Sometimes it is easy to forget just how different life is when you live on a ship. Things that we accept as quite normal are probably not normal for all of you living onshore.
This past weekend, a group of Danish teenagers came onboard for a "Teen Street" Reunion.
Teen Street is a huge week long congress put on by OM for teens every summer with over 5000 participants from across Europe and beyond. So this was an opportunity for 50 Danish teens to come and spend 2 days on Logos Hope, experiencing life onboard and having a great reunion.
On Saturday they took part in a wide range of games and activities that included - a race using a fire house to push life rings along the quayside, another race that involved dressing up in an emersion suit, throwing heaving lines at a target and dressing up in a fire suit.
These are not the kind of activities your average teen gets to do in their church youth group.
On Saturday night they had a huge praise party which at Teen Street is called The Throne Room, which many of the ships company joined in. This was a great chance for one of our bands to really have fun and also put our new sound and light system through its paces.
Later on they had hot chocolate up on deck 9, then sat up watching movies.
They then had the joy of sleeping in some of the great new dormatory cabins that have been built especially for teams of young people coming to the ship.
For this group of Danish teenagers, living on a ship for a weekend was a fantastic experience and most did not want to leave at the end.
In other news - the new sewage treatment plant came into service this week - sorry no pictures but it is another step towards finishing the ship. The official opening of the staff and school library's took place last week. As a ministry known for our books and our training, it is important to have good resources onboard.
The opening of the school library included a special reading time for the children where one of the teachers read out stories the kids had written. Here Kara's teacher is reading out her story.
The plans for Christmas opening are well under way. We plan to be open the last weekend in November and the first 2 weekends in December. One highlight will be a live nativity and we have been given permission by the captain to have live animals so we are currently looking for sheep, goats and a donkey to be part of it! We are not sure yet what we will do with them all overnight!
On Monday night there was a special evening where many of the ships company who have been learning different creative ministry skills such as drama, mime, story telling, clowning etc, got to demonstrate what they have learnt to the ships community. Heather has been teaching mime to a group and it was encouraging to see 2 of her pupils perform.
Last week, Heather and I decided to begin having Spanish lessons. Not sure how much we will actually learn in the coming weeks but as the kids are already well ahead of us with their Spanish, we thought we should give it a try.
And finally, Heather was shocked today to receive an email from Amazon confirming the order for a Peter Pan DVD. The only problem was that neither Heather nor I had ordered it.
Somehow, Kara had managed to get onto the Amazon website, find the DVD, put it in a shopping basket and then order it. We think we have a future computer geek on our hands.
However, we had to cancel the order because it wasn't done through this blogsite so we wouldn't get any commission! Don't forget to come here first before YOU order anything from Amazon.
