Long Time No Blog

It has been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything here. I don't have any proper excuses. I had a week off work between Christmas and New Year which was a time of extreme laziness where the most interesting thing to happen was this rather light snowfall

Though the snow we had driven through the night before was much scarier. This was the most wintery it got here. Then when I got back to work I had twice as many classes as before. Yes, a massive TWO classes a day. Mind you, they are both three hours long. Then again, so is my lunch break which is why I had time to meet Angelika, the Swiss girl I met in Perth, for lunch last week

We went to Waxy O'Connors for a half which nearly saw me fall asleep. My second fatal mistake was to have a hot chocolate before going back to class. I nearly didn't make it out of Starbucks awake.

The next day I was up bright and early to go to Greenwich. Kinda of a lie really, I got up and eventually went to Greenwich anyway. I met Russ there and we went to Up the Creek comedy club. We went before Christmas and had a great time and were both eager to go back. What we hadn't counted on was being seated right next to the stage. Yikes. The first comedian wasn't funny but we did our best to laugh. This wasn't enough for her though and she picked on me. Not nice. Then I had a quiet time until the last guy who was very funny. So I didn't mind when he started on me too- though it might have been the few extra beers that I had imbibed by then that gave me the padding.

After the show there is possibly the worst disco that you can imagine. Needless to say, I drank too much and suffered the next day. But I did remember to bring my camera to get this photo of a statue of Nelson looking proudly over London and the stupid dome



And despite my best intentions, I neither househunted nor went book shopping or even sloped around Greenwich Market. Instead, I just sidled home and got back into bed muttering something about never drinking again. Binge drinking is neither big nor clever, kids!

Monday was the day of the Tube strike here in London. Anticipating all kinds of problems I got up earlier than usual to get to work. Turns out that my line wasn't affected and so I arrived at work too early and spend most of the day yawning.

The early start meant that I didn't really have the energy I needed when I got home that night to prepare for the observed teaching practise that I had the next day. All new teachers need to prove themselves with a couple of observed lessons in their first couple of weeks. Mine had been delayed. My class behaved wonderfully and it all went very well, much to my relief. But the feedback session ended late and I didn't get home in time to see my soap operas that night.

On Wednesday I travelled halfway across the country to go to an interview for a teaching course at Exeter Uni. This being despite the fact that I was loving EFL too much to want to teach English rugrats. But the interview clarified for me that I was better off in EFL even though the wages would shame McDonalds. Four hours travelling in each direction- nice! Though I did discover that in Devon some trains actually do request stops! You must tell the conductor who can then ask the driver to stop and let you off! I have never heard of that before.

Thursday was a late night at work because of a workshop, a bi-weekly occurence. Then on Friday I had to go to a Salsa club with some students. I was too shy to get on the dance floor or join in the dance lessons. The Colombians that I had gone with are rather nifty dancers who have never had a lesson in their lives. After the lesson, Camilo took me into a more secluded corner and taught me some steps. He is a very patient guy, as the bruises on his feet will prove, but eventually he had to find someone good to dance with.

I danced with an American guy who told me that the key to Salsa was to look surprised. And there was me thinking that it had something to do with moving my hips! It was a lot of fun even if it felt a bit too sexy to be dancing with my students like that(!) We said that we would go again next week and take some more people. And I promised that I would do the lessons next time so I could get less clueless about the whole thing.

The worst thing about my shameful performance was that I used to do Latin American classes when I was a kid- mind you, I don't think that I was any better then either.

Good job that Camilo is a patient guy as he is going to start teaching me Spanish this week. let's hope that it goes better than the salsa!