About our Spanish party

Our spanish party, or: Hail to the Octopus!

  
My name is Daniel, I am from Germany and I am 26 years old. I like pizza, pasta, cheeseburgers, steaks, german bread with meat and cheese and I also like beer. When it has to be even faster there is milk with cereals. I like indian, chinese, italian and fast food restaurants, but also german restaurants with huge and hearty meals like deers with potatoes and a good, fatty sauce. Oh, and I really love the chicken soup of my grandma.

Yes.

During the last years while my wanderlust began to be uncontrollable I thought about the possibilities what kind of diets my future will offer to myself. I thougth about myself, staying in a crowded street in any far eastern country, facing my first stick of steamed locusts, staring to the neighbour stand with the idea, if it's not better to start with grilled spiders because of their crusty legs.

But now I live with spanish women and no one told me before, that the spanish diet is so strange. Dada told me that they are ordering pieces of seafood in normal bars like we order a bag of chips to just have something to nibble while we are chatting with friends...
... and at the same time I have to hear that they have the best diet of the world and somehow I believed that.

In this moment I didn't know that my "youngest dish" came closer (okay, this is really a funny thing when you know english and german because "youngest dish" means literally "Jüngstes Gericht" which is correctly the "Last Jugdement" in english. You see, the author has a lot of intelligent humor), because Dada wanted to celebrate a spanish party in Vila Raluca, with everything which belongs to it. We helped her, of course, and she brought the spanish food by her own from Spain. In the end we had tortilla (oh yeah, I love tortilla), "chorizo" and "salchichón" (for me a kind of salami), "jamón", paprika, olives...

... and here it comes: really weird fish-parts, octopus and other small bullet-like things with a lot of tentacles!

I thought I will be brave and a good model for the kids by eating everything totally natural like "Where is the problem?!", but when it came to it at the party and I had to face the situation on my plate (tentacles!) it was me who needed a good model! And I found it in the small children which ate the matter-framed guts (plus tentacles!) like pizza. 

What can I write? I ate it and, like you guess (or not), it was good! Of course I'm not used to the feeling of chewing this kind of food, and please don't think to much of digestive cycles of sea creatures, but... I ate more of them. Of all of them. And when I'm not brave enough again I will just drink more sidra, which we also had on the party: A kind of wine made of apples traditional from Asturias. You have to drink it with special rules of filling in and drinking with special glasses and movements and other actions, like you can see in the first picture (flag of Asturias + sidra with special glasses):

Of course the food was not the only part of our spanish party! In the beginning Yoana and Dada performed two dances of Asturias, their home county. I really liked these dances, because they reminded me on northern countries (and not on sexy south american latino dances) and the music also includes bagpipes! Well, who expect this!?

After the food we all danced in the house to music (without bagpipes) till we were all sweaty and tired...

   
One day I will be in Spain and I will eat all of this and more again - fresh! And some day I will also say "hello!" to the crispy spider legs.

- Daniel

Summer Urban Camp: Pirates of the Black Sea, second week II

 *Day 9: The sea
On the last day of the camp we arrived to the treasure island, but for this, we should sail through the sea before.
The outside-game for this day was a traditional camp game: capture the flag. In this game the kids are in 2 teams, and each team has an own flag. The aim of the game is to capture the other team's flag located at the team's base and bring it safely back to the own base. The players can tag the others in their home territory, and in this case the players are sent to "jail".

After this game we did one of the last crafts of the camp: a crocodile! This activity was a recycle activity, the crocodiles were made of egg boxes!!!

The water appeared after the craft! For the water games this time we chose the game: bomb! All the players are stand up in a circle . One is in the middle counting from 1 to 50 meanwhile the other players are passing the ball to each other. When the kid in the middle arrives to the number 25 he-she will scream "the bomb is going to explode" and on number 50 "the bomb explode". The person who has the ball in this moment has to sit down with open legs, so the neighbour will jump to pass the ball to the other player. To transform this game in a water game we changed the ball for big balloons full of water!!!

The next game that we played was an strategic game inspired by the boardgame: Risk.
The kids were divided in 2 teams, between the teams there was a big map of the pirate world. This world had 8 different lands that the teams should conquer. To conquer a land the kids should throw a waterballoon on the wished land and fight for it on the water-battlefield.

*Day 10: The Treasure island

The Treasure island was our last stop of our trip around the Black sea. We started our last day as every day: with outdoor games.

The first one was a paperball fight! The kids were in 2 teams, each team in a square. Each square had 25 paperballs on the floor. The aim of the game was to have an empty square by throwing the paperballs to the other square.

After the games we did our last craft of the camp: a color sand bottle. For this craft we needed salt, food coloring (we used blue, yellow, green and red) freezer bags and small plastic bottles.
We put a small quantity of salt and some drops of the food coloring into the freezer bag. The kids mixed it by shaking the bag and later they put the color salt into the bottle.
Wehave to be careful during this process because the salt can not be mixed inside the bottle. Here you can see some results:

Finally we played our last pirate games:

We played an obstacles race around the playground. The kids were in 2 teams: the stars and the hearts. One kid of each team  should carry a waterballoon through different obstacles. The team with more balloons at the end of the race was the champion!

The obstacles were to jump in the squares, jump from one side of a line to the other, sing a song, receive a water glass from Yoana, pass a spider web...

It was not simple to pass the obstacles with the big water balloon!!!

We also played a competition of rock-paper-scissors and we had some "penalizations" for the losers (everyone wanted to loose):

To finish the camp we prepared a little party with some food and drinks and music. We also gave to each kid their Pirate Diploma, because after all, they became true Pirates!!!

                                               
Al :)