School Days, Protests, and Randomness

So I left y'all a couple weeks ago having just started working at the school. A fair amount has happened since then so I thought I'd write another post.

School officially started last Monday. There was lots of fanfare and more flowers than you could count (seriously one of the teachers had to take a taxi home because of all the flowers she got from her students), lots of singing, and of course speeches. Classes really didn't happen that day but I did manage to meet some of the students I'd be teaching. Tuesday and Wednesday we had classes, but things were still pretty chaotic. there were problems with the schedule for some people (one of my friends has a German class and our Business English class scheduled at the same time) and problems getting used to the school layout for others (I was constantly asking people where this or that classroom was). I was twenty minutes late for one of my classes because I didn't know that the high school classes change time slots after lunch, but things worked out ok in the end. Wednesday was a lot of the same although it seemed like the chaos was calming down a bit. And that's that for school. Being that the school is a Jewish one we had off the last two days of that week (and we get off the last two days of this week too) because of some religious holidays. It was kinda strange only having three days of work but I was busy with other things outside of work so it worked out fine for me.

So what are those other things you might ask? Well let's see I've been busy repacking my stuff so that I can finally move into my permanent apartment. This has been rather a long process but I should be all moved in by the end of this week. Friday was able to see my new place for the first time and drop about 95% of my stuff off in it. I didn't take any pictures because my camera was packed away but I can tell you that this place is huge. It's almost too big for me but I'm not complaining. They still need to fix somethings in the kitchen but aside from that the renovations are complete. It's in a much quieter part of town than where I was living before. My first apartment was six floors up right on the main boulevard in the center of Bucharest which meant that it was incredibly central and close to work but also was incredibly noisy because of all of the traffic. At my new place, the loudest thing I heard was the bell on a kids bicycle.

In the last few weeks I've also managed to get out the house quite a bit.

 I attended a couple of the protests about the gold mine at Rosia Montana (that's the Mountain Tomato for all of you linguists at home). There have been protests all over the country for the last month or so. Every night people have been protesting at the university square (eventually the crowd gets big enough to block the street) and on Sunday there was a 15,000 person march through the city. I'm not really going to delve into the causes of these protests here but you can read about them all over the internet. I like this article quite a bit. The vote on this issue was planned for last week but I haven't heard anything about it so I can't tell you anything else about it. I did manage to take some pictures of one of the protests I attended. They aren't that great and there weren't that many people there because we were early but you can see them here.

I did manage to get a group together to try out the new board game cafe the center of town. Some of the other American teachers and I went out one evening last week and played some Settlers of Cataan. We had a good time and were able to meet the owner of the cafe. It was really cool to see a place like that in Romania. I hear there is another one in a different part of town. I'll have to check it out too.

On Monday Eli and I checked out part of the Italian cultural festival that was going on all week. We spent the night in Herastrau park listening to a jazz group from Milan. It was a beautiful night and the band was really good. There was a small Italian market at the festival and I ended up buying a jar of sweet and spicy sauce from one of the ladies there.

And of course I've spent a lot (well not that much by some standards) of time in Old Town Bucharest. It's the social district where you can find lots of good restaurants, bars, and clubs. I've managed to find some great (and cheap) Lebanese and Turkish places along with several British style pubs amid the numerous pretentious bars blasting their music way to loud in their efforts to get some poor souls to sit down and have a drink while their eardrums melt.

That's it for now. I'll write something else soon!

Back to School

So last Monday I started working at my new job as a teacher at the Lauder-Reut School in the Jewish Quarter in Bucharest. It's a small private school with classes from Pre-K through 12th grade. It's a bilingual school with students starting English in kindergarten and many students completing the BEC in 11th grade. While classes don't start until the 16th, we teachers have two weeks of prep before marching into the classrooms. For me it's been a lot of meetings, paperwork, and planning. It's also been a lot of getting to know the teachers I will be working with and getting familiar with the institutional culture. So far it's been a lot of fun.

I've been assigned to teach three sets of classes in the high school this year. I'll be teaching Business English to 9th,10th, and 11th graders, British and American Culture and Civ to the 11th and 12th graders, and I'll also be teaching 12th grade Lit. It's been really interesting creating the syllabuses for these classes and bouncing ideas off the other teachers who have experiences with these subjects. Because these classes are in the high school, where standards are a bit looser, I have a lot of freedom when it comes to what I'll be doing with the students. I've already completed the semesterly plans for most of the classes, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how things will go once the students show up.

In other news, my girlfriend left for a weeklong business training in Austin, Texas yesterday morning which is pretty awesome. It's her first time in the States, and I can't wait to hear her impressions of it. Meanwhile, I took the weekend to just chill out on my own for a bit here. I looked up some information about language schools that offer Romanian classes, tried out the Japanese place around the corner from my house, and installed Skyrim to see what all the fuss is about. Later I think I might call up some friends and go down the the board game cafe that opened up just down the street and play some Settlers of Caatan.

Beep Beep Burp

So today I got called out by a cop walking back from work (yeah it was my first day but I'll talk about that later, maybe). What the hell were you doing, kid?!?

 I get what you're thinking.  I must have been doing something pretty horrible to be talked to by a Romanian police officer. Knowing me I was probably kicking babies or smoking crack right there on the sidewalk, maybe causing some light property damage. The usual things. However, this time was different.

You see I was jaywalking or pseudo jaywalking anyway. I (along with thousands of Romanians) do this on a regular basis but today I was informed by a very pleasant lady cop that not only should I pay attention to the red and green lights at the crosswalks for my safety but that also I would get a fine if she caught me doing it again.

Now normally I wouldn't be so happy about being warned by a cop but this instance was unique for me. It reminded me of the time when the Albanian Border guards pulled a guy off the bus to Greece because he wasn't related to the minor he was traveling with and they wanted to make sure he wasn't doing anything shady. It was an instance of cops doing there normal jobs in a region where, to the outside world anyway, cops aren't seen as competent or trustworthy. These were nice moments of normalcy in places not known for it.

These countries aren't the wild west or the European backwater. They're great places full of great people. I just wish more people around the world would see them that way instead of the way they are portrayed in Hollywood.

In other news, I visited some muddy volcanoes this weekend.

Burp!