Welcome to Kids Kabin!

Hi everyone,

I finally got around to taking pictures of Kids Kabin...since I spend so much time there I figured you might want to see what it looks like.


Here is Kids Kabin from the outside. It was closed when I took the picture...the big blue shutter is where the doors are.





This is the art room. The red and white thing you see in the picture is a puppet theater trailer. This is the kitchen. I help run cookery sessions a couple times a week. Today I worked with Sr. Jill and we made some gluten free recipes since Sr. Jill has celiac disease/gulten allergy.

This is one of the hallways...got to love the bright yellow doors!

The computer room-not used for much right now but we are working on getting an animation type activity up and running soon.

The pottery room-Abby spends a lot of time in here and runs pottery sessions a couple times a week. Since she was an art major she actually has experience with pottery and using the wheel!

This is the woodwork room.This is the sewing room. It is kind of a mess right now since it isn't used very often. All the staff/volunteers were given rooms last week to organize and I have the sewing room so it will look a lot nicer in a week or so!This is looking out from right in front of Kids Kabin. At the bottom of the big apartment building is Common Ground.

This is the Churchwalk Shopping Centre (to the left as you walk out of Kids Kabin)-a post office, grocery store, betting shop, drug store/pharmacy, 2 convenience stores and Greggs.

Above are some pictures I took today at the Tyne Rowing Club (the building, the Tyne River and a old boat planter box on the path to the club) where I have been rowing off and on since early November. On Wednesday mornings there is a learn to row course and that is what I have been going to. In November and December there were some other people who came but lately it has been just me and the coach. It has been great for learning (I can't complain about a 2 hour lesson for £2) but I hope other people start coming again because part of the reason I started rowing here was to meet more people. The other reasons were to learn more about rowing because I started last year at CSB/SJU and wanted to do it again and just to stay active. I haven't been on the water since before Christmas but let me tell you, it was tricky changing from rowing with one oar to rowing with two oars! They start everyone off here rowing with two oars where as at CSB/SJU everyone starts rowing with one oar. Hopefully it will be nice enough next Wednesday to actually go out and row instead of just having land practice on the ergs.

There is another rowing club in Tynemouth that I went to twice but the times at this one seem to work better for me. Also, they row on the sea and really only get to row during the summer months. I hope to row there some when in the summer/spring! They have evening practices and once it is spring time hopefully the water will be calmer and it will be light late enough as well! Tynemouth is a cool little city and it would be awesome to row on the sea.

It was Abby's Birthday on Monday so we had a little celebration at Kids Kabin and then had a nice dinner at home. I forgot to put toothpicks in the cake before putting tin foil over it so the letters got messed up a little bit :( Abby decided she wanted steak and potatoes for dinner so Melissa and I made steak, cheddar bacon mashed potatoes, grilled peppers and onions, spinach and a mushroom sauce. It was so good!! Of course, you can't have a cooking adventure with out the fire alarm going off. When we were cooking the steak/searing it on the stove the fire alarm went off but according to the websites Melissa and I read to learn about cooking steak it was pretty much gaurenteed it would happen. After some fanning and cross ventilation (opening the back door and front window), we were good to go and didn't have anymore fire alarm problems. Melissa's birthday isn't until May so they are nice and spread out over our 11 months here.

"When will my reflection show who I am inside"

Hi everyone,

I've been meaning to take pictures of Kids Kabin for awhile now and I keep forgetting to bring my camera with me! It is my goal for this coming week to remember my camera and take pictures since I realized I haven't done that. Here is one picture of Melissa, Abby and I outside Kids Kabin that was taken in November.

Kids Kabin is such a great resource! There are lots of rooms with endless possibilities and I love the little projects we do! Here is an example I made for a project this past week. I found the idea in one of the many craft idea books in the art room. I think it is pretty cute!

Woodwork is the activity where the most practical items are made. For example, lot of tables, chairs and bird boxes are made each week by the kids. When it snowed a lot before Christmas, sledges (aka sleds) were being made everyday. I thought that was pretty cool! They all just came and asked to make sledges! Last week I finished the spice rack I had been working on for a while and although it isn't perfect, I like it and can't wait to hang it on the wall and use it! I have found that woodwork is a lot more fun than I thought it would be and I hope to learn more about it and get better at it.

Melissa, Abby and I watched Mulan last night (we got a VCR and I found some cheap VHSs last week - about $.15 each)! We had a great time singing alone to "I'll Make a Man Out of You" and other favorites. The song "Reflection" stood out to me even though it isn't one of the songs I normally like as much as others in Mulan. In this song, one of the lines is "When will my reflection show who I am inside" and I felt like this was perfect for me right now and says how I am feeling. For a while now I have felt that I am often not the person I truly want to be even though I'm not sure exactly who that person is. It is hard to explain and probably why the line in the song hit home for me because it says what I want to say. I want others to see the person I know I am inside, or want to be (even though I'm still figuring out exactly who that is), and I know that that doesn't happen all the time. Not that I should care much about how other people see me but that I want to act truly myself and not hold back at all. So I know that it will take a lot of thinking and searching to figure out how to make some changes and make sure that "my reflections show who I am inside" but it is now a goal I have for this year.

I also think it ties in really well with an experience I had at Common Ground on Tuesday. I was helping someone apply for a crisis loan. The process for doing this consisted of waiting on hold while listening to the same 1 minute clip of Vivaldi’s Spring for about 30 minutes on repeat and the message "Thank you for your patience, we will take your call as soon as we can but all our lines are currently busy. You may want to call back later" or something like that, finally getting through only to get cut off, calling back and waiting just as long if not longer to get through and finally going through all the application questions and getting the loan. The client I was working with is smart (has a college degree in his our country) and we chatted while on hold. He was clearly very frustrated with the system and annoyed with all the hoops you have to jump through to get a crisis loan in order to buy food and hygiene supplies. The loan gives him money that is supposed to last for a week and if he needs more money next week he will have to do the same thing all over again. During our chatting he begged me to never let my family become refugees because it is awful. He wants a job and wants to be off the system as much as possible. Somethings he said where along the lines of how people look at him differently when he uses his food card at the stores or when out and about in general because he is not white and speaks with an accent. “When will my reflection show who I am inside” really fits for him as well. He is tired of having skills, knowledge and ideas yet being treated differently and not being able to provide for himself the way he knows he should be able to.

Well, that is about if for today. We are having a lazy weekend which has become a trend here and I am ok with that! January is flying by and I can't believe it is already half over!

Prague

Prague trip: December 19-23

Prague, or Praha, is the first place we visited where English is not an official language. It wasn’t really a problem because like in other tourist cities many people spoke English and most restaurants had English menus as an option. It was nice but also made me feel bad just waltzing into the country with no knowledge of their language and expecting to be accommodated. I am spoiled being an English speaker and being able to go all over without having to learn other languages. I know if we went to smaller cities, we would run into situations where the language difference was a problem but so far all the places we plan to go are big enough tourist cities that people will speak English.

(Sunday) Our trip to Prague was uneventful and we found our hostel easily. We had booked a 3 person room since it was pretty much the same price as a room with more beds a different hostel we were looking at. Turns out we were given a 4 person bedroom with a kitchen! Fabulous! We didn’t cook any meals since we wanted to try the food the Czech Republic has to offer but we did use the fridge for breakfast and sandwich ingredients. By the time we got to our hostel it was about 5 pm and we were all hungry! So we dropped our stuff in our room and went in search of dinner.

We found a nice place to eat and all ordered from the traditional Czech section on the menu. I got schnitzel style pork and potato salad, Abby had beef goulash with dumplings and Melissa had a roast duck with potatoes. They were all yummy and we left feeling satisfied. The potato salad I had was not the American style potato salad; instead it had a vinegar type dressing which I thought was better! We went to Tesco after dinner to get breakfast food and lunch food for the next day. Only during the breakfast the next day did we realize that the “milk” we bought wasn’t normal milk. I can’t remember the translation we found online but it definitely wasn’t what you would want to put on your cereal in the morning. I think that was our only language problem of the trip and the next day we made sure to buy the right kind of milk. Before heading back to the hostel we wandered over to the Charles Bridge and walked over it and back taking in the bridge and the castle lit up at night.
(Monday) On our second day, as seems to be our norm these days, we went on a Sandeman’s tour on Prague. We met in the Old Town Square and we got there early and looked around the Christmas market. So many fun things and yummy food! The tour of Prague was very informative and interesting…and cold! It is one thing to be walking around a city when it is cold and another to walk and stop for long periods of time for about 3 hours. The lunch stop in the middle was much needed and although we all brought sandwiches with us, we opted to buy something warm to eat and the soup bagel combo at Bohemia Bagel was exactly what we needed! Warm and yummy! One interesting thing we learned on this tour was about a poor man who walked into the Church of St. James and saw jewels around the neck of a statue of Mary, he decided to take them. Surprisingly the statue grabbed hold of his arm and would not let go! When he was found the next day by a monk or priest and he could not get the man’s hand free, he cut it off and hung it in the entrance of the church to warn all other thieves. It has been hanging there for 400+ years!
After the tour we walked up to Prague Castle. It isn’t a castle we would normally picture but more a collection of buildings that surround St. Vitus Cathedral. I really liked St. Vitus Cathedral! It is so pretty! The stained glass windows were amazing as well. We didn’t go all the way into the St. Vitus, just as far as you could go without a ticket. You had to buy a ticket for the Castle in order to go all the way into St. Vitus and we weren’t interested in the rest of the Castle so it would have been a pretty steep price to pay to maybe spend half an hour walking through the rest of the church. What we did see was great! We wandered around the castle grounds (which are free), watched the changing of the guard (they are much less serious looking than the guards at Buckingham Palace!) and went back to our hostel for a few minutes before dinner. We found a restaurant pretty close to our hostel. It has cool lamps hanging from the ceiling made out of old bottles. Abby and I had pizza and Melissa had gnocchi which I had never heard of before. I tried a bite and it was pretty yummy. My pizza was good and I decided I would eat all of it instead of bringing leftovers to our hostel because I don’t think pizza is nearly as good when it is reheated (Abby took some of hers to the hostel). I eat slow normally and Melissa and Abby eat fast….so needless to say it took me probably 45 minutes longer to finish my meal than they did! I was just chugging along and enjoying my meal but also couldn’t help but laugh a little bit at the situation. Since it is winter, it gets dark early!! There really isn’t a lot to do when it is dark and cold so we went back to the hostel to read or maybe play a card game. We weren’t in the hostel too long when the power went out for some reason or another…it was only out for about 1.5 hours so it wasn’t a big deal but not much reading or card playing happened. Oh well, more sleep is always good!

(Tuesday) Our tour guide on the Sandeman tour suggested that we get tickets to a performance or show while in Prague if we had some time. Our first order of business was to find a show to go to either that evening or the next day. We were really excited when we found out the Nutcracker was sold out but understandably so since it was showing that night and the next night. We ended up getting tickets for the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Christmas Concert for the following night.

Then we wandered around Wenceslas Square and its Christmas market. Next we went to the Pinkas Synagogue and the cemetery. It is a memorial to all those from the Bohemia region lost during the holocaust. One of the exhibits has drawing that children did while in Terezin, a transit camp. The cemetery next to the Synagogue is incredible. I’ve never seen so many headstones in my life! And it is several layers deep since it was a ghetto area and they didn’t have anywhere to go but up. After this we walked up Petrin hill and saw the Petrin Tower, a miniature version of the Eiffel Tower built two years after the real on was built in Paris. We got some nice views of the city on our hike up the hill. After we climbed the hill we headed out in search of Strahov Monastic Brewery. Melissa had read about it and it sounded like an interesting place to have dinner. It was a bit off the beaten track and Abby doubted we were going to right direction for most of the walk to the Brewery but we did find it! One of the previous AMAs visited Prague and said that rabbit is a traditional food so I decided to try rabbit for my meal and it was pretty tasty. Along with some dumplings and a beer, I felt like it was a very Czech meal.
(Wednesday) The next morning/early afternoon was spent at the zoo. It was a big zoo but sadly most of the animals were in their winter indoor housing. We still got to see all the animals (except we never found the giraffe) and probably closer than if they were outside but it would have been nice if they were outside. The polar bears and the elephants were pretty funny. One of the polar bears kept banging on the door to their enclosure…we think s/he was hungry and that it was probably the door used to give them food. The elephants kept bobbing their heads like they were dancing to some silent music. One of our other favorite animals was a house cat that followed us around for awhile...can you tell we all miss our pets? When we finished up at the zoo we got lunch at Wenceslas Square Christmas market and headed on a wild goose chase for the Jewish quarter. The pass we had got us entry to many different places and was valid for two days but we didn’t have much time and we got turned around, oh well. We spent the evening doing some shopping in the Christmas Markets before having dinner and going to the concert. It was a nice concert and although it was a Christmas concert they didn’t play anything Christmasy.
(Thursday) We got up early on our last day to see the sunrise from the Charles Bridge, sadly it was completely overcast and we didn’t see anything. Melissa and I then went on a crazy hunt for a post office to buy a few stamps and mail some postcards. We had a map from the hostel and the post offices were marked on the map…sounded easy enough. The post office must have moved because we looked exactly where the map said it should be but didn’t find one. We asked a new paper stand where to find a post office but and we didn’t find that one either. We ended up finding a convenience store that sold stamps. By the time we got back to the hostel it was time to pack up and head to the airport. The flight ended up being delayed about an hour and a half but that was ok since we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

A few random things:

We couldn't leave with out trying Trdlo...a yummy treat that was being made at several stands in all the Christmas markets:

"The Dancing House"

Above: People buying carp to eat for Christmas dinner.

Below: a building I thought looked like bubble wrap.

London Trip

With our extra time off from Kids Kabin we decided to take trips to Prague and London. I was the only one who had never been to London so everything was new for me! We spent December 29-January 2 in London.

We got into London a little after noon and made our way to the Sisters place in Kensington. First we got Oyster Cards that allow us to get discounts on all the transport systems in London. For example, if you were to buy a single ticket from Kings Cross Station to the High Street Kensington tube stop would cost £4 but only costs £1.80 with the Oyster card. We got settled into our nice rooms in the newly renovated building at the convent and then headed out to go to the Natural History Museum.

The building the museum is in is really pretty and ornate. Surprisingly there was a long line to get into the museum. Luckily it moved fairly quickly. We stayed in the museum until it closed at 6 pm looking at many cool exhibits including dinosaurs and a slice of a giant sequoia tree from California. We went to Tesco and bought food to make a meal back at the convent. The building we were staying in has mostly offices, guest rooms so it isn’t used often in the evening and there is an extra kitchen that we were able to use which was great! We were able to save some money by cooking dinner a couple times while we were there.

On our second day, we decided to take a walking tour of London. But our first order of business was going to TKTS to get theatre tickets! We ended up getting tickets for STOMP. Then we headed over to where the tour started.We got there a few minutes early so we wandered through Winter Wonderland which was a sort of Christmas market and amusement park combo. I had every intention of returning to look at what was being sold but ran out of time. The tour company, Sandemans, gives free walking tours in many big cities in Europe and we have been on their tours in Prague, Dublin and Edinburgh and they have been informative and fun so we decided to do the one in London as well. Since the sights are spread out more in London we did not see as many places and there was less meat to the walk in general. It was not a waste of time but definitely not as good as the other ones we have been on. After the tour we walked around and I got to see more of Parliament, Big Ben and the London Eye before heading over to the National Gallery for some art. One great thing about London is that there are lots of free museums!! It is fabulous! Abby really enjoyed all the museums since she is the art person of the three of us. I enjoyed them as well but not nearly as much as Abby since in most museums she saw several pieces she has studied in school or at least read about. After the museum we found a place to eat dinner before heading over to the theatre for STOMP. I didn’t know much about STOMP before going except that is was a group using various items to make noises. Well, I thought it was AMAZING!!! I was smiling pretty much the entire time!! So much fun! The theatre was small as well so we had great seat (I don’t think there would have been any bad seats in the theatre). It was a great way to end the first full day in London.
On New Year’s Eve, Heather, another AMA in the south of England came up and joined us for the day. We went to the British Museum in the morning and got to see lots of neat stuff there. It was cool to see the Rosetta Stone but there were lots of other pieces that I found most interesting like all the hieroglyphics! It was a very large museum and we didn’t make it through everything before our stomachs were growling. We took a lunch break and then headed over to the Tate Modern. It took a long time to get there because we wanted to walk but that was fine. There were some cool pieces in the museum but I have a lot harder time understanding and appreciating modern art than most other forms of art. The big exhibit at the moment is:
It is lots and lots of hand painted porcelain sunflower seeds. This one was hard for me to understand.
After that we rushed over to Westminster Abbey for the Evensong service. Melissa has a trick of seeing churches by going to a short service instead of paying the entrance fee. You don’t see everything you would see if you pay the entrance fee but you do get to chance to admire the architecture and the church itself.

We debated for a long time about what to do New Year’s Eve. Even at 5:30 and before people were lining up along the river to get a good view of the fireworks and we heard that by 7:30 many of the viewing areas would be full and closed off. Standing around for 4+ hours to see 7 minutes of fireworks did not sound like much fun to us. Then we would have had to wait a long time to get out and back to where we were staying since there would be so many people trying to get on the tube or just walking in the streets as well. So we looked online and found that there was a park that had great views of the city and some people suggested going there to watch the fireworks instead. We got up there only to realize that the park was HUGE and we had no idea where to find a good view of the city or what direction we even needed to be looking! Luckily we found a bunch of people all waiting on this hill and they were indeed waiting for the fireworks. Well, turns out we probably should have keep looking for a different “outstanding view” point as they were called on the map because all we saw of the fireworks was a glow behind trees. Bummer. The fireworks are shot pretty low I think for a good display right behind the monuments and for the TV viewing so not many went high in the sky. We saw a good amount of other fireworks down the river being shot off by random people but it wasn’t the display I was expecting. Oh well, at least we had easy un-crowded tube rides. To get to the place we were staying at we would go through Heythrop college because they are right next door and have a 24 hour door man and it would lead us right to a door to the convent and through that door was where we were staying. However, said door was locked and so began the adventures of trying to get into our rooms. There are lots of keys at this desk and the door man gave us several to try since he wasn’t sure which convent door was which. We were hopeful but turns out none of them worked. So he suggested we call the sisters and even though we didn’t want to wake them up at 2 am we figured it was ok since we were locked out. No one answered the phone and he tried all the phone numbers he had for various sisters. So he called a coworker and we tried calling the volunteer coordinator whose office was in the building we were staying in hoping one would have some useful information but neither answered. Kindly the doorman offered to open up a student lounge with sofas for us to sleep on until morning. Around 5:30 am he came down saying the person who came for the next shift knew the right key so they would let us in! We were super happy and sleepily left our coaches…it was chilly so we were happy to go back to our warm rooms! However, that key didn’t work either. I think part of the problem is that they renovated the building and likely changed the locks on all the doors and forgot to give new keys to the doorman. So instead of putting us back in the student lounge he opened up the guest house where we stayed the one night upon arriving in London on Sept. 2. This was nicer than the student lounge but he only let us into one room that had 2 beds and there were 4 of us and it still wasn’t that warm. We stayed there until about 8 am when we knew for sure the sisters would be up and if the door was still locked we would be able to reach them on the phone and get let in! Luckily it was open and we went to bed for another 2 hours, this time in warm and cozy rooms! I have never slept in 3 different places within half a block of each other in one night before so that was definitely a first!
Since we didn’t sleep great we took it easy in the morning and started our day later than we normally would. We wanted to see another show so Abby went to get Wicked tickets and Melissa and I went to get Lion King tickets before meeting back up to watch the New Year’s Day parade. It was fun watching the parade and we actually watched it for longer than we had originally planned. We then went back to the Tate Modern because we had run out of time to finish it the day before. After we were done we went over to the Globe Theatre which was about a 2 minute walk. We watched the Winter Wassail performance which was pretty good-my favorite part was a rendition of “The 12 Days of Christmas”, it was hilarious! Just because we hadn’t seen enough shows we split up and I went to Lion King with Melissa while Abby went to Wicked. The set and costumes for Lion King were AWESOME! The opening scene when all the animals come out was so cool!!!!!!! Sadly, the singing left a bit to be desired and when you are used to singing along to great songs in the Disney movie it was disappointing for the music part not to be up to snuff. Melissa and I had standing tickets because all the rest of the tickets were sold out they let a certain number of people stand along the back for cheap. They were not bad “seats” by any means and we especially liked the small price tag…kind of made up for the failed singing. I’m still glad we went but it wasn’t as good as I was hoping.
By our last day we were all thoroughly exhausted from walking around so much. We each had different things we wanted to see and do for our last day so we all went separate ways after breakfast. I had not seen the Tower Bridge or the Tower of London and wanted to see those. Unfortunately, the two tube lines that would take me directly from High Street Kensington to Tower Hill were having maintenance work done so getting there took several tube line switches and about half an hour of walking. Needless to say, that took a lot longer than I was expecting. I didn’t think I would be interested in going into the Tower of London since I have been in several castles already but after seeing it, I think it would be cool to go inside! After seeing the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge and walked the half hour back to the tube and took it to a market area in search of a birthday present for Abby….I didn’t end up finding what I wanted. Oh well. By that point it was time to go back and through the last few things in my bag before going to the train station and catching the train back to Newcastle.

All in all it was a good trip and I definitely have the itch to see more shows! However, I have never been to such crowded museums in my life! It was probably a combination of it being New Years and that they were all free but it was insane how busy most of them were!