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Gabigabs
June 7, 2008

1982

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BOM pg. 2 describing my favorite childhood memories. I used this photo since it's the favorite one I have of myself when I was a child. I was little over 4 yo. I tried to keep the design simple since the photo is really small. Journaling is placed in an envelope glued to the other side and reads:

My childhood was full of happy memories, many of them directly connected with summer camps. Summer camps are very popular in the Czech Republic as they provide wonderful adventure (and tons of exercise) for the kids and couple of weeks of precious “just us” time for the parents. Many of them are organized by the parent's employer but there are other organizations (usually tourist groups and even some travel agencies) that add up to the variety of place one can go. The thing they all have in common is that they allow children to spend 2 or sometimes 3 weeks in the middle of the mountains, playing, goofing up… simply being children.

Most kids experience their first camp as early as the very first summer after they started school. This said my parents were too worried to let me go when I was that young so my first time was when I was close to 10 years old. I had no clue what to expect, it was the longest I was supposed to be away from home in a company of complete strangers. I was worried that all the others will have far more experience and I won't fit in. The very first day we went for an evening walk away from our camp area and hiked to a meadow where we found fire pit, built a fire, played the guitar, sand old country songs (non of them I knew at that time but most of them I still play in my car over and over to this day). I have never felt so strongly that I belonged somewhere as I did at that moment. It was just us, tones of the guitar, cracking of the fire, and stars. It was perfect in every possible way. Before the evening was over the strangers were no longer strangers and I could not wait to see what the next day will bring.

Every camp is divided into several teams, each guided by an adult leader and the teams compete with each other in various tasks. Every camp also has a theme. It might be a book, movie, historical era, etc and most of the games played have something in common with the theme. The most memorable one was the treasure hunting year (who doesn't like treasure hunting) when we had to complete several tasks to obtain pieces of a map leading to a treasure and another sets of tasks to collect explanation to a different characters used in the route description. I was always good with words (I had been writing stories for 2 years already at that time) and I managed to translate the instructions with only half of the characters collected which gave our team a huge advantage. I felt so proud and still have some of the “gold” coins we found inside the chest.

Every camp also has a flag. And the flag has to be guarded. Especially during night time when people from camps located nearby try to steal it and collect a ransom usually in a form of bucket full of blueberries (blueberry dumplings are one of the most popular dish in the Czech Republic but can you imagine picking enough for a camp of over 50 people?
Teams of two people take turns during the night ready to make lots of noise if they see something suspicious. One time I was holding a guard in early morning hours, and my teammate fell asleep. The next half hour or so was the most powerful, most memorable time of my childhood.

It was only me at that moment, listening to the soft wind whistling through the trees. There was not a soul awake in miles away. Then the sky began to lighten. Silhouettes of mountains became visible and stood strong against the sky. The trees stepped out of the darkness. Then the sun appeared at the horizon. There is a saying that life is not counted by number of breaths but by number of moments that take your breath away. This was one of those moments and I still have chills just to think about the magic of the first sunrise I witnessed deep in the mountains.


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