Russian Summer Camp

The English language camp I taught at this summer was held in what seemed, from an outsider's perspective, to be an utterly bizarre venue for any kind of retreat/resort/children's camp. I believe it was a private country estate, at one time, but had been purchased and decked out with some brand-new swanky hotel buildings.

 
The odd thing was, instead of removing the old farmhouse and its cluster of outbuildings, all of these were left in various states of cardboard-windowed graffiti-walled decay, with the new buildings simply plopped down here and there among them.

Additionally, the footpaths were left to lie as they fell, meaning roads to nowhere (that nevertheless must be used, as the only connections between said brand-new fancy buildings).

The sidewalk "connecting" the dorm building with  the classrooms

The large recently-built gym was reached not through the manicured front landscaping (you can see the flowers around to the left) but via an easy-to-miss trail that led around the back.

The front

The trail around to the door

The view from the back/front door

The doors to the classrooms sometimes locked from the inside trapping a whole class of kids, or the doors to their bathrooms would lock, trapping a kid in the loo for a couple of hours, until someone eventually came to break out the unlucky child or class of wild monkeys. After seeing how well the lock worked on my own hotel-style room I was hardly surprised.

The creative signage left a lot to the imagination...

But best of all, when walking around the sparse woods dotted with buildings new and old and connected by a maze of half-paths, there was the occasional broken window and DayGlo reminder of just where you were: