YOG - Youth of Gayatri

Well, I'm going to follow Dip's example and write my own testimonial for this camp......also I'm finally back at work and don't really feel like working right now.  

If any of you guys that's been to any of these GP camps before and you take the time to really think about what happened last week you might realize how monumental of a camp this actually was. 

I mean for starters it was the first camp to have a significant number of international participants.  I mean, dude, a busload of Canadians drove all the way down here to hang out for a week.  That's kind of a big deal. Props to Canada for the commitment.  By the way I'm convinced there's gotta be some Hindus living in Mexico.  Hopefully next year we can attract some of them too.  I bet the food they cook is amazing.

Anyway, this camp was also pretty cool because it was the first one that was live cast on the web...... well parts of it anyway.  But for all its shortcomings, the system was still pretty awesome to me.  I mean, think about this, we were able to take little more than a cell phone and use it to transmit live video of ourselves to anyone anywhere in the world in an instant.  It's a wonder the things that we can do with technology these days.  I can't wait to see what we can get setup for next year.   

Also, we invented an awesome new dance during the Garba night: the ice cream circle (walk in rhythm in a circle while eating ice cream).  That was pretty sweet.  Come to think of it..... there was a lot of ice cream at this camp.  We had it almost every day for like no reason at all sometimes. 

So what else?  What else?  Oh yeah yeah the picnic!  The games we played were so fun despite the looming threat of heat stroke, snakes, and hawks (apparently some folks spotted a snake and later we spotted a hawk).  The watermelon eating competition was by far one of the best ones we've had yet.  We started doing those watermelon eating competitions back at the North Carolina camp in 2008.  This year, though, was unlike anything I had ever seen.  There was some really fierce competition.  The group 1 and group 2 kids really brought their A-game.  I also remember playing Ultimate Frisbee which was really fun.  I've never seen a team work together so well as what the Canadian guys were doing.  You guys really put us to shame in that game, but we made up for it in the Tug-of-war.....although some may argue that it was mostly due to the fact that we had like a million little kids on our side tugging at the rope.

Sujal was totally right in his email before when he said that the location isn't the most important thing about the camp.  In truth the most important aspect of the camps is the people.  When you have great, fun people attending the camp you're just about guaranteed to have great fun.  What we got in Baltimore was just a small sampling of the awesome folks Canada has to offer as well as the east coast, the west coast, and the cool middle area of the US(Chicago),   Hopefully next year we can meet a whole lot more people from all over.

Jai Gurudev,