One Week Into It

It's Saturday night, and we're getting ready to go out. Another new teacher that's been here for a few months invited us to a rock bar -- we're meeting her at 11. Why so late? Apparently bars here close at 5 or 6 am...

As with anything, the sheen of our new home is wearing thin (although I'm not really surprised). Some of the rules at the school, our accommodations, etc are showing problems that were not evident at first. For example, everyone is so quaintly 'laid back' here that service requests for the house take often more than three weeks to fill out (or so we're told, and our current experience is definitely supporting this claim). The previous tenet in our house jammed the printer impossibly with paper. Our shower only has tepid water. And so forth. Another interesting aspect that I'm not looking forward to is we get observed multiple times over the year, and not just by one person. Our supervisor, their supervisor, all the other grade 5 teachers....TEN people in all would be observing in one go. Then they all sit around a table and discuss the 'warm' and 'cool' observations (hooray for euphemism!) in front of me, while I'm not allowed to reply. Of course I'll get to do the same to my 'colleagues,' but still it's intense.

They haven't given us very much information about teaching, or what they specifically want, or lesson plans yet. They don't seem to know themselves. They do, however, have very clear ideas on the image of the school, and how we should interact with the parents.

Everyone is very nice and friendly. Not surprisingly, all of us English-imported teachers have banded together during this orientation week. It's getting kind of tiring every time a 'helpful' Spanish speaker jabbers away at us in Spanish, with the idea that it will somehow help us learn the language. Our Spanish lessons don't start for a few more weeks, and I can't wait because it will garner us some more independence to get around on our own.

As promised by Andrew, here are the pictures from Chimpique Park. First up: the butterfly enclosure (the person in blue is one of our delightful colleagues:



The white thing has sugar in it for the butterflies.



A snap of one in flight:



And a video of some in flight:



Some views from a lookout point. These pics were taken mid-morning, and you can see that the smog hadn't yet burned off from the city. As Andrew noted, Monterrey sort of sits in the bowl of mountains, and note that there are green trees right up to the summits. We were told that the peaks don't receive snow, even in the winter.



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