Once Upon a Meatball.: Pescasseroli

My first summer camp. I arrived at 8:30-9ish on Saturaday night after a long day of traveling with Gabrielle (a tutor from the Covo camp) over 7 forms of transportation. It took a car ride to the train station, 3 trains, 2 buses, and one more car to get from Covo to Pescasseroli. Utterly insane. When I finally got to the hotel, all of the other turos were there. The had picked thier groups for teaching, so Gabrielle and I were stuck with either the high school group or the group of all 10-year-old boys.Gabrielle didn't want to do the older kids, so I took them. I was really hesitant because I had heard stories about how the high school students tend to be unenthusiastic about learning English, but my group was an exception.

I could not have been happier with their performance. They bonded so quickly, which I was afraid that they wouldn't because of the age differences. My youngest was 11 and my oldest were 14. Quite a broad range, but they all looked out for each other, hung out together, and had a great time. This made my job a lot easier, especially since I had to work from 8 am - 10:20 pm every day with barely any time reserved for myself. (usually I only had enough time for a 20 minute nap). I had my group make up a camp newspaper to summerize what happened during the week. --- I'll try to attach the newspaper because it looks really cool, but I'm typing on an old computer, so it might not work.
Anyway, my group was amazing and that's pretty much the only reason why I'd have to say that summer camp was worth it. The camp was not as organized as I would have preferred it to be. Sometimes we would have something planned, but then the director would tell us that we should do something else instead. So we pretty much had to improvise on hours worth of activities on the spot. Not exactly my cup of tea. We also had planned from the beginning to have a disco on the last night, but for some reason they were unable to install the speakers in time. We were at least a 1/2 hr into the disco until maintenence arrived.

I would prefer not to be placed in another summer camp since it was so exhausting, but I am definitely glad that I got that experience, especially with my fantastic group of kids.
Next stop: Sesto Fiorentino