A quick update

While I have had the intent to write many a times in the past few weeks, I have not had the time. Since school has started I have been pouring any, and all of my creative energy into the preparation of lesson plans. While I traditionally think of lesson planning as a neat activity that takes place at a desk, my process tends to involve all of my art supplies, cutting, gathering of objects that can be described by vocabulary words that I intend on introducing, coloring, and drawing. When all is completed my living room is generally covered in a fine blanket of shredded papers, pens, pencils paints, making it somewhat unrecognizable. In fact this description perfectly describes the state if affairs in my living room as we speak, but I decided to try to overlook that fact so that I ciould finally write this much overdue blog.

School: School started two weeks ago. It started slowly and lightly. My first week I mostly observed and was observed. After being introduced at the assembly on the first day and anonymity I had in town was officially gone, which is fine by me. I can't deny that I like the attention and popularity that accompanies being a foreigner in a small Romanian town. The second week I actually began teaching, although since my room wasn't ready I taught ended up with about half of what will be my normal 16 hour load. This week, my class should be ready, so Raluca and I will be splitting her classes. She meets with each class twice a week, meaning that if she has 30 students in a class I will take 15 of them one day a week and the other 15 the next time. I am looking foreward to having smaller classes, as it is hard to have comunicative based classes with such large numbers.

Projects: Before school started, Jenny, a peace corps volunteer from last years group, who also lives in Maramures, contacted me about getting involved in "Let's Do It Romania", a national campaign to clean up trash on the 25th of September. I started to look into it, but after hitting a few road blocks, such as, the fact that my counterpart wouldnt be in town the weekend of, the fact that i couldn't understand what the website was asking of me, and the fact that I was overwhelmed by the beggining of school, I dropped the ball, or so I thought. It turns out that instead of dropping the ball, I had actually just passed it on. A few weeks before the event I had mentioned that I had mentioned to the mayor that I wanted to organize a "Let's do it Romania" team in Maramures. He said okay and apparently meant it beacause during my last class on Friday I was informed that we would be meeting at 10am the next morning to pick up some trash. The event ended up being a success. Not only did about 30 kids and 20 adults come and clean up the town, but I also got a taste for how I will be able to organize events in the future.

So that does it for the basics. I promise to take some time to comment on some of the more colorful things I have been apart of, such as "cutting hens", and meeting an American in town, wow! But right now, I need to sleep.