Spring

Still no camera. I have nothing to spice up my post so I guess you'll have to settle for a thousand words.

I've made a decision to stay here for one more semester, a full year in total. Ever since I arrived, I was considering the possibility of staying longer than my original committment of six months, and I'm excited to now be working out the final details with my organization and school.

Summer is promising to be quite nice. Earlier in the season, roaring winds ripped through the city for hours at a time, picking up all the dry dust and turning the air brown. When you blew your nose, your snot was brown and you had to clean your ears carefully after every shower! However, the winds are dying down and the weather has been mostly clear and mild, not too hot or cold. Most exciting of all, the leaves are just this week appearing on trees all over the city! It's like Alaska! Spring is such a long, dead, ugly season, a slow process of growth and then finally, the life bursts out everywhere!

The central heating system is finally turning off all over the city. It was getting quite hot indoors as the outdoors weather warmed up and centralized heating stayed constant! However, the day we were all looking forward to (supposedly on the 15th of May, but I found out that's actually an approximate), arrived. On Sunday I layed my pillowcases over the radiator to dry them and found them still damp when I came back a couple of hours later! It's hard to remember just a few short months ago when the radiators weren't producing enough heat-

After this week, I've got one more week of regular lessons. Next week, my students will be making their third, and final presentation, so my responsibility will mostly be preparing a final and grading. The semester's almost finished! I hope my students have learned half of what I have. I'm very excited to have the chance to put my experience to use next Fall! I've loved the creative aspect of preparing my lessons "from scratch" and I'm getting more comfortable with the rythym of teaching. I'm learning to relax and take my time during lessons, and as a result, I feel like I'm missing less opportunities for the students to participate and fully comprehend the lessons.

Blessedly, I seem to have also risen out of a little "culture shock" slump of a month or so, and I'm really been enjoying life here again for the past couple of weeks. Today for instance, my classroom was being used (without warning or previous arrangements). And as it was one of the busiest periods of the day, we had trouble finding another, empty room. However, my students were helpful as always and they took me to the scheduling office, where the scheduler found us a room in a far wing of the school. The room was excellent and we had a good lesson. I remembered previous occasions when I've been frustrated by similar instances, and I was surprised at how little this even caused me to pause!

Thanks for following along. I'll keep you posted about a class trip to the countryside this next weekend. I've been invited to join a group of first-year students and their teacher for a weekend jaunt that I've really been looking forward to. It's time to get out of the city!