Camp Friends Forever.

Morning, everyone.
Chances are, you're enjoying first block right about now. Chances are you'd pay good money to sit where I'm sitting right about now. Chances are, I find this amusing. ;)
I got word that one of my friends from camp will be able to visit the night I go back to camp. I'm more than excited about this. Returning to Summer in the City is a huge deal to me. Last year's camp was one of the best experiences of my life. I interviewed a Harvard fellow and an internet entrepreneur and fell in love with photography. Most importantly, I met some of my best friends.
There's something about camp friends that can't touch the friends we keep at home. Camp friends never have to see you when you're breaking up with someone, balancing extra curriculars and studying for 6 tests all at once. They don't see the stressed out, strung out, school version of you. Maybe that's why it's easy to love your camp friends. They come from different places (Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina) and they know the happy, carefree summer version of you. If you go to a camp like mine, they're guaranteed to see you a little (ok, in my case more than a little) stressed out. But the thing about camp friends is that even after a year of living 500 miles away, they're happy to see you and remember every second of the year before.
My camp friends (mainly the infamous 500's featured in my profile picture on facebook) are wonderful. They're kind, supportive, forgiving, talented girls with a passion for photography and journalism. We've got tons in common despite the fact that some of us come from high schools with under 1,000 where everyone knows everyone and others come from 3,000 people schools where no one knows everyone. Some of us are band kids from Texas, others photographers from Ohio. Some are avid Pittsburgh Penguins fans, others have never really watched hockey. We come from different families, different cliques, different lifestyles, but for one week we are all the same.
After one week, we've got more in common than many people I'm friends with back home. We have memories of long lectures, impossible work days and scary cafeteria food. We've got pictures from the fountain we ran through late at night, and pictures from the couch in the dorm. We have inside jokes about stinky and the BG's. We'll never open a can of tab energy and not smile, thinking of the 500's. There were Peking acrobats, and we ate chinese in a cup. We remember every crazy elevator ride up to the dorms, every late night conversation, and each encouraging word in the bathroom.



Thanks to facebook most of us have kept in touch, and I look forward to seeing Laurin and Emma as RA's this year, and Haley in the photojournalism program with me as well as any other returning campers. I look forward to meeting "the other Hannah" at dinner the first night, and hopefully seeing Tyler sometime during the week for a chinese buffet night. I also really look forward to meeting all the new kids.

So here's to camp friends. I miss and love all of you and can't wait for this June.
With love,
"Hannah Montana"
(no, I'm not a fan of the show, it's just a camp nickname)