Stockholm- A Culture Capital

Stockholm- A Culture Capital
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

Sunday, April 4, 2010

At Home in My Castle

Well I have left London, narrowly avoided being stranded by the train strikes in France, spent a night in Paris eating Moroccan food and Nutella covered waffles, mastered the Paris Metro, and after a long day on the train made it to Cosne d’Allier!

Cosne d’Allier is the small town where the camp I am working at is situated. It is in the center of France near Lyon. The weather has been a little up and down with rain but it is overall quite lovely here and the town is as quaint as anything you could find. There is a great little bakery and all of the amenities included a few stores, hairdresser (that doesn’t look like a barber) and some restaurants and bars. Our first few days at the castle were spent unpacking all of the decorations and materials to run the camp and setting everything up, we then had to plan the weekly program and all of our English lessons. The crew I am working with is the cream of the crop and their company is better than gold so I am having an amazing time working 14 hours a day.

A basic day at the camp consists of Breakfast, 2 hours of English lessons, a big Congress meetings where we introduce our theme day (Wild West, Hit Music, Discover America, etc.) by doing skits, teaching songs, and a little aerobics. After that we have lunch and then have free time for the kids. During this time we supervise, play with them, run the shop and so on, then they have 2 activities that we plan for them. The activities can be sports like baseball, big group games like capture the flag or ‘who stole the gold’, or making dream catchers and tie dying shirts. Then the kids have a shower while we have a meeting to make further plans for the week and get more prep done for the evening. We then have Dinner and give the kids a little free time that allows us to set up for our Evening program, which is something like a campfire, dance party, a carnival, or so on, and the event is usually based on that day’s theme. Then we warm the kids down and send them to bed.

The camp runs Monday to Friday and then we have the weekend off for some preparation for the next week and also free time for us. This weekend we went into the neighboring city of Montlucon for some Chinese food and to check out a bit of the night-life there, we even stumbled upon an odd French folk concert. The capper to our night was being denied a pizza from a 24/hour pizza vending machine because it only accepts French bank cards.

This Easter we will have more adventures and stories to tell and I shall fill you in soon!

Happy Easter!!!