School

Despite my being quiet on the interwebs these last couple of weeks. I have been quite busy. I've finally started to feel like I'm settling into my classes and apartment, and now I'm on a plane leaving. Ha! Ain't it the way.

In any case, my classes are still ridiculous. My girls are wild, silly, frustrating, tyrants, but shoot, they're cute at least ten percent of the time. Which isn't much, but it's an ego trip way they tackle each other so they can hold my hand at the front of the line. Yeah, I'm pretty popular, and apparently pretty boring as evidenced here by this first grader:
We learned the names of our face bits. Once I taught the girls the Hokey Pokey, they like to include putting not only our right hands in, but also our noses, chins, mouths, and eyes. I'm still working on shakin' my ears all about.



We had S day for phonetics. Together we made snails, snakes, suns, and spiders. Check out their handy work:


I requested to get some boxes to organize our classroom supplies. A place for the pencils, erasers, glue, scissors, you get the idea. I was expecting some plastic tupperware style containers, but that's about the furtherest thing from what I received. This is Emiratie style right here folks:


Note the poem:

Sad love, it breaks my heart. I thought about covering it. But I think it might encourage the girls to learn English.

Tour de Zayed: Dig my New Digs

Buckle your seat beats folks! I'm taking you on the whirl wind tour of my new home: Madinet Zayed.

Known to locals as Bida Zayed, it has it charms: desert, dunes, and camel farms hanging outside the city proper. But the attractions inside the city are on the list for today, and all the crazy times will keep you busy. For instance, Al Dharfar Co-Operative Society. I buy my peanut butter here.

And right across the street (and I do mean the street cuz there is only one main thoroughfare) I can get my money at National Bank of Abu Dhabi, aka NBAD, which is just a sweet acronym.

Neighboring the bank is the town clinic. Which also houses the fish market....I haven't figured that one out yet, but supposedly they carry a very fresh selection of prawns.

All that green stuff is maintained quite nicely by a host of immigrant workers. They work from about 4am break at about noon, then sit out until 8pm when they have at it again until 11 or 12. If someone doesn't water and plant, then the landscape is a little more like this:
And yes, that's fog.

Despite the lack of landscape interest, the sunrises are particularly beautiful. This really doesn't capture the sense of color or beauty the sun brings at 6:30am, but check it out all the same...

It's so refreshing to see the sun rise from the start. In New York I didn't get a glimpse until noon.

And on the flip side, sunset.

Next up, my school courtyard where the girls run crazy during snack break.

The black stone thingy in the foreground has a ton of sand in it. The workers spent about three days refinishing the stone work and then loading sand in it. They've been like that for about three weeks. It's been promised that there'll be plantings, but eh, sway sway as the locals say, "little, little!" Work happens in due time, if at all.

And my classroom where the girls run crazy during instruction time.

Note the bulletin board header in the background, "Look what we did!" Yes, that space is blank beneath it...eh, teaching and learning are not exactly happening all the time. It's mostly just classroom management, "Sit down! SIT DOWN! SIT DOWN NOOOOOOW!" I'm finding my big teacher voice more quickly than I'd like. Little steps.