Fish Balls and Mash Mallows

Two of my cabin girls: Francesca and Angie

View from the pier

View from the upper level of the camp

Pause

So yes. Middle school camp. I am almost done with this bloggiest of blogs! Wahoo! Ok, so every school here has a week where they travel and for the Christian schools, do missions trips or experience weeks. CAIS has Discover days. So I was supposed to go with a group called "Art in Hong Kong" I was so excited for it. But through a series of miscommunication, I ended up going with Mike to CAIS' Middle School Camp. He was the main speaker and had a cabin of kids and I just had a cabin of girls and supervised. So yeah. It was...Interesting. Middle school kids are so differerent! But more on that later. It was in Sai Kung, which is just gorgeous, and I have some amazing pictures which I will proceed to post with this post. It was from Monday to Wednesday. I have come to realize that Hong Kong kids do NOT like nature. It is really sad to see kids run and scream at a BUTTERFLY! I also realized that roasting hot dogs and "mash mallows" (as RBT teahouse calls them) is quite different from home. At home, I can go into the woods, cut myself a green stick, whittle the tip, plop myself on a log and watch as my dad or brothers makes a fire. Then I proceed to poke my hot dog or mash mallow through the stick and roast it over logs from our own woods. Now THAT is the kind of bonfire and roasting that I like to do. The kind where you smell all smoky when it's over with. And not a bad smoky, a nice outdoorsey smell. Gotta love it, especially in the crisp, slightly chilled, autumn air. Oh, how I missed autumn this year. Anywhoo, back to reality. Their idea of a BBQ (not barbecue) but B-B-Q, was a bunch of short BBQs with coal on a cement basketball court with stools and metal pokers with hot dogs and mash mallows and fish balls and meat balls and chicken wings. I'm making it sound better than it was. But to the kids, it was wonderful! And that's what counts. It was so fun to show some of them how to make S'mores, and where the best spot to roast is. It was one of those times when I said to myself, "I am not at home anymore". I realized even more how different the kids are here. Girls in my cabin would shower three at a time, and ask me to come in to fix the water while they were still sudsing up. That was way different from Western girls. They were constantly talking about boys (which really isn't diff) but then they would TELL the boys, right there and then. That was funny. The last night there, I let my girls stay up a little bit later because they kept asking questions at devotion time. It was so great: We went from talking about boys, not gossiping, being careful about whispering and secrets, to the Big Bang Theory, why Jesus yelled at the Pharisees even though they followed the rules more than anyone, what it would be like if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, etc. It was so good. So camp had its ups and downs, like anything. And now I'm home and I'm going to go with "Art in Hong Kong" group to a museum. Yay!