Lesson 5:  ABC's (getting started)

Things have picked up after a somewhat slow start, due to their hestitance to talk with one another in pairs, groups or simply as a class to me; I asked my first class what it was they most wanted to practice, of course their reply was 'speaking'.  At the start of my second week I broke this pattern, by getting them to 'role-play' a little.  Most had not fully understood the task and over the weekend whilst they were meant to put together a character for them to pretend being, many just wrote down details of themselves.  However, whilst everyone enjoyed it; Choe (the Korean) who has been up until now my quitest student, seemed to really get into it.

As the others started asking him questions, he spontaneously made more and more details up about his character, yet the rest of the class thought he was just talking about himself, as many of them were.  They were quite shocked to hear that 20 year old choe had a beautifull wife and 2 school age children.  Its probably a case that you had to be there to appreciiate it, but it was very funny when he realised what was happening and had to point out that this was all make believe.

I am currently teaching 3 classes, however I am only standing in for one of those, and will most likely loose that after Wednesday.  3 lessons is really all I need to maintain my living out here, and it really does seem like it would be easy to live here if I were working fulltime. 

Since I last blogged I have seen through International Workers Day and Buddha's Birthday.  Each of which are a little different I guess, however they do both involve a lot of flags.

Personnaly I prefered the first of the two, not only cause it meant marching through the streets amongst a bunch of people who want to improve the social situation here, but also because it did not turn the quiet little area that I have settled in; into some manic,crowded hell hole, just like Thamel the tourist centre.  How dare these day tripper Nepalese interupt my solitude by the monkey temple, they even scared off all the monkeys for the day, although I like to think that the monkeys merely went to their neighbourhoods and raided any food they could find through any open windows.  Like the communists here, they are more organised than you would think....

(The Unified Monkey Leninists [UML] sit down to discuss agitation tactics).