A lot has happened since my last entry, too much to squeeze into one entry, but I’ll give it a go.
School: Last week was my first full week of school, we started school the Thursday before that. I teach at the ChochK’ati school. It is the hub school for the villages, so as kids get older they leave their village school and come to mine. In my first – third grade classes I have no more than 8 students. About half of the 1st grade parents come to class with them as education starts in 1st grade. My second and third graders are brilliant and I love teaching their classes. My 4th – 6th grade classes get progressively larger and I teach about 22 6th graders. 1st-5th grades are all in English 1 (same books) and the 6th graders are taking English 3. The school probably has about 200 students grades 1-12. On Monday I was asked if I wanted to teach in a more remote village on Tuesdays and naturally I said yes, and now I am also teaching at Guliani school, which has no more than 50 students. Grades 1-8ish? I would say there is about 5 students in every grade and I teach 2 combined classes, and one solo. For some reason my combined classes are 1st and 3rd graders, and 2nd and 4th graders. Also one of my co-teachers was sick on Monday so I got to teach 5th grade alone. They were more rowdy than usually but I corralled them, and I think it was a successful class. Most of my students now have books, but I have no teacher book, or audio CD’s, so I just make up the stories. Today I was asked if I wanted to play basketball against teachers from another village, needless to say I was ecstatic.
Batumi: 2 weekends ago. I’ll call it the Batumi weekend. Batumi is kind of like Las Vegas and Miami compressed into one in Georgia. It is the “it” place to be in Georgia. Knowing what I know now, the wealth in this country is definitely in Tbilisi and Batumi. Anyways on Friday night I was eating dinner with the host family and a commercial for Batumi came on. My host father then says Batumi go? I’m thinking yea it would be cool to go to Batumi some time. (Batumi is about an hour and 20 minutes from where I live) But no, he meant go then and there, it was about 8:30 when he said that. So we went to Batumi drove past some of the sights, and then we watched the musical fountains while drinking Turkish coffee and eating Hacipuri. We probably got home around 2 am. Then on Saturday I get a call from TLG saying the President would like to invite us to the opening of the Batumi Opera house which he would be attending. So on Sunday I was dropped off by my principal my regional resource education center in Lanchuti. There a bus picked us up and took us to Batumi to watch the play/opera. We had great seats, the president walked within five feet of me. I unfortunately didn’t get to meet him, but I did get on national TV. They interviewed one of my friends, and I was in the background. We also ate at really nice restaurants and stayed in some of the best hotels in Batumi. I stayed at the Intourist Palace Hotel and many of my friends stayed at the Raddison Blu. All of us ended up missing the third day of school. But I mean, would you really say no to the president? The best part about the trip to see opera, it was all covered by the Ministry of Education, and in total I think I spent 1 lari on a bottle of water.
Ureki: Last weekend I went to Ureki again, to go to the sea one last time before it gets cold. It was epic adventure, I met up with Riley, Clare, Erica, and Ruth-Anne. I got there a day after they did, and they had met a guy who was the GM at a nice hotel. He gave us the works, nice rooms, made us delicious food ect. Then naturally we ended up at a supra. Some guys were eating and invited us over to their table, got all our food, busted out their homemade wine. Typical Georgian hospitality, no occasion needed. By the end of the night we had taught 2 Georgian grandpas pong, and flippy cup.
Pictures from my adventures are up on facebook, at this link -> https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2330479217402.2132669.1112370002&l=bcaba308ee&type=1
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