The above sentence being about half of my French vocabulary at the moment, and this sentence a good representation of how screwy my English grammar has become, I conclude therefore that I have been in Germany for a very very long time. And then I must now admit that I am not, in fact, in Germany at the moment - rather, I'm in Italy, somewhere near the Mediterranean, although I never know exactly where I am when traveling with my family.
My last day of teaching was August 4th, and on the 5th I took a train to Geneve (la Suisse), where I met up with my family, as well as two really cool people named Alan and Laura that y'all might happen to know. There are pictures from this meeting, despite the weather being generally dreary, but they aren't on my camera, so I leave it to one or more of these super cool people to post them. hinthint. As for the weekend, it was spent walking around the streets of Geneve, touring CERN, and eating smuggled roquefort instead of sleeping.
In other news, like I said, my last day of teaching was last week, and I'm now on vacation. The last two weeks of my teaching program went very quickly and very nicely. The kids were the youngest we've had all summer, so I feel like I haven't gotten to know them quite as well, but they have been remarkable as students and pretty fun to teach. I had one particularly memorable student - if you've ever read Anne of Green Gables, this kid is my Paul Irving. He was just the most remarkable boy... and Alan, if you read this, I mean remarkable as in special, not remarkable as in able-to-be-remarked-upon.
I've also brought the llama song over to Germany, where the younger kids have loved it, as you can probably tell by the pictures I have sent out to the group. Here's another one for good measure (President Obama-Llama was their favorite). I have also taught them the PTERODACTYL game, which caught on more with the older kids. The thing with that game is that you have to be bad at it for it to be fun. Ah well. C'est la vie. (The previous sentence being the other half of my French vocabulary).
This summer has been super awesome. I've learned a lot/changed a lot, I think. On the serious side, my German is much much better, I have some clearer ideas of what I might want to do with my life, I've networked a bit, I've done a lot of teaching and a lot of learning, and I've met some really really amazing people. On the less serious side, I am approximately four orders of magnitude less mature than previously (I blame my team) and have embarrassed myself more times than I am able to name/count/whatevs. Ah well.
I return to Geneva in three days, FRA in four, BOS in five, and DTW in five and a half, or something like that. After that I sleep for a day, go counsel at orchestra camp for a week, relax for a week, and return to campus. I'm very excited to see everyone!
Love and mussels,
Zizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
1. I read anne of green gables.
ReplyDelete2. I just almost spelled green with an e. like greene.
3. I don't like mussels.
So when I think of moules-frites I always thought of mou-frites and was kind of disappointed to find out via wiki that it was the former rather than the later which I imagined to resemble poutine or something. It was neither form of remarkable-ness.
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