When you think of a holiday it will usually be lying on a beach somewhere on Bali, climbing the Alps, partying every night and late night summer car rides, or even camping in the middle of nowhere with your loved ones. Everyone has a certain image painted of the perfect summer, but what I noticed is that we’re usually so caught up in picturing a place we want to be or thing we want to be doing, imagining all these different scenarios we hardly even look around and breathe in the summer breeze or just lay in the grass and glare at the stars anymore. That’s why these two months go by so fast.
To me, summer means going home. I hardly know what to call home, but when it comes to my grandparents’ house where I always spend most of my summer, it feels like it. Just a village with a big orange house where arms are always open to anyone. Where you can just grab a bike and go for an evening ride and then watch the stars fall in the big garden along with apples falling on your head all night long. Where you wake up at noon and go swimming in a nearby pool or lake away from the everyday responsibilities. Or my other grandparents in a hut by the woods in the middle of nowhere. You get lost just listening to the quiet. And spending those two months here always makes me realise that yes, they aren’t going to be here forever but I can’t imagine spending my summer elsewhere. Especially living abroad all our lives, for me and my sister those are places that will always be home.
Another big part of these holidays for me however are summer camps. Just a place where you meet your type of people, where you all have the same interests and everyone fits in. And I think this is a big part in shaping who you are becoming, especially at this age growing up, because it’s when you meet people you will never forget, influencing you and showing you something different for a change. Afterall, you can tell straight away the way these kids think is so much different from your classmates for example who you don’t always choose to be around. And I now I think about it I really can’t imagine a summer without camps. For 3 years now I have been going to the same two camps every summer, yet they never get boring. The first one is a musical camp and since I play the violin one would think of some big, formal orchestra and long dresses but it’s the very opposite. You get to meet kids from such different backgrounds, each different stories, different music taste who make their own band. After a week of rehearsing songs you either compose on the spot if the mood is right, or recreate ranging from pop, rock, rap, to death metal, you get to perform on a concert for the nearby village. And again, the concerts usually start off with a band singing rocket man, and then somehow end up at one in the morning with people jumping around and going into hospice to slipknot. It’s the place where you make lifelong memories, meet your first loves, and the things you take away the way these people will always understand you is so amazing.
The other camp I have as a ritual to go to with my friend I met in Sarajevo, (but she’s also Czech), is a canoe sort of camp where a bunch of kids that know each other and are all friends with the instructors as well go to a river in Poland and camp on the riverside. Every day you wake up, open the tent when people are shouting at you that you overslept and are the last ones -again in my case. Usually, my friend and I are the only two girls along with 15 other boys, meaning we are treated as princesses, but when it comes to the competitions of flipping around each other’s boats, we hold the record of always ending up in the water the most times. When you come back to camp, you firstly dry all your clothes, but then roast and make dinner over the fire, or even go further down the river by boats to the closest and only shop around where you buy snacks and walk back, or if you’re lucky, one of the instructors picks you up in the big van and you all go in the back. But then of course nothing beats the evening bonfires. Those deep talks by the fire until three in the morning, then waking up from your tent and just enjoying the view is what you will essentially carry with you.
But the quote that really opened my eyes to just living in these moments this summer was when someone said, “If you were to watch your very last film before you die, and it was one of your life’s highlights, would you be enjoying it? Would you feel like you really lived?”
