North Domingo Baca

       Welcome to another edition of my city of Albuquerque tour. Today we will be reviewing North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center. The center is located on the crossroads of Wyoming and Paseo Del Norte. Although it has a long title it has a relatively simple explanation for the place. It is a recreation center for both the young and old making a multigenerational facility. It is run by the city of Albuquerque which means that it is funded for by the taxpayers. Today I’ll be sharing with you a small taste of what my trip was like at North Domingo Baca, and what the center has to offer and whether or not you should make this a place to stop by and visit the facility.

            One thing you always expect when going to a place of service is a staff that is both friendly and is quick to attend to your needs. When I visited North Domingo Baca I discovered the center definitely has both of those. James Mader runs the center and he has made sure to hire a friendly and attentive staff. When you walk in you are immediately greeted by one of the clerks at the front desk. There are three different front desk clerks. Other staff includes an office assistant, two programming assistants, two general maintenance workers, and nine different student staff employees. The student staff is in charge of the youth program at the center. From speaking with all of these employees I was able to gain a whole lot of information about the center and what goes on from a day to day basis there.

Another thing that you would expect from any good recreation center is plenty of options to do when you come in. North Domingo Baca offers a variety of things to do for any age when you arrive. First off there is a fitness center upstairs which offers a variety of weights and cardio machines for anyone over the age of 18. However there are more than just machines, North Domingo Baca offers a variety of exercise classes as well. Classes like this include: yoga, zumba, salsa aerobics, full body blast, tae kwon do, line dancing, and aikido. Aikido and zumba also offer a class designed specifically for kids. If you’re looking for something besides exercise North Domingo Baca also offers a wide range of other classes as well. Spanish, Philosophy, knitting, bridge, homeschool, computer technology are just a few but there are many more. Looking for something to eat? North Domingo Baca offers both lunch and breakfast programs. For the breakfast program they offer oatmeal, cold cereal, and bagels and cream cheese. All for an affordable cost that is most of the time less than a dollar. The lunch program offers a wide variety of options for food for a small price as well; the only catch is you must make a reservation for lunch 24 hours before you attend. All of these activities you can participate in on a regular basis when you become a member of the center. A membership costs just 13$ for an entire year.

Something I viewed as impressive in my visit is that the facility is expanding. Although it was only built a little over a year ago the facility that’s currently in place is just their first of their three phases of the builiding. One of the more noticeable parts when I first walked into the facility is the construction going on all around, that’s because North Domingo Baca is now in its second phase of building. When all said and done the facility will include room for more classes, a game room for kids, a pottery room (including a kiln), full basketball courts, and a walking track. When all done the facility will be an impressive size, a size that will draw plenty of visitors just out of curiosity about the place.

Another common expectation of recreation centers is that you want them to be clean and in good shape when you walk through the door to do whatever it is that you came to do. This however is one area that I noticed could use a little improving. It might’ve just been the day but when I walked around the facility trash cans were overfilling with trash and looked like they hadn’t been taken out in a few days. The fitness center had a few areas that had broken down machines that really needed some work done to them. Lastly was the construction in general. The noise and the dust being admitted from the construction area were just causing a lot of issues for the place. The dust from the construction was covering several areas and even after it was cleaned off the dust was back a short time later. The noise just made it difficult for the classes going on in the middle of the day to hear their instructor. Large heavy machinery could be heard throughout the building and in several of the classes going on and even in the administration area. North Domingo Baca may want to hire some additional cleaning staff till at least the end of the construction to make the place just a tad bit more representable to their members.

Overall from my experience at North Domingo Baca I thought it was an impressive facility. One that met and exceeded most of my expectations of what a recreation center should be like. The facility had friendly staff plenty of activities to do for people of all ages and overall had for the most part a clean facility. The one area of improvement again I would have to say is the mess that the construction to the facility is causing. It causes the facility to look out of sorts and in some cases just dirty. If that can be fixed up or if the construction can be finished shortly the facility will be a major part of the community around it.

Reflection

            I thought this assignment was a pretty interesting choice for a paper. From other English classes writing a review didn’t usually involve me actually visiting anywhere. I thought using a blog was a great way to use some of the newer forms of technology available and teach us in a roundabout way on how to use these. I thought there were multiple course outcomes that could be found in this assignment. First and probably the biggest is that we used research and writing as a means of discovery. This assignment we were to discover someplace new and do some research on the topic. Secondly we analyzed a rhetorical situation in that we analyzed an already existing location. Thirdly we composed an argument in that we said whether or not in our travel blog we thought this would be an ideal location to visit. Another I thought that was used was that in the paper we integrated others positions to help create the paper when we had our peer workshops. The final course outcome I thought that we used in this paper is that we used our skills from other things we’ve learned about in this course. Composing an argument came from the first paper, we learned about reviews recently and how to analyze things like we did in the movie. All of these outcomes were used in this assignment and probably a couple more I can’t even think of at the moment. All however made this an enjoyable assignment and made it easy to write about.