When I was about seven-years-old my mom sent me to a camp in Texas. My best friend came with me. And this is Texas and we are both Jewish and so we got there, and they don't feed you a lot for some reason, or maybe I just had a huge appetite as a child. But I remember going to bed eating toothpaste because I didn't get enough to eat at the mess hall, and they would have challenges every day and the winner would get like extra food. And there was one fat girl in my bunk, and she won something, I was on her team that one, I doubt she did anything to win, and so the team got chips and sauce, and I remember her coming back with sauce on her shirt. And I was like, "Oh that's cool, because I have crashed underneath that, right out of bed".
And so we didn't get enough food and when we got on to the lake, there had been an oil spill in that lake earlier that year. So there were dead fish, like if went far enough out, the water had like a nice sheen to it, and they had to put eardrops in your hear. And to make you even hungrier, they would tell you that the ear drops were flavored. They were like, "oh, who wants cookies and cream ear drops?" and as a kid you are like, "oh, I want cookies and cream", not the other flavor, not realizing it's in your ear. You are not tasting but it's just the illusion of food because we are so deprived of it.
And when you get out of the water, you had to go to horse back riding. So you are in the Texas heat, it's about 140 degrees in the shade. Get out of the water, cover it in oil. Run to your bunk, you had to run every where by the way, because apparently this was holocaust camp not so much like a summer fun sports camp. Put on jeans wet still, which is the best feeling and run and go get on a hot and sweaty animal and ride around for two hours in the Texas desert. These are the things that we did.
Looking back there was definitely some Jew hating in terms of camp, because they weren't nice to us. I got head lice and it was just the worst summer ever. We had one of those things called the blob, where you jump off like a ledge onto the blob, I saw one girl fall off and I never saw her come back up, I am not even kidding. I don't know if her parents got a refund, I doubt it, especially she was Jewish, which would have been nice. It's an old thing.
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