You’re up!, the international jamboree for Scouts and Guides aged 14 to 17 organised by the Scouts et Guides de France opened on 16 July 2015 in an ephemeral town built just a short distance from the Zenith music venue in Strasbourg. Hundreds of people have been working for more than two weeks to set up villages, technical areas and stages. At midday, the gates opened and the first Scouts and Guides joined the villages.

Welcoming thousands of people to a town that did not exist at the beginning of July is a real logistical challenge. Volunteers are working all over the site, whether in yellow (service team members), pink (security team members) or green (leaders) to try and guide the tide of red shirts (the uniform for the French Pionniers and Caravelles) arriving in waves at the You’re up! site.

Resting under a tree, some Spanish scouts from Albacete tell us that they made the trip overnight by plane and are a little tired. A few seconds later, they rush to a rugby field and begin a huge game of thèque (a type of baseball). The international dimension of You’re up! can be seen at a glance: we find Hungarian Scouts speaking not-so-fluent English with Pionniers and Caravelles from Cahors (France). A little bit further on we spot Mathilde, who has just arrived from Épinal by coach and is already debating the Resolution for the Europe of Tomorrow to be voted on by the participants at the European Parliament assembly on 17 July 2015.

Welcomed by one of the twenty-five village teams, the units set up their tents under a blazing sun. The special high-speed trains arrived around 4pm, a few hours before the official opening of You’re up! during the first evening gathering.