Brownsea Island: Day 1, 2, 3 and 4

As in introduction, I am subcampstaff on Brownsea Island the birthplace for scouting, and this year we are celebrating the centenary of scouting, and I am actually very honoured of being here on the day, the very second that scouting is celebrated in its fullest ever. The subcamp staff will be roughly 50% british and 50% international. In my subcamp there are 4 british and 3 internationals, whom are Finnish, Guatamalan and Danish (me... duh). The camp will run (for me) from the 24th of july to the 8th of august, however I am leaving the camp on the 7th of august and then staying on the main jamboree camp in Essex at Hylands Park for the closing ceremony. The entire island is vegetarian while the camp goes on as we have to respect all faiths, beliefs and religions on this camp, of course they could just serve halal slaughtered horse or fish, as nobody technically opposes any of that except for true vegetations, but eggs, chese, milk and other diary products are served, so it isn't an attempt to be vegan, but just to make it easy to respect all faiths, beliefs and religions. In the wolves subcamp in which I am in there are 7 members of staff, the subcamp leaders Karen and George; and the rest of us, Panu, Bernardo, Graham, Andrew and Jens (me).

Day 1 (24th of July):

I had to get up at a starkingly mad 6 in the morning to catch my flight to England, check-in began at 8.20 and I was of course in queue at 8.00. When I finally did get it, I bought an M magazine and a small Marabou bar. Eventually after a lot of waiting, my plane was delayed 40 minutes :(

As I finally made my way into the plane I was seated next to nice quiet people. The flight was problemfree and the luggage arrived quickly. But I must say that I blinked once or twice when I was told that the price for the train-ticket to Liverpool Street St. from Stansted Airport, and I was soon to learn that trains in England are FAR from cheap. I mean the 4 pound ticket from Liverpool to Waterloo was acceptable, but the 35 pounds from Waterloo to Poole was maddening. 35 pounds? Whatever.

Anyway I made it to Poole trainstation 2 minutes (if that) before the bus that was to pick me up... Picked me up. In the bus I met the top media handler Neil Commons, and we talked all the way to Poole Harbour. At Poole Harbour I had fish & chips (in the pub Lord Nelson none the less), where it didn't looked like the fish had been battered to death, but instead just dipped into the frying machine alive, with the saggiest potato's available. Once across I discovered that all the work of the day had been done, and I was in for a nice evening with rubbish dinner (but I had already eaten, remember?). And as far as the tent goes, I was assigned to tendmate called Andrew who is a really nice guy, and very quiet as far as sleeping goes, which is REALLY good (no snoring etc.).

Day 2 (25th of July):

Breakfast was egg and hash brownies which is really good, followed by the raising of 2 very big tents. The rest was more or less just a long relaxation day where we didn't do much. Most of what happened was just meeting different people, and shortly setting up portaloos. It did rain quite heavily for some time but that was it. But what we really did was listen to some orientation and a tour of the island (of course in the period of time when it was raining), so that we wouldn't get too lost while we were showing the scouts around for the 3 upcoming camps. Dinner was lasagne risotto which tasted horribly and I ate some chocolate instead (oh Jens, you healthy thing). The rest of the day went on without anything spectacular or worthy of mentioning.

Day 3 (26th of July):

On this day the participants arrive, so there was a lot of action going on, with people preparing and some going to mainland to recieve them. For breakfast there was egg and pourage, which was great... I LOVE POURAGE; and yes I know that makes me mentally insane, but how does that make news? Anyway when they arrived one of them immediatly started crying (Ryan Michel), because he didn't know anyone and wanted to go home. So I decided to take care of him, making sure he stopped crying before trying to make him laugh (which I was very succesful at), and later found out what he needed, if he was to stay, and it just so happened that he had a friend in Bulls and would stay if he was transfered from Wolves to Bulls, and so he was. The rest of the day was just answering questions to which I didn't know the answer ("When will we get our neckers" etc.) and getting to know the participants which all happened to be from England (how boring does it get?). For dinner we actually had some nice pasta with tomato sauce and a baked potato. After dinner we all prepared for a party which turned out to be a lot of fun. There was live music from a really good band fronted by Laura Bettinson which started out with a lot of popular cover songs and then some of their own material which was truly superb. To get the crowd (the participants) going, some of us in the crowd went up in front of the scene, turned towards them, and started dancing synchronised to the music to get them to follow and do the same, and damn that was fun, and for the dancing we were all lead by the hispanics (2 from guatamala, and 2 from Mexico).

I danced all the way to the midway break (some left before, some didn't) but then I was hit by a really hard depression wave that I won't be getting into detail about right now. However I went up to the Brownsea memorial rock where I had my first kiss (with Frida), brought me sleeping mattress with me and lay down to think for about 30 minutes. When I was done I went back to the place of the concert and had a look around where nothing had changed except it looked like Adam (a really nice guy) and Jane (pretty girl) were getting something going on. But I was still very sad and went back to my tent to get some good sleep.

Day 4 (27th of July):

This morning (I am writing this on the 27th of july) I woke up at 6.00, as we have to be up at 6.15 so we can be ready to wake up the participants when the wakeup music begins playing at 6.30. We went up to the breakfast and I had egg with hash brownies. When we were done eating we had a lot of time to kill before I had to take participants out to the activities. We started out by doing Conflict Resolution but not before one of my subcamp leaders had lost a participant and I had to take her participants to their activity while she found her own, so Graham (I wasn't alone with my 10 participants, as once during the entire camp, we are two to a group of participants, and for me that was the first day) took the participants to the tent with conflict resolution. During the first half of the day, we had three 1 hour activities, and by the time I made it there, it was already halfway done, and it was to late to join in. However afterwards we went to circus skills where we learned to juggle, using one wheeled bicycles, and those who didn't know how to, learned how to play the devil game (two sticks connected by a string, spinning a timeglass shaped ball/object thing). Where I had a lot of fun trying to juggle with 3 balls together with another member of staff called Squeeze (real name, Andrew). Afterwards came the real fun though, when we were supposed to find the pottery, it had been moved and nobody had told us where. So we walked a very long way back to the main tent trying to find it, just to find out that it had been moved to the main tent (bummer). Anyway lunch was decent because for the first time I had a cheese sandwich instead of an egg/mayonaise sandwich, which meant I could take the content out (the cheese) and just eat the bread which isn't possible with the egg/mayonaise sandwich, for reasons that I am not going to explain. Later that same day we went on island adventure, however they only needed one staff to go along, so Graham would go have a shower, and for the second half of the activity which was cutting down rodondendron (most like not spelled correctly) Graham would take over and I would go have a shower. However I discovered that the showers had just been closed when I got there, so I didn't get my shower which I really wanted before I went to the big jamboree in Hylands Park near Chelmsford in Essex. The rest of the day went nice and easy, with lots of time spent writing on this blog (quite a big post, right?). But I'm here in a second sitting as I was torn away from the computer while writing and chatting as my subcamp leader (I'm just subcamp staff) needed me to herd participants down to our subcamp. So having brought them back and herded (most appropriate term) them back into the tent for a centenary scouting celebration and concert (live artists), and I'm back here. I am not interested is joining them as I'm still riding on my depression wave, feeling really sad, but maybe I will write a post about that when I get back (I will start a post and save the draft in order to remind myself) and I imagine the rest of the day will be me going back to my tent and... sleeping.