Well things sure have gotten busy around here

Looks like it's time for another update. I've gotten pretty busy at school so I haven't been updating as frequently as before, but it's Friday and I don't have any classes today so I've got the time.

Where to start? How about things in Bucharest? 

Eli and I went to two film festivals. I forget the name of the first one but it was only showing short films. Most of the films were pretty interesting and for the price it couldn't be beat. Eli and I spent about $10 to watch an entire afternoon's worth of movies on a rainy Saturday. We also attended the Creepy animation night at the Animest film festival.The Animest film festival deals almost exclusively with animated films. The event we attended didn't quite live up to its name but it was pretty entertaining nonetheless. Bizarre would have been a better word to put in the title. You can find a list of some of the films shown here and if you want to watch some of them you can find them on Youtube.

Eli and I also managed to attend a couple concerts. Eli and I both like rock music and there are plenty of clubs with live music here in Bucharest. If one was inclined they could probably find a concert every night. The rock clubs are mostly underground and each of them have their own personality. We also saw some jazz at an outdoor concert on one of the squares. I'd really like to go into the jazz clubs to see how things are there but we haven't found the time yet.

We also attended the first show of the opera season at the national theatre. The opera seems to be a pretty big thing with Romanians, even the younger ones. I was surprised to see that lots of the attendees were under thirty. The venue itself was a pretty classy place, lots of marble and red carpet. It's an older building predating communism I think and while they've maintained it pretty well the age shows in certain ways. Many of the seats were a little broken and things were a bit dusty. Overall though a nice place. The show we were attending was Othello, which I didn't remember being an opera. I'd seen it once before as a student at Armstrong so I was familiar with the story which was good because it was sung in Italian with a Romanian translation projected above the stage. The performance went well and as usual Iago stole the show. 

This week I was asked to help chaperone a school trip to an exhibit that was part of the Jewish Film Festival. It wasn't a film but an exhibit centered on the pogram in Iasi during WWII. It was entirely in Romanian but thanks to my students I was able to understand most of what happened. The next day a director of one of the films from that festival came to the school and gave a screening of her movie. It happened during one of my classes and so I got to sit in on it. I learned a couple interesting things about the politics of the Jews going to Israel after WWII but overall I thought the film was pretty boring. I think most of my students thought the same thing.

And then the rains came

So for the last three days the weather has been unseasonally bad across Romania. In Bucharest, there were downpours and blustering winds that caused problems all over town. Trees snapped, traffic slowed to a crawl, thousands of umbrellas were destroyed, and a metro station was shut down due to flooding.

It's also about 10 degrees ( in C not F) colder than normal. I've seen lots of people breaking out the winter coats and in the northern areas of the country it snowed. In fact, the road between my girlfriend's house and Brasov (a major city in Transylvania) was closed down due to the ice and snow. Pretty crazy for the beginning of October, huh?

Well that's it for context, let's move on to more personal developments. I'm liking the new apartment a lot but I'm realizing that there's a lot of stuff I'm going to need to buy to make it comfortable and homey. I've made a running list of things to find once my paychecks start rolling in. Some of them are more practical than others (like trashcans and powerstrips for instance) but I'm hoping that I'll be able to get most if not all of it bought within the next few weeks. It's funny looking at this list. It feels really weird knowing that I've bought everything on it at least once (others two or three times) before. I wonder how many more times I'm going to have write lists like this?

Things at school have been moving at a rather slow and jerky pace but I think they will even out soon enough. The schedule of classes has changed every week leaving the kids (and many teachers) in a distracted kind of state. Being that I only have high school classes that means that few if any of the students are taking much seriously at this point. But we'll get there. Eventually. I actually had all of my seniors show to Lit class for the first time this semester. They informed me that it was a fluke and would probably never happen again.

It's a funny situation with them. It's a group of six and they have a huge exam at the end of this year which determines their entrance into university. The test is broken down into three or four parts: Romanian, Math, and one or two optional tests which are subject related. This entire year is focus on preparation for this test which means they take double Math, double Romanian, and then double physics or chemistry (or whatever other subjects they are focusing on). The rest of their classes are pretty much blown off (but they announce it beforehand so it's ok). Lucky me I teach two of the blow off classes, right?

Wrong. I must have grown up or something because the fact that I'm basically babysitting these kids (if they show up) annoys the crap out of me. I've made a great program for this class, and I've worked pretty hard trying to find materials that I thought would interest them (we are reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Persepolis) but it's a discussion based class and it won't work if they won't do the reading. The second class is an American Culture and Civ class which relies much less on outside reading and it's a class I was really excited about but again if nobody shows up what's the point. I'm hoping things will get better as the semester goes on but right now it's pretty frustrating.

The rest of my classes are mostly Business English and one more hour of Culture and Civ (it's a mix of British and American for the 11th grade). The Business English is pretty interesting, although I've never taught it before. I also rewrote about half of the syllabus for those classes so it's like doing a long experiment. I hope it results in good things. It should be interesting at least. I'm partnering up with another teacher for the 9th grade section and I'm working with Junior Achievement in 9th and 10th grade.

Starting next I'll also be running two or three clubs. One of them is a public speaking course for kids in 5-7 grade. The school has a professional public speaker do things at the high school but they asked me to try an introductory thing with the middle school. Should be interesting. I'm also going to be in charge f the Model UN team and the debate team. There's not a whole lot of details for any of these groups because nobody is really sure how things are going to work out. But they will.