halloween

i did a halloween lesson this week with most of my kids. some good classes got to have races to make mummies.

some were pretty proud of their work...

some were not so happy to be the mummy...

some had way too much fun...

and some kind of sucked at it...

after talking about halloween (15 minutes), and mummy wrapping (5 minutes) i gave the class the remainder of the time (25 minutes) to do a halloween word search. [hungarian kids equate cheating with helping so when they take a test there is ALWAYS cheating and no one feels bad unless they get caught. teachers have even congratulated students on cheating without getting caught, sort of encouraging them to beat the system however they can. i'm not making this up.}

when i told the students that the winner would get a candy bar, all conversations stopped. i told them they could help each other and they all refused. i had never heard such silence. even the most rambunctious kids (like the boy pictured below) concentrated and tried their best for the prize. i was really quite impressed, if not stunned.

so far, after two days of halloween, i'm willing to call it a success. the kids learned some new vocab, made mummies, and had a howling good time.... and so did i.

szent imre - the good school

szent imre is the catholic school i teach in on tuesdays and thursdays. the teachers are great and always talk to and help me. we eat lunch together, talk about lessons, and shoot the breeze in our planning periods. they make me like my job even more than the kids do.

that's not to say that the kids aren't good, because they are. most of the time the students there are interested in english and learning and so interested in my lessons. they are cooperative even when they don't fully understand what i'm saying.

since it's a catholic school, it's a bit more strict than other schools. the students don't greet teachers with the normal "csokalom" (i kiss you[r hand]) but with a latin greeting of 'may you be blessed by jesus christ'... or something like that. (no need to correct my latin, people. i'm working on hungarian right now.) i am supposed to respond with the latin for "may it be so forever."


if i see kids in the hall, they are supposed to say this phrase and i am supposed to respond accordingly. it's so long and strange to me, though, that i usually just say hi to them. oh, well.

here is one of my favorite classes at that school. i wanted to take a picture of them but forgot my camera. i ran downstairs to get it and told them to get in position. when i came back, they were ready and had surprised me with a different word than "cheese."
maybe a video will make you feel like you were there. :)



another favorite class of mine is the beginners. this is their first year learning english and they haven't lost their motivation for school yet. we do very elementary things in there (and i use as much hungarian as english!) but we all like it. this week we sang some songs: Old McDonald Had a Farm, Father Abraham, the Hokey Pokey, B-I-N-G-O, and the jazz chant that goes 'hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.' when i took their picture they wanted to sing partof one of the songs. so here they are:

the lock thing

in my town there is a ... structure (for lack of the actual word) with a lot of padlocks on it. the tradition surrounding it is that couples attach a lock when they're in love and seriously committed. it's quite a sight, actually, because people decorate their locks with their names, dates, pictures, or inside jokes.

i think it's a fun idea... uncharacteristically so for the hungarians ;)

went to tata

another teacher, carla, invited other CETP people to her town to exchange lesson plans and have a get-together. i was excited to go because a)i'd never been there, b)i like carla, and c)i need some lesson plans that will work with my *lovely* kids.

stan (some sweet CETP guy) and carla, the hostess
who even let xander come along AND sleep on her bed for a while
then she took us on a little sight-seeing tour
and we saw the sights: the lake, the castle, the stuff around the lake and the castle
after the tour and the lesson stuff we went to dinner at some pirate restaurant - yum!
thanks again for your hospitality and lessons, carla!

xander

this little dog of mine...

last week xander had some back and hip problems. he couldn't jump up on the (low) bed, sit down anywhere, or let me pet his back without whimpering and yelping. it was so scary and sad for me. i was frustrated because i didn't know what the problem was and the silly dog can't tell me! i noticed it when i came home one evening and decided if he wasn't better by morning i would take him to the vet.
i was in the middle of a series of phone calls (trying to find an english-speaking vet) and getting fed up and scared when a former colleague (from the best school ever, zrinyi) called. she asked how i was and through tears i said ok. she said, ok, that means not ok. i told her the problem and she came over right then to escort us to the vet. we took a taxi (driven by my private student, taxi-driver gabor) to the animal hospital.
the vet who saw us was a nice lady, but didn't speak english. i couldn't understand all (or even half) of what she said, but i could figure out a lot from her gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and the words i knew. gabi, my colleague, translated periodically but not throughout.
it seems his hips were buckling or something under the pressure of his extra weight. the vet was sure to explain to me several times that xander is overweight. later she said he was old, too. (i, of course, googled it when i got home and my nearly 7 year old dog is about middle aged for his breed... so not old.)
we were given two medicines: a pain killer and a joint lubricant (or something). i understood the regimen and agreed to administer the meds to him accordingly. i am also supposed to watch his diet, give him more exercise, and keep him from walking up/down stairs and jumping on furniture until he's back to normal.

as of this week, i'm happy to report, he's back to his jumpy, stair-walking self. he has been spared a few scrapes of people food and doesn't like that, but otherwise he's happy. thankfully it wasn't anything more serious. i can't tell you how many times i've said out loud to him, "please don't die in hungary." i know i would be just devastated. anyway, all is well again.

i love me some xander-pants!