Bailamos!

Last weekend here in Cali was the Festival Mundial de Salsa, or the World Salsa Festival.  So of course that's where I was to be found Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening.

With Richie, my coworker and dance partner, and Catherine, my coworker and awesome new neighbor.  Eating passion fruit suckers which are also pretty awesome!

At the finals with Kathleen

There were several different categories for teams and pairs to compete in.  There were teams from other countries as well but apparently its rare for people who aren't from Cali to win.  And its not hard to see why; the speed with which they move their feet is downright impressive!

It was inspiring to spend the weekend watching such fantastic dancers!  Despite Cali being considered the world capital of salsa, I have to admit I've been a bit disappointed with the social dancing here.  Most people here learned to dance by watching family members as they grew up so their salsa is fairly basic.  It was a nice change of pace to spend some time watching some dancers who are truly phenomenal at what they do.

Here's to hoping this is me next year and to the many, many hours of practice coming up.  

 

This group is from the school that I am taking lessons at.  I didn't record much of them because their pink sequined (ie. AWESOME!) outfits were making it hard for my camera to focus.

There was even a baseball themed number......

......And Nicole, this one's for you! :)

Expensive Cookie Therapy

The kids had off of school today because of some bus strikes.  I walked to school this morning expecting to spend the day doing some much needed lesson planning.  Despite having two weeks of school before the kids started, our schedule was jam packed with meetings and I really hadn't done any planning.  I should have know better than to expect the day to myself to plan!  I arrived to find, what else?  A list of meetings posted for the day.  After many interminable (ok, it was five hours, but it felt like forever!) and unproductive meetings and only an hour and a half of lesson planning, I was GRUMPY!

I walked home from school contemplating whether I would rather go for a run or eat cookies.  Consider it a sign of my mental state that I preferred to go for a run.  Who chooses that over cookies!?!? Certainly not me!  However, I really only know the main roads around my house and I was not about to go running down those.  It would have resulted in almost certain death on account of the insanity of the drivers here.  So I settled for the cookies.  (Clearly my mental functioning has not fully returned because "settled for" and "cookies" never belong in the same sentence!)

The school bought me a little mini countertop oven so I am now able to bake four cookies at a time.  Perfect!  By the time I finished eating the first four, the next four would be done.  At the store I found no whole wheat flour and no chocolate chips.  I usually like to bake with whole wheat flour so I can feel like what I'm eating has at least minimal nutritional value, but at this point I just wanted my cookie.  Any kind of flour would do.  Chocolate chips - no problem, I'll just chop up a chocolate bar.  But when I asked where I could find the baking soda I was told they didn't have any.  Are you kidding me?!?!  Does no one here bake cakes, cookies, coffee bread, muffins....

After stewing up and down a couple of aisles I decided I could still make no bake cookies.  I got my $6 jar of cocoa powder and $7 jar of peanut butter and went back home.

I may or may not have eaten this out of the bowl by the spoonful before deciding to actually make the rest into cookies to put in the freezer.

School

School started last week and I have very much enjoyed getting to know the kids!  They are all very sweet!  I will be teaching Math, Science and Social Studies to two classes of fifth graders.

 

My incredibly adorable homeroom kids.

There are a lot of things that are very different from my job back home and some of them are going to take awhile to get used to.  Some of them are cultural things and some of them are just differences in the type of teaching position I have.  So far I'm absolutely loving having other teachers to work with and feeling more involved in the school.

Here's a quick tour.

Hallway outside my classroom

Inside my classroom:

I love that the classrooms are open and I get to enjoy the nice weather all day long!

 We get a computer but no way to project anything to the class.  We can bring them to the auditorium to project stuff but that's not very practical when I just want to show a 5 minute you tube video.  I'm so used to having a smartboard it's going to be challenging to get used to not even being able to project things.

View from the soccer fields.

These two buildings are the primary school with a little courtyard in the middle.

From the courtyard, this is the building that was on the right in the previous picture.  My classroom is in this building but on the other side.

Lunch room.  Also open air.  Have I mentioned yet how fantastic the weather is?

View from the lunch room and looking into the preschool.

This is right outside my classroom.  Administrative offices are in the building you can see and the high school is behind that.  The construction is on what used to be the library.  They are turning it into classrooms for French classes that are going to begin later this year.  The library is being moved to various buses around campus.  Bibliobuses are apparently the thing in Europe now and that's what they're going to try.  I remain unconvinced about the merits of this idea, but we'll see.

The Good, The Bad, and The Strange

After a couple weeks in Cali here's what I love, what I hate, and the things that are neither good nor bad but different from home.

The Good  
 
1.  The weather is my absolute perfect ideal!  Not too hot, not too cold.  It is usually in the mid to upper 80s during the day.  In the morning and after the sun sets it cools down a bit and which is a nice change from daytime and with a cardigan it is still warm enough that it is comfortable and I don't get cold! :)  LOVING IT!

2.  The city is full of palm trees, which of course makes me smile, and surrounded by mountains.  Gorgeous!

3.  I love hearing salsa music coming from cars when I'm walking down the street, blaring out of my neighbor's apartment, in the stores walking around the mall - basically anywhere I go.

4.  There are tons of places to dance here and I will get a lot of dancing done!

5.  The wide variety of delicious fruit.  Sugar mangos are my new favorite!


 The Bad

1. Because Cali is "so hot" - in my opinion just right - the vast majority of people do not have hot water.  This means showering has become the most dreaded part of my day.  If I don't return home at the end of the year it will be because the cold showers killed me.  If I do, it will be because of the cold showers.

2.  Not having an oven in my apartment.  I love to cook. Not sure how I'm going to manage a year without pizza or roasted vegetables! :(

3.  My neighborhood - too expensive and far away from everything.

4.  All the stores have someone to bag your things for you and they all tie the bag handles in a knot before handing them to you.  This makes them feel bulkier when you're carrying them around and then you have to untie them all when you get home.  Really pretty minor but this is going to be one of those things that just irks me.

5.  Getting around the city.  It's big and takes awhile to get anywhere via bus.  It gets dark early and I'm not comfortable walking around myself after dark - sometimes even the couple of blocks from the bus stop to wherever I'm going.  Which makes getting places quite a challenge!


The Strange

1.  Traffic rules are really more of guidelines that mostly don't get followed.  Road markings are more for decoration than to tell you where you can or can't go.  Lanes of traffic are non-existent.  I'm pretty sure that car horns are just to entertain drivers that get bored.  At night when the roads are less busy, red lights have no meaning. 

2.  The windows have no screens.  Remarkably, despite leaving my windows open almost 24 hours a day, I can count on my fingers the number of bugs I have seen in my apartment (aside from the ant fiasco).

3.  The grocery stores.  Eggs don't need to be refrigerated.  Who knew!?  You can also tell by the color of the yolks that their chickens are much healthier than the ones in the US. Milk, along with just about everything else you can imagine, comes in bags.  Other things that come in bags: water, mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, apple sauce, pasta sauce, bbq sauce, tartar sauce. I'm told that this is because of shipping costs and the weight of bottles and jars.

4.  People here like to talk.  In meetings everyone gets a turn to share.  Even if your idea is the same as the previous three people who shared. Handouts that could be read on your own in ten minutes?  It's much more fun to read them in a group over the course of two hours.  Meetings here are looooooooooong. 

5.  Parking lots.  I was so confused the first time I went with someone to the mall and we parked.  They gave us a ticket. 
          -You have to pay to park at the mall?  
          -No.  
          -Well then what's the ticket for?  
          -So they know that it's your car.  
          -Well course it's your car.  You're driving it.  Why would you be coming or going in a car that's not 
            yours......Ooooooooh.....right.....
Different world!

6.  The hallways in the malls are all open air.  This means birds can strut around the mall with you.

7.  The carrots.

They only come in one size.  Massive.  No baby carrots here.