Culture Camp

Surprise! I'm not in Nicaragua yet. I'm in a hotel near the Toronto airport waiting to get into the airport at 3:30 in the morning.

I'm with 17 other youth who are travelling to Nicaragua with Canada World Youth. 9 of them will be going to Somoto, a place with 40,000 people, and the rest of us will be going to Estelí, a much larger town (population 120,000). It seems like a really fun, dynamic group from all over Canada. We'll be working with Funarte (click on link for a 5-minute youtube video of the amazing organization).

So for these past few days I've been at Edgewood camp in Eden Mills immersing myself in an intercultural/orientation camp. I've also been learning some Spanish so soon I will be writing some Spanish on here!

We stayed up on Friday night (it was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day so the people of Quebec were itching for a beer) and had a sort of sober nightclub going on. In the outdoor chapel we danced with an iPod and computer speakers as the DJ, we used flashlights for strobe lights and all people could blame their behaviour on were the marshmallows they'd eaten a few minutes before.

Although the median age of the group is 21, as we got on the bus to come from the camp to the hotel, people were eating candy (Mentos and Lick-n-Dips), drinking from juice boxes and making signs for passing trucks to honk their horns. It's weird how I forgot all about those things until I experienced them again. Once you leave childhood behind it takes other people to remember it for you.