself with new vocabulary: ice ax, zip line, rappel. Take a liking to them and let them become vices of adult life.
32) The bugs. You have to get used to them: there are many and it is you who is invading their space.
33) Have fun counting the riddled child bites by the mosquitoes, which give the report every morning announcing: “Two new ones in the arm”.
34) The deck of cards: your new best friend.
35) The guitar: the real star of nightly bonfires.
36) Sleep on the bottom bunk and getting your hair caught on the top bunk bed frame when you get up.
37)Already in adolescence be aware that it is still possible to do parties and have a pipe without alcohol.
38) The loves of camping. That could range from holding hands in children's to furtive sexual contacts in adolescents.
39)Night game!: Waking up in the middle of the night with this scream from the monitors that forced you to get up to jog half blind through the bushes and finally use your flashlight.
40) Learn very useful things for life such as making figurines with wicker or making juggling balls with rice and some balloons.
41) The land rover: There is always a land rover with mud-caked wheels that every child dreams of getting into, fearlessly driven by the oldest monitor.
42) Dye (fade) t-shirts with the technique of knots. Having a whole camp of kids dressed like they're going to a psychedelic hippie rave.
43) Celebrate costume parties in which each one has to procure his costume: or how much a garbage bag and a box of crayons can give of themselves.
44) Wishing that the life in the camp extends to infinity and cry when separated from your new and best friends in the world without whom life has no meaning.
45) Hang the t-shirts signed by the friends of the camp on the cork in your room for years while the ink fades but the memory of the experience becomes more and more beautiful.
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I wish all my camping life