March

Ok.
We have to catch up. We didn't put any post for so long. Many things happened.
We've received a nice heater which helpped me to survive wet and cold winter.
Note for future volunteers: the winter here sucks! There is no central heating, houses are poorly isolated and all heat you produce runs away very fast. You'd better stay outside at the sun as much as you can. Thanks to this gift from our Portugueese teacher, I am able to write this at the moment.
Let's go back to March...
There was a Carnaval. We went with the kids to nerby town – Moncarapacho. Everybody said : “It is not so special ...they just have a little carnaval there...”
In Poland I don't celebrate carnaval in any way. Something different is always interesting for me. So I went to check and accompany kids.
What a big surpirise! The city centre was all closed for the traffic, on the streets gathered crowd of people in all ages. At the beginning we heard drums, then we saw youngsters marching and playing instruments. After a while came huge platform with dancing and smiling people on top. I took several pictures of the first five cars, later I gave up and stopped counting. There were too many. Come on, you said it was suppose to be a random, boring carnaval parade! Just take a look at the pictures.
During the event we also ate some portugueese doces – which are muito bom!
As I can recall it was a first day when I could wear T-shirt again. The spring has just started.

In addition MOJU organized its own Carnaval – MóCarnaval . In a rented Recreativo (the residence of the first NGO in Olhão ) played a popular local band . Theme for MOJU people was 'crazy 80.' Can you find our Neşe in this crowd?

 

foto by Carlos Filipe de Sousa

Unfortunatelly Nikola and Linda couldn't party too much because they were at the same time organising leader's meeting for incoming youth exchange.
Here they are busy at the office:

Also in March Linda presented her country – Austria or Österreich. Of course, main attraction was food. Many of the dishes she prepared for the first time in her life. Result was absolutely perfect! Just Portuguese people were afraid of poppyseed cake – at first they thought that it is a caviar cake. Here is the full menu:


Mohnstrudel
Sachertorte
Apfelstrudel
Linsen mit Speck und Semmelknödel and its vegetarian-no-pork version for Nese
Erdäpfelvogerlsalat mit Kernöl
Schnitzel

Stay tuned! 

In May we will put something from April ;-)

workshops workshops workshops

You never stop learning in life...
Under this motto we are participating in some workshops
and some of them are a lot of fun ;)

relaxing massage workshop

Even if it does not look like a dancing workshop in the first place, but still we needed to get the good food away from our hips again. First the joy than the work :)

Also who can say no to this delicious kitchen work??? 

active holidays

The weather, during the christmas holidays, was sunny and quite warm :D. So we decided to do some outdooractivities with the kids.

Two girls form Panteras, one of the two neighbourhoods where MOJU and we are working in, planned a litlle running competition through their neighbourhood.
In partnership with the ecoteca team and the team from museu Joao Luzio we had some interesting and creative workshops about the use of natural ressources. The youngsters learned about the natural colours (in fact we took for example coffee puder, flowers, curry puder, etc and draw some nice pictures). We also had workshops of how to make bathing salt and natural soap for cleaning dishes and clothes, without the use of any chemical ingridients.
After the workshops we enjoyed the warm weather and the sun on the little playground.

Christmas

This year we celebrated Christmas on the Portuguese way. Sea food, 15 degrees outside, a lot of sun, snowmen build out of carton and paper, no "Lebkuchen", cake contests, a Christmas theatre play. The Christmas party with the kids and their families started with a Christmas lunch and a dancing show. We met the parents of the kids with whom we are spending a lot of time. For the last weeks in December the children were working hard on their gorgeous theatre performance. We brought a little bit of our tradition by making our cookies and cakes for the best cake contest. Unfortunately we are not the best pastry makers so we didn't get the first price.

In the evening we were invited from our friend Marco to spend a traditional Portuguese Christmas with him and his lovely family. A sad message to the world... We ate all the seafood from the Atlantic ocean J Of course the holy bacalhão was the main dish and surrounded by shrimps, oysters and different kind of shells. We were really impressed by the hospitality and kindness of the Do Vale family. Afterwards we also visited other friends homes and partied until the morning.

We are thankful for having such good friends here whom created us a memory which we will remember forever.