Insomnia

Bah! I had a terrible night last night, not a wink of sleep was had. In fact I didn't start feeling tired until 7am. If I'd fallen asleep at that time I would have slept through my alarms and missed my morning classes.

So, up at 7:30am and a slow stumble into work. Couldn't concentrate, kept bumping into things and almost dropping them. Thank goodness my early morning class is so nice, I drank a milky coffee, told them I hadn't slept and we did the lesson. Luckily my second lesson ended up as a one-to-one so we had a reading lesson.

I had to cancel my private student - I'm not sure I would have got to his office without falling asleep. As is it, I came home, got into bed and dropped off the planet. Side effect is that I feel like I've been kicked in the ribs (my mattress is so hard and I didn't move while awake or asleep) and have to be careful when breathing deeply.

Three more hours to go and then another nights blissful sleep, I hope!

Update 22:30 I've just re-read it and made a small change to the grammar. Now I'm just about to go back to bed for a blissful zzzzz.

Plans

So, here we are at the end of October and I've been in this country for eight months. Doesn't time fly when you don't have a life?

We've got about five weeks of normal teaching left, followed by a couple of weeks of intensive exam preparation (and if you thought I didn't have much of a life before now, wait until I'm doing split shifts every bloody day). This is finished off by a week or so of 'preparing for the new academic year' (whoopee) before we finally break up on 21st December. Of course, the end of term being so close to Christmas means that even if anyone wanted to fly home for the festive season, they couldn't afford it - I wonder if it's deliberate to prevent anyone flying home and deciding not to come back (me, I love conspiracy theories).

I'm not sure what I'll be doing during the summer break (remember I'm in the southern hemisphere and we're going into summer here). I've been invited to go away with my host from last weekend and I've got a friend from Milan flying into BsAs for a one-night stopover on 3rd January. She's travelling (as we speak) to Argentina by ship and will be spending a few weeks walking all over Patagonia. Then on 11th January my beloved parents are coming to visit. By then the weather should be hot and humid so it'll be interesting to see who wilts first!

I start back at school sometime around the beginning of February because I'm going to participate in the DELTA course being run here. I know I've done it before but, having spoken to others who took the course elsewhere, I don't think it was particularly good. Additionally, being referred on the coursework element was a huge hit to my self-confidence. I feel I need to participate in a course in order to pass the externally assessed teaching practice and thus pass the DELTA.

I actually considered giving up teaching and going back into an office job in the UK. The only reason I didn't was because (and if I've said this once I've said it a million times) my worst ever day teaching was still a million times better than my best ever day in any other job. I love teaching and that's another reason why I want to get this DELTA qualification.

Then in March, it's back to teaching proper and before you know it, it'll be this time next year and I'll be wondering where to go next!

Shopping (or not)

Now that the weather has started heating up and the humidity is rising, it has become necessary to find some light cotton trousers. I did bring four pairs out with me but two of them have become worn and holey, and the other two are just a little bit too small to wear comfortably.

So today I went to the biggest shopping centre reachable by bus and had a good old look around. Sad to report, absolutely nothing! I have two problems, one is actual size (I'm about three times bigger than the average woman here), the other is length (I'm about six inches higher than the average woman here). What the Argentines call large or extra-large is what we'd call medium, so my chances were minimal anyway.

On top of all that, there is the problem of material. There is a tendency to use synthetic material but when they use natural material (mainly cotton) it is poor quality and badly made.

Now I have a choice: lose some weight (not a quick remedy) or get some trousers made. I'll be pursuing both options but in the meantime count yourselves lucky that you live in Europe!

Nothing in particular

So what has happened recently?

Not a lot. Following a couple of broken nights due to the heat, I managed to sleep through both my phone alarm and my alarm clock, not waking up until 11:50 this morning. I did feel good though, much more relaxed than I have been recently.

Work is trundling along - it's only five weeks to the end of term (although we have a couple of weeks of intensive exam courses after that) and we are all getting a little bored and restless.

Tomorrow we're off to the other school for a joint meeting, what fun! L is giving a teacher development session (jointly with someone from the other school) so even if attendence wasn't compulsory I'd be going to give her moral support.

Social life - not really gone anywhere or done anything since the weekend but that's not surprising. This weekend will be one of catching up on homework, doing a little work on my Spanish (I hope) and chilling out in general. I'm going to try and finish the film in my camera so that I can get all the films developed - yes I know I was supposed to do it this month but... (frowns while trying to think up a good excuse)

Anyway....

Nope can't think of anything else to tell you so toodle-pip!

Evil Teacher

I have this thing going with all my classes - I'm an evil teacher; I give them homework and I expect them to do it, I give them work to do in class and I expect them to do it, I don't often use songs and videos even less (I don't see the point - most songs are badly written and if you put a video on, the students' brains switch off), I've little patience for excuses and none at all for whining.

The thing is, in reality, I'm quite easy going. Especially with adults, after all it's their money and if they want to waste the opportunity, it's their choice (which is why I don't make the most of my Spanish classes).

However, I might have overstepped the mark yesterday.

It was (as I've said before) hot and humid but as it is only the very beginning of summer I assumed it would get much worse. So when my students started complaining about how hot it was and how much they needed the fan on (the air-conditioning wasn't working, thank god - I hate air-conditioning, bad, nasty, nasty, bad) I told them to stop whining. I told them to get on with the work, I told them it was going to get a lot worse before it got better and that if I could put up with it, so could they.

What I didn't know what that yesterday was the hottest day in BsAs for 70 years.

Ummm, sorry?

The Weekend

Well, I hear you ask, how was the weekend?

Well my dears, it was an interesting experience. I got there at 10:55pm, only 25 mins late (pretty good since we drove through a marvellous lightning and rain storm) but what's 25 mins between friends - enough to have my host running up and down the station convinced I'd changed my mind and wasn't coming at all. Luckily I have more patience than him and waited for his re-appearance just five minutes after I arrived.

From there a short taxi ride to his home - ummm... it would have been a short taxi ride if we hadn't got lost (I tell you all those packed-sand roads look exactly the same at midnight after a rainstorm and at one point I thought I'd have to get out and push as the taxi was getting mired in the mud) - some beer and a long, long chat deep into the night.

One unfortunate outcome of this chat was that I discovered my host to be a practiced debater but holding opinions on which we have absolutely no agreement. For example: the reason the tax on cigarettes and tobacco in the UK is so high is because the British Government is in the pocket of the Mafia. This means the Mafia are instructing the government to maintain the high taxes so that the great British public will continue buying blackmarket cigarettes (which according to my host account for 62% of all tobacco consumption in the UK) supplied by the Mafia. Now I know it sounds plausible but I have great difficulty in believing this (and I like conspiracy theories). Anyway we agreed to disagree (or I refused to discuss the issue any further, whichever version you prefer) and finally we went to bed at 4am.

The next day we did nothing; walked to the bakery for medialunas, sat and chatted, went to the supermarket for food, played a board game he has invented - good but not really my thing and in the evening we walked down to the beach, then onto his local bar where I met M&F who run the bar and J&S (who I think are a couple but mine host says no). Good discussion including how Eire benefitted from the EU and how it has mainly avoided the problems of the UK, the relative virtues of New York and BsAs, what I do for a living and where I'm off to next. J also teaches English although he isn't trained to do so (A "I speak the language therefore I must be able to teach it even though I don't know why we use the words we do in the order we do and how to spot, correct and prevent mistakes" type of teacher).

Early to bed that night and up early the next morning for a bus trip into town to buy my ticket home (next time I'll get a return), more medialunas, more chat, a short walk around the area, a skim of the local free-ads paper (my host is trying to buy a car) then back onto the bus for the journey into Mar del Plata.

My journey home was a bit confusing. We got stuck in a traffic jam and then suddenly the coach did a u-turn and went back the way we'd come (very worrying). Turns out there was a demonstration on our motorway so we were diverted. Go into the bus terminal only an hour late but luckily picked up a taxi immediately and was home before midnight (just).

Sorry to tell you that there are no photos. I took my camera but the batteries died on me - maybe next time.

Getting off the bus in BsAs was like walking into warm chicken soup whereas Mar del Plata was wonderfully fresh. The heat and humidity haven't let up since I've been back and I'm sitting here in a puddle of my own juices. I'm back to two showers a day just to get rid of the stickiness. I had planned on going to the gym tonight but just couldn't be bothered - maybe tomorrow.

....and we're back

and in one piece. More later but now I need to sleep.

We're all going on a summer holiday....

Well, actually, it's a weekend by the seaside. I'm leaving in about zero minutes time, catching a supercoach to Mar del Plata and from there, another bus onto Santa Clara del Mar to stay with a new friend. We've emailed a lot, and met once and he seems a good guy plus I need a weekend by the sea. I haven't had a holiday by the sea since last November when I was in Italy. Ok I grew up by the sea but, you know what.., it's not the same.

I have good memories from my last seaside holiday, lets hope I have good ones from this one.

See you on Monday.

Afternoon Tea

After dragging my tired and slightly incoherent body out of bed at some unreasonable hour this morning (my fault, I confused my time with UK time) to speak with my parents, I went back to bed for a couple of hours kip which actually left me feeling more confused than ever.

Finally I got up and showered and, realising I didn't have anything I wanted to eat in the house, I took myself over the road to the local patisserie for tea and medialunas (aka croissants) while I marked a whole load of homework. I got there fairly early and the place was almost empty. Two hours later it was packed to bursting and the noise level was incredible. Argentines have that Mediterranean trait of unselfconsciousness in public (you often see youngsters eating each other's faces) which is still somewhat surprising to me. However I was stuffed with tea and pastries and it was time to go home.

I had hoped to go out and take some photos today but by time I got home the light had gone and it wasn't worth the effort. So, not a particularly busy day but much was acheived and I'm happy.

BTW sorry Dad, I didn't mean to ramble on like that, thanks for your patience.

Springtime

It is Spring here in BsAs and, the same as everywhere else, Spring means fresh, new, lovely. Unfortunately Spring also means, hot, humid, wet (see my last post). However, I'm not complaining because one of the most amazing things here is the smell.

As you should be aware, I have a very acute sense of smell - yes I'm the one that can always smell gas - and it is one of the most delightful senses to have. Here in BsAs, in Spring, everything smells. Most of it's wonderful but sometimes there's a bad odour.

A few weeks ago I tried to get some of my students to construct a scent calendar. In other words what smells did they associate with each month of the year (pine for December, strawberries for June, etc) and they had no ideas at all - they claimed there were no smells in the city because it is a city and all the smells are drowned out (but they don't know what by). Eventually they came up with mothballs for May because that's when everyone takes their winter clothes out of storage (especially the big, old fur coats so beloved of middle class ladies of a certain age) and... that was about all!

At the moment the shrubs and trees are beginning to flower and that means jasmine, orange blossom, honeysuckle and bougainvillea (excuse any bad spelling). These are the good smells.

The bad smells? The tree that smells like cat's piss, the cat's piss itself (the humidity makes it worse), the sweaty armpits of people who think deodorant is for wimps (it so isn't).

Still, you can't appreciate the good without acknowledging the bad.

Early Morning Wake Up Call

I was woken up this morning by someone throwing water all over me and, before you get any funny ideas, that someone was Mother Nature®.

Remember I'd said how hot and humid it's been here? Remember I'd said I had all the windows open (and therefore an insect encrusted ceiling)? Well MN® decided that enough was enough and I was to be warned about my blase attitude to the weather. How dare I go shopping in flipflops when it's raining? What gave me the right to sit around in my gallebaya in the middle of the night and then sleep naked with no covers over me? it's wrong, it's indecent and I had to pay! (grammatically, that sentence is all over the shop and yet it feels right - oh the highs and lows of being a native speaker English Language teacher. Anyway...)

Very early this morning, too early for me to check the clock, MN® started a rainstorm and, being a mischievous sort of force, she decided to change the direction of the wind - just for a few minutes you understand - while throwing as much water out of the sky as possible. The outcome of this was several fold. Firstly, I was woken up by water hitting me even though I had the wooden shutters down (like in Milan); secondly my poor laptop and all the associated electrics (which live next to a window that was also left wide open) got drenched; thirdly I was running around naked at stupid o'clock, shutting windows, mopping up puddles of water, drying off hardware and trying not to get electrocuted. I am very grateful that (touch wood) nothing seems to have stopped working and I'm still in one piece.

The sun is trying to break through the cloud cover at the moment but I don't have much hope of its success. Oh, and all the insects have gone.

The Long Weekend

This weekend is a long weekend here. That is because Monday is a national holiday, not that my students can tell me why it's a holiday. Now when Monday is a holiday we don't have a meeting on Friday so technically we have a four day weekend. However, long weekend or not, I still have to plan lessons for next week. I also have my Spanish lesson on Friday morning so I didn't even get much of a lie-in. Then I spent until 6:30 this evening planning, writing and generally sorting things out.

I had planned to go away this weekend but the person I was supposed to be staying with hadn't been in contact so I didn't know where I was staying or how to get there. In the end I emailed him this morning, cancelling. I'll probably go next weekend instead, when hopefully I'll be less tired.

On a completely unrelated note, the weather here is hot and humid and the only way to keep cool is to open the windows and allow the breeze in. Unfortunately this also allows all the insects in (including but not limited to the mosquitoes), so now my lovely white celing is covered with small black spots - all live insects, I couldn't kill them all even if I wanted to. I've got the mosquito repellent plug in and I'm thanking my lucky stars that I don't react badly to bites.

Visitors

You may, or may not, have noticed a little button at the bottom of the left hand sidebar. The button called 'StatCounter'. This delightful little device allows me to find out whether anyone has been reading my blog (you may remember this rant not so long ago about nobody commenting). It isn't sophisticated enough to tell me who has visited my blog but at least I now know that people are reading (in some cases returning every day to keep up to date with my meanderings) and where in the world they are. So far I've had visitors from the USA (pretty sure that was a mistake - 12 year old boy who has created a D&D blog), Vietnam (hi Dave), Argentina (no, it isn't me), the UK (hello you gorgeous people), Italy (Jam is good) and most recently Australia (g'day).

Keep up the good work and maybe one day I'll reward you with something decent to read.

Mobile Phone

I've finally sorted out my mobile phone. I still can't receive texts from Europe but at least my voicemail has my message on it now. So, if you were the one who tried to call me yesterday and didn't leave a message, please try again.

Birthday Wishes

Firstly, many, many thanks to all of you who left comments (that would be two of you) wishing me happy birthday; also to those who sent me emails and other birthday greetings. All were gratefully received.

I would especially like to say "Thank you" to my brothers who made such an enormous effort not to forget my birthday - oh wait, they made no effort at all... not a word via email, blog comment, telephone call, messenger voicemail etc. etc. It's good to know that two people who I'm so closely related to, care so much about me.

Anyway, my weekend was wonderful. The house is on the Rama Negra (The Black Branch) and took about one and a half hours by boat. The boat ride was like a bus ride but on the water, people get off at their local jetty (some privately owned, some public) but the way out is drop-off only and the way back is pick-up only. There are no roads therefore no cars. The only mechanical noises were from the neighbour who needed to strim his lawn (big lawn) and the radio commentary of a football match. However these didn't last very long and much better were the noises of the local wildlife.

I actually went out there on my own, never having been there before, with just a set of instructions and a hand drawn map. It is a bit of a trek especially as we have to take our own sheets, towels, bottled water (the tapwater comes straight from the river) and food. L joined me later and, once she had turned on the gas bottle, we were able to make a cup of tea and relax.

The house is basic but comfortable and clean. It stands on stilts for those times when the river floods. I was woken up in the middle of the night by something sniffing around the front door and on the roof. At first I thought we had an intruder but then I realised it was an animal - but I don't know what kind. I also saw a woodpecker, a bee as big as my thumb (black body with orange sides), a flying ant-like insect about an inch long (and orangey-brown). Everyone seems to have a dog but they are generally well trained (although they bark a lot).



The Tigre House (more on Flickr)

I really enjoyed it but all good things have to come to an end and at 6:30pm L and I caught the boat home. The journey back was a little hellish. There were a gazillion people trying to get back to BsAs, so much so that they had to send out extra boats to pick people up, we had to queue for tickets at the train station (unfortunately the return tickets are only valid for one day) and then squeeze our way onto the platform and finally onto a train. We were lucky in that we got onto the first train that came into the station. When we got back to BsAs, we went to a local cafe and had something to eat and finally to Persicco for birthday ice-cream - L's treat for me and a lovely way to end my birthday weekend.

Birthday Weekend

As you all know, it's my birthday on Sunday - if you don't know, I'll be 45 years old. To make the most of the birthday, I'm going away for the weekend. The school has a house in Tigre, on one of the islands off the Rama Negra. It's nothing spectacular, but it is quiet and out of the city. I'm taking all my Spanish notes and I'm going to try to put them in order (and this includes doing all my outstanding homework - yes I know... but teachers make the worse students). I'll be taking my camera and a good book to read, mosquito repellent and a quilt. I have to catch a train then a boat (which takes about an hour) but I think it'll be worth it.

Even though my birthday is on Sunday, we had the ritual cake and card today (much as I tried to avoid it, I couldn't). It was originally going to happen on Monday but that is another teacher's actual birthday so I elected to have mine early (more cake for everyone). Here's a picture of my corkboard containing momentos of all my social visits and the big pink thing in the middle is my birthday card!

Storms

It's 8:22am and, as I sit here typing this, there is the mother (and father and probably grandparents) of all storms happening outside my window. Rain is falling vertically and with intent, the lightning is flashing across the sky at regular intervals and the thunder sounds like someone clearing their throat prior to a major announcement. I wish I could show you a picture of it all but, unfortunately, all that would come out is a huge grey blur.

And I have to go to work.... thank god it's less than two minutes away.

So English Village....

There are a lot of people who came here from the UK many years ago and have been here ever since. And, of course, when they came they brought their cultural values with them. For many Anglo-Argentines this means courteous behaviour, polite language and (unfortunately) a middle class snobbery. On the whole they are nice people but somewhat out of touch with the UK as it is today. Equally I have found similar groups wherever I have lived abroad (ok, not in Poland) but especially in Egypt. The separation between the Anglos and the rest of the population seems to depend on how long ago it was that the British/Europeans were the dominant class, thus in Egypt (British kicked out after the second world war, I think) the Anglos are more or less completely out of touch. Here in Argentina they are the 'elite', continually refering back to the days of one-to-one (when one peso was worth one US dollar and everyone was wealthy). One of their constant worries is crime. They see Buenos Aires as a crime ridden and dangerous place to be feared and hidden away from behind locked bars. However, don't let me deceive you, as I said before they are nice people who mean well (but can be slightly patronising) and are doing their best to maintain a decent standard of living.

Part of that standard of living is The Country Club. Every Anglo-Argentine seems to be a member of a country club, somewhere to go at the weekend to escape the city. One of these clubs is the Hurlingham Club (in the suburb of Hurlingham!) and this weekend they held a fete - to which L and I went.

How can I describe the experience? The thoughts that came to mind were 'Very Miss Marple', 'Very 50's', 'Very old country'. Everything was the same, bric-a-brac stalls; second-hand books; clothes (but not second hand); jams, marmalades & chutneys; arts & crafts; bouncy castle; etc. The only thing that was different was the lack of a tea tent (although there was a tea room), and the addition of a parilla (open air grill/barbecue) and alcoholic drinks. Here's a photo... (go to flickr for the other six).