Like I’ve never been in my life, but it keeps showing up as a theme in movies and video games. What the fuck?
Summer camps is what happens if you give people only 15 vacation days, but give their kids a 6 week summer holiday.
ha! i went to an evangelical AND a zionist one. truly the best places.
i was able to laugh at them in both cases, though they weirded me out.
The staff are usually stoner college students who are pretty chill and will let you get away with bs provided you don’t like set anything on fire.
Hard ask for Boy Scouts. Really steep request.
I worked at one of those BSA camps in high school. Most of the staff were Mormon kids who would have been stoners or were really good at hiding it. Definitely chill vibes and the land was beautiful.
Oh I thought you meant the stoner part lmao.
Yeah…. I was in a military base troop once and some young enlisted guy was an ASM. He refused to answer our questions, but he poured a fuel of some sort onto a bonfire once and it leaped up a ridiculous amount. I burned down a traffic barrier… yeah teaching teenage boys to make fires real good has highly predictable consequences.
I went to a summer camp for nerds, was on a college campus and we played lots of starcraft and quake /UT on lan, made model rockets and played capture the flag.
I had pretty ideal rural New England summer camp experiences in elementary school. I learned to swim, canoe, kayak, and even sail. Our sailboat capsized once in a lake but we managed to right it. We played capture the flag, drew pictures, hiked, and sometimes slept in old wooden buildings. At the time I didn’t like it because I just wanted to be home watching TV or playing video games but in retrospect it was probably better for me to be out there. A lot of the kids also didn’t want to be there and took out their frustrations on each other. My closest friend there was the son of a relatively famous lib polysci scholar. He’s now a lawyer at some ghoulish law firm in DC. He liked to talk about how swear words were just words and people shouldn’t take them seriously.
When I was a teenager I was lib-brained enough to go to a summer camp at one of the universities in DC to take a politics class which would supposedly count as college credit (it ultimately didn’t). This was my first extended time away from home. I came from a family of downwardly mobile labor aristocrats (proto-Berners) but found myself in the company of the kids of relatively prosperous petite bourgeois families—rich, educated republicans, soon-to-be frat bros and sorority girls from across the country, not all of whom were white. One bragged about sitting next to Kathryn Harris, who was instrumental in W. stealing the 2000 election, on a flight. They were mostly lazy students and just wanted to party but I didn’t really interact with them very much, even though I had to room with one. I made friends with the nerdier kids who had brought their expensive gaming computers with them. Our teacher looked like a less handsome version of George Clooney and had co-written an incredibly boring lib polysci textbook about the modern Middle East. I got an A in the class after reading and writing a lot about Tunisia even though as a lib I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.
The weirdest thing about that camp was being in DC, being warned not to give money to homeless people (no explanation given), and then seeing homeless people everywhere, every single one of whom was Black. The isolated and artificial feeling of the city was pretty profound. I saw a presidential motorcade speeding through the city—black SUVs and police sirens, all traffic stopped, very annoying. I was also there years later at Obama’s inauguration (still a super lib) and saw W. fly away from the White House in a helicopter.
I wonder about what happened to a lot of those kids but I can barely remember any of their names. All I know is that one became a dentist.
Summer camps were big in Soviet Union. I've been to one right after the fall. Wonder how different the American ones are.
Without doxing yourself what were the Soviet summer camps like? Most summer camps I had been to as a kid in the US tended to revolve around voluntary classes you would sign up for and then have to be at every weekday for a week or two along with recreational activities in between that were optional like swimming in lakes/pools or playing sports with friends or spending real cold hard cash in the summer camp store. The classes were regimented while the fun activities were more loose and could be done whenever. Also every summer camp had an end of week dance which was great fun.
I've been to a whole bunch of camps. I generally didn't like them much, but my parents seemed to think they were a good way to keep me occupied during summer instead of spending all my time playing video games.
Like I've been to a Jewish one that was using the same classes framework you describe. They probably got that from American camps.
I've also been to an more "orthodox" Soviet one a whole bunch of times. At least I assume it functioned like Soviet ones used, because it actually continued to work through the fall and a lot of things seemed were similar to what you can see in Soviet kids movies about summer camps.
This camps was for kids of worker of a specific factory and shared facilities with a sanatorium for workers for that factory. The day was regimented around meals and there filled with various activities, sports competition and talent show. I think we had dances like every other day. The sanatorium had it's own movie theater and they showed us movies like a couple of times a week.
The food was the same we had in all Soviet canteens and I hated it with passion. We were also had a rotating duty when some of us were supposed to help with pealing potatoes or setting the meals.
I can ramble for a long time, but I can also answer if you have specific questions.
Wow, I wouldn't even be sure what to ask, that's just a really fascinating insight. When you say that often times camps were for workers of a specific factory do you mean that there were often large social institutions built around creating a common culture of belonging with your coworkers? I've never even heard of this in the United States except for like richer office workers or something. I've also never seen any Soviet kids movies about summer camps, is there any off the top of your head you could say capture the overfall vibe? Even if it's not translated into English in any way, it might be cool to know.
Also you said video games, did you grow up in the 80s? I didn't even know video games were available to Soviet kids back then, what kinds of video games did you even play?
large social institutions built around creating a common culture of belonging with your coworkers
I wouldn't be able to say much on that cause I was a kid and probably filtered out a lot of what parents told me happened at the factory. My parents and grandparents lived on a street named after the factory, all 50 apparent buildings from five to twelve stories high build specifically for the workers of the factory. All my family worked at the factory. Everyone seemed to have know everyone from work.
The factory organized a bit of cultural stuff at the factory sanatorium I described in the previous post. There were busses that takes workers to the forest were the sanatorium was when the shift ended.
I remember my mom telling me about her brief stint in the factory choir and one time she won factory skiing race. That probably happened before the fall.
There was a lot of mandatory political organizing but my family hated it. No one of them was into communism.
...camp movies..
Welcome, or No Trespassing was the big one. It's a children's comedy and I remember likings it as a kid but have absolutely zero recollection of it not.
Also you said video games, did you grow up in the 80s?
I was born in the late eighties. So most of the things I remember were after the fall. I went to the sanatorium with my grandma for the first time in 93, I think and to the camp in 94 or 95.
I got a NES clone in 94. In the city park we had a whole bunch of Soviet-made electromechanical arcade machines. Those were pretty cool, you can look them up on YouTube. There were also Soviet Nintendo game-and-watch clones called Electronica .
I’ve been to a whole bunch of camps. I generally didn’t like them much, but my parents seemed to think they were a good way to keep me occupied during summer instead of spending all my time playing video games.
What the fuck are you talking about? There were no video games in USSR.
Yes. 4H camp. It was awful for someone introverted. They make you do stuff you don't want to do, everyday. Constant weird social interactions.
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Staring at the floor in showers because it was group showers and I didn't want to stare at naked people of the same sex. Still got yelled at because I was accidentally staring into a puddle, I didn't even realize it, and it was reflecting someone who noticed way before I did.
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Someone almost smacked me across the face with a fishing weight on a line. He was in the bathroom and someone threw it over the stall. They wanted to beat up the person who did it and since I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, they thought it was me. Their friends talked them out of it.
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Weird dance/social at the end that was super awkward.
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Forcing someone who never swam before out on a canoe in the middle of a deep lake
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Talent show that forced people with stage fright onto stage to do humiliating stuff because nobody in my cabin had a talent
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Everything done as a cabin/group. Sleeping, bathing, eating. It's like being in prison or the army.
I'd like to say it made me stronger but it didn't really. If anything it set back my development a little bit.
lmao I also went to a 4H camp- I'd think it could even be the same one except that our showers weren't communal.
I actually really liked it though, except the talent show and dance, those were the fucking worst
I have an intense dislike of communal sleeping. I'm a restless sleeper, I constantly toss and turn and maybe even hum a tune, but being in a place where I'm expected not to be a noisy piece of shit makes it hard for me to sleep.
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I got sent to evangelical Bible camp twice. It was incredibly weird and culty and it was way way out in the woods in some kind of camp grounds with cabins clearly built prior to plumbing or widespread electricity. There was one sermon where I was told secret gay people are gonna make me gay. This was before 9/11 too so I can only imagine how much worse it is now. There was also a scorpion in the toilet at one point.
Day to day activities involved basic kind of camp stuff, lots of hikes on trails in the woods. Little crafts too like wrapping yarn around popsicle sticks. There was an ongoing game where some kids were assigned to be Roman soldiers, some early Christians, and some observers. The whole idea was Christians were supposed to convert the observers and Romans had to arrest the Christians, and observers had to become Christians but no one knew who was who unless you asked. So if an observer approached a Roman soldier thinking they were a Christian, they'd get arrested. It was kind of like weird rock paper scissors.
The only other notable thing that happened was my bunkmate had some kind of seizure or panic attack or something and instead of getting medical attention, we were told to form a prayer circle around him as he screamed and writhed on the ground. He then got up and ran off into the woods screaming. Then I never saw him again.
The only person I knew who went to summer camp was my eighth grade girlfriend who went to a church summer camp and then broke up with my atheist ass because she liked a boy she met there. Huge L for me.
summer camp is good. I went to a bible camp which would have been so much more wholesome without Jesus. Still fun though.
I didn't know it was a bible camp. I was just following my friend.
There was a horse with an erection and I go "look at that horses dick" which I didn't consider a curse word but they sent me home early.
I was essentially tricked into going to summer camp by my crush at the time, basically she asked if I wanted to go to Sweden with her and some friends and I said yes because, yknow, I had a crush on this girl and she knew it, but she didn't tell me it was like an outdoor camping thing and I'm 95% sure she withheld that information on purpose because she knew I would've never agreed to it if I knew.
It was alright, also organized by a church and definitely an experience. For some reason the food was really damn good.
I went for 3-4 years, to a christian bible camp no less, when I was like 10-14 age range.
Honestly, it was fuckin lit. You put a bunch of 12-14 year olds together at a camp for a week and preach gospelly shit at them while hormones rage and you got a perfect recipe for sneaking out of your cabin to go make out with some one who you'll never see again or at the very least snag an email address so you can hit em up on the old MSN messenger.
Also every day at like 2pm they opened up a shop that sold candy at insanely cheap prices. It was awesome.
i also went to a christian camp, and unfortunately did not kiss anyone.
yeah twice. once when I was 14 and once when I was 17. They were both primarily academic though, and I was already a teen, so they were not exactly like the idealized movie camps you see in US media.
also once when I was 9, but that was a day camp (you went home every night). I remember playing games on alfy.com and trading my Pokemon 2000 movie cards for a holographic mewtwo. Also played MTG for the first time with someone else's deck
I feel like the stereotypical ones (like in OP picture) are usually from the pacific north
