Saturday, July 29, 2006
More or Laos
This video features less white noise and more rooster calls, bus honks, SaBaDis, kids rolling tires, bathing, and some screams of introduction.
Spin this fools!
I have to say that I find the the politics and media in America absolutely surreal .
Read the article here.
Republicans muscled the first minimum wage increase in a decade through the House of Representatives early Saturday after pairing it with a cut in inheritance taxes on multimillion-dollar estates.I really like that last sentence. It's golden.Combining the two issues provoked protests from Democrats and was sure to cause problems in the Senate, where the minimum wage initiative was likely to die at the hands of Democrats opposed to the costly estate tax cuts.
...
Still, Republican leaders saw combining the wage and tax issues as their best chance for getting permanent cuts to the estate tax, a top Republican priority fueled by intense lobbying by farmers, small business owners and super-wealthy families such as the Waltons, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune.
Read the article here.
Monday, July 24, 2006
The life of a career English teacher
I feel like I might be becoming just such a beast.
No chance actually, but oh, how I teach and teach.
Got to JinJu (check it out on the google map here) last Thursday night after 24 hours on the high seas. I was the only westerner on the boat, and I got upgraded from "first class" - which is the lowest class actually - to "suite class". Turned out that the only difference between "suite" and "first" class is that there are only two beds instead of four... but the status! I met a couple of Korean students who have been studying in Beijing for a couple of years now and spent most of the trip with them. Not the isolation at sea I was half expecting.
Now I find myself right back in the thick of teaching english again. Not the old "sleep in till 9:00 or 10:00 o'clock, spend two hours drinking tea and reading, go for a bicycle through the rice paddies, and roll into work at 330 in the afternoon to prepare for a 5:00 class" kind of teaching though. Not this time. This time it's a summer camp, and so tomorrow morning I'll be up at 6:45 to lead exercises for about 250 elementary students, and I should finish up the teaching day around 9:00 in the evening. It's a pretty good set up though. I've got twelve 11 and 12 year students with whom I can pretty much converse with. They are diligent and quiet and cute and I have them all day. The cirriculum is set up fairly well. I've most of this stuff before, so most of my prep is quick. There's not too much to tell really.
I've included some pictures from BeiJing, The Great Wall and the Forbidden City below. My camera is kind of broken right now, so I don't know if you can expect any original photos of this fine country any time soon. I'll try to get it fixed though.
I was forbidden to enter the city because it closed at 5:00 in the evening.
HuTong alley way in the dead centre of BeiJing.
The SiMaTai section of the Great Wall is very steep and mostly unrestored.
It was a pretty cloudy/foggy day.
This is my friend Patrick whom I mentioned in a previous post.
No chance actually, but oh, how I teach and teach.
Got to JinJu (check it out on the google map here) last Thursday night after 24 hours on the high seas. I was the only westerner on the boat, and I got upgraded from "first class" - which is the lowest class actually - to "suite class". Turned out that the only difference between "suite" and "first" class is that there are only two beds instead of four... but the status! I met a couple of Korean students who have been studying in Beijing for a couple of years now and spent most of the trip with them. Not the isolation at sea I was half expecting.
Now I find myself right back in the thick of teaching english again. Not the old "sleep in till 9:00 or 10:00 o'clock, spend two hours drinking tea and reading, go for a bicycle through the rice paddies, and roll into work at 330 in the afternoon to prepare for a 5:00 class" kind of teaching though. Not this time. This time it's a summer camp, and so tomorrow morning I'll be up at 6:45 to lead exercises for about 250 elementary students, and I should finish up the teaching day around 9:00 in the evening. It's a pretty good set up though. I've got twelve 11 and 12 year students with whom I can pretty much converse with. They are diligent and quiet and cute and I have them all day. The cirriculum is set up fairly well. I've most of this stuff before, so most of my prep is quick. There's not too much to tell really.
I've included some pictures from BeiJing, The Great Wall and the Forbidden City below. My camera is kind of broken right now, so I don't know if you can expect any original photos of this fine country any time soon. I'll try to get it fixed though.
I was forbidden to enter the city because it closed at 5:00 in the evening.
HuTong alley way in the dead centre of BeiJing.
The SiMaTai section of the Great Wall is very steep and mostly unrestored.
It was a pretty cloudy/foggy day.
This is my friend Patrick whom I mentioned in a previous post.
Monday, July 17, 2006
REcap
My first time dealing with this YouTube site. I wanted to post a good video from Laos, but it was too big. This one is a little grainy, lacks commentary, and has annoying wind noise.
And yet, I post.
This is Tiger Leaping Gorge as seen in mid June.
As well, if you like watching videos of total fools, or if you've ever driven a motorcycle in Taiwan, then this video is a must see. See Taipei from the seat of a Kawasaki Ninja.
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