I am a terrible person.

I have a year seven student who has family in Thimphu which means he has seen a lot of foreign, as in American, movies.  He will often come and tell me about movies that he's seen such as Toy Story and numerous superhero movies.
Now, I am not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to superheroes but I can normally fake my way through conversations.  You know, I'll chat about how Steve Banner flew his invisible plane from Krypton because his parents were shot and that's how he became Wolverine.  Flawless.  I do have my own superhero, though.  Her name is Drake and she has dragon powers which she got when a dragon saved her life after she had been thrown into a volcano in Iceland.  I then decided how it was totally unfair that male superheroes often have titles like 'Captain' or 'Professor' and female superheroes don't really so I thought that Drake should get a title. So I changed her to Captain... Drake.  Hmmm.  Can I do that?  Those of you who have studied English history will know about the Tudor era privateer who, I believe, was the first Englishman to sail around the world.  Can I use his name for a half human/half dragon superhero?
I seem to have become sidetracked.  Sorry.  Anyway, my student, who had recently seen Iron Man 3, asked me how Tony Stark's suit was able to put itself on him.  I tried to explain CGI which I brilliantly described as 'kind of cartoons made with computers' but he stopped me and asked how Tony Stark did it.  While I was thinking how to answer this he asked me if I had ever met Iron Man.  I was slightly thrown by this question.  Looking back, I could have said something like, 'No, but I had tea with the Hulk last week.'  but I didn't.  I really had no idea what to say.  I said that I had not met him and, I am so sorry for this, I said that he is a comic book character.  I did NOT say that he wasn't real but I felt really, really bad.  I would like to say that the student is thirteen or fourteen and was one of the students who previously asked me if My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was real.  What would you have done?  Am I the worst person in the world?  Aargh!
Hugs to All!

MOM, STOP READING WHEN WARNED TO, SERIOUSLY!!

It's my last day in Thimphu and I'm already suffering from internet withdrawals!  How will I survive without xkcd, Jesus and Mo and adorable cat pictures?  I could just immerse myself in work, I guess.

Since I've been super lazy with blog so some of these things happened a while ago but hopefully I'll remember enough or be able to make something up.

A few weekends ago I did something which most people find strange, but I find those people strange so meh.  I went looking for serpents.  (Spoilers to keep mommy happy: I didn't find any and, if I had, I would never have touched them)  I took my walking stick and headed out to a pretty, foresty area by the river and had absolutely no luck finding any reptiles at all.  Fortunately, it was still a fairly nice day and I didn't really expect to find any when I set out.  After a couple hours of meandering, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and thought that a bunch of cats had come down to the river.  But they were totally squee, chirpy little otters!  Little Skipper and Tag and Tarka!  I wasn't quick enough to get a picture of them on shore but managed to grab some of them swimming.

See those blobs?  Those are adorably cute otters!  Promise!

Another animal I saw recently, but have no photo of, sorry, was a bird that was enjoying mocking some students and me.  Sadly, the season's just finished, but in spring there are these really nice berries which grow on bushes on the way to school.  Imagine orangey-yellow raspberries and that's what the berries look like.  Sadly, the bushes have a really mean habit of growing on the edge of steep slope which means humans can only reach about a third of the berries safely.  Birds, on the other hand, can get pretty all the berries and one afternoon, some students and I were desperately trying to get as many berries as we could and were looking longingly and the fat, juicy ones out of reach when a bird landed on the far side of the bush and happily gobbled up most of the fruit and I swear it was laughing at us poor, flightless creatures.  I looked it up the next day and think it is called a Himalayan tree pie. A Himalayan tree pie!  I can just hear Homer's 'mmmm.'  

Oooh, tree pie! (courtesy of google image search)

Since it's the exams obviously the exams are all over and I am hoping to do another awards blog but haven't quite finished marking yet and there are some year sixes who I have high hopes for when it comes to winning awards.  On the whole I feel like I may have taught my year 7s and 8s too well as there were far fewer amusing answers than last year.  How terribly irritating that my students are learning and improving their English!  They could have warned me that they were doing that!  However, due to not quite knowing determiners and possessive pronouns as well as they should, about 90% of my year 7s will be getting the 'Ich Bin Ein Berliner' award for their answer to the question 'I have a hat.  It is ____ hat.'  and they put 'mine.'  Now I just need to teach them German spelling.  Just to show off for a moment though, I did have a student who made no mistakes in the grammar section.  And that was totally all me.  Her studying tonnes every night had nothing to do with it.

MOM IS NOT TO READ PAST THIS POINT. SERIOUSLY MOM, STOP READING RIGHT NOW!



Has she stopped?


Ok.  As some of you may have noticed, I'm very fond of reptiles.  This means I have kids bringing me geckos and skinks which they find around school.  My message of 'Don't touch wild animals' hasn't really sunk in with lizards but fortunately it has with serpents.  But I certainly never said 'Don't take photos of wild animals' so one of the teachers when he heard his neighbour had a cobra behind his house grabbed his iphone and ran to grab photos for me.

Isn't it cute!  I really hope my mom can't see this!

 ISI! ISI! (The cobra is the mascot of the International School of Islamabad.  Way cooler than Karachi's knight and Murree's water buffalo).  You will be happy to know that nobody, including the cobra, was hurt.

Lots of hugs to all and I miss T'eo.

edited by Divvies to correct comic title typo caused by internet deficiency.

Well, I promised you photos and these were the only ones I remembered to bring with me.

This one is from teachers' day.  The one in the front spends far too little time singing and dancing.

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

I would love to see this photo with a Superman costume photoshopped in.

This one too.

I love how in volleyball photos it looks like players are using a hover spell on the ball.

Screw volleyball, it's interpretive dance time!

I never knew how graceful and dignified volleyball was. (Disclaimer: this student loved this photo)

Or that doing 'I'm a little teapot' was integral to the game.

They found another use for the ribbons!

I don't know what they're laughing at but I like that they look happy in a photo.

I just like this photo.

Some of my students from last year!  I went to their school on the pretense of watching a football game but just wanted to catch up with them.

I have no clue what I was trying to take with this picture but I love the disembodied leg attacking someone.

So as you can see, I desperately need my mommy to come and teach me how to take successful photos.  Not really writing anything today as I'm in the middle of marking and have about 10000 to go.  I will just say that one of my students did 20 marks better than he did last year!  Of course, I'm taking all the credit.  Now back to marking!
Hugs to All and I miss T'eo.

I guess it's been a while

Greetings!  Now I have the huge problem of trying to fit everything that has happened in the last 6 weeks into one blog.  Fortunately for you I won't really try to.  I did start a post just over a month ago and have been adding bits to it every so often but I forgot to save it onto a usb so it's stuck on my laptop at home.  I'll do my best to just remember the interesting bits.
A very belated and happy Saint Porkin's Day to you all!  Normal people call it Star Wars Day and even normal-er people call it May the fourth.  (If you can't work out why that's Star Wars Day I'm not going to tell you.)  I celebrated the day by watching one of the most dreaded movies in the world, The Star Wars Holiday Special.  I wasn't brave enough to watch the original version but instead watched the Rifftrack of it.  It did make the day special because, to quote the Rifftrax boys, it's not everyday you get to see the stupidest thing you've ever seen.
Other fun things include the boys' and girls' house volleyball competition where the Ravens came fourth and second respectively.  Sadly, I forgot my camera for the girls' games but managed to get a few shots of the boys' games.  Which I've just found out you won't be seeing today as I seem to have deleted off my usb when I copied them to another teacher's computer.  Whoops.  Well here's one from the football match.

Oh no, a football! Hold me!  Only if you hold me!

  I realise that what they're doing is probably a well-used strategy but it still looks funny.  I could also have shown you photos from the match between the Jibjokha and Tashidenkha teachers, no I didn't actually play, but you'll have to wait for those too.  (I have just sent a message to the teacher asking him to not delete any of the photos until I can copy them back so you can relax. I'm sure you were very worried)  Sadly, we lost the match 2-1 but it was still fun as I got to go to Tashidenkha and see a bunch of my students from last year who were worried that I had forgotten them.  As if I could ever forget students who wrote such funny answers in their exams!  I did get chastised by one of the teachers because while I was catching up with my old students, I missed him kicking Jibjokha's only goal.  How dare I talk to students!  I was so ashamed of myself.

We also had the very first spelling bee ever at Jibjokha.  And it is purely coincidental that I organised it and my house won. (It really was. I was nervous about giving the Ravens too much help so I helped all the houses).  Words like 'thylacine' and 'rehabilitation' were spelled beautifully.  Sadly, words like 'feast' and 'friend' proved too difficult for some contestants but on the whole I was very proud of my spellers.

My choir also had their very first performance!  It was National Forestry Day last Monday (June 2nd) and since it's also the anniversary of the 4th King's coronation all schools had a celebration and planted trees.  I wasn't told about this until the last minute so we didn't have much time to rehearse but the kids really wanted to perform.  So we did 'Yellow Submarine.'  They looked lovely, all dressed in yellow and all the girl's had yellow ribbons in their hair which I managed to find in Thimphu. (The ribbons, not their hair)  I offered ribbons to the boys as well but they declined.  They performed with enormous smiles and great enthusiasm.  The only thing which could have made it better would have been if they had actually got one of the notes right but everyone seemed to enjoy themselves so I don't think it matters and I managed to keep a straight face.  I was trying to think of other songs with 'Yellow' in the title so we could use the ribbons again but the only two I could think of were 'Isty-Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' which always gives me flashbacks to what so easily could have been an international incident back in Pakistan (not me, a girl called Karen Binger should have worn more on stage in an Islamic country) and 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree' which wouldn't be terribly appropriate either.  Any other suggestions, please let me know.
Wish my kids luck as exams start on the 20th!  Some of them will have to answer questions on the stories of Nintendo games so hopefully they'll have some fun.  Not too many exams ask questions on space pirates and aliens.
Hugs to all and I miss T'eo!    

Football and Kookaburras

Happy T’eo’s birthday for yesterday!  I celebrated the day by doing a listening activity with my year 7s on a My Little Pony episode which had Spike as the main character which they thoroughly enjoyed.  Or, at least, almost thoroughly because they still had to answer questions on it.  My year 6s sang Happy Birthday as loudly as they could to try and make sure that he heard them.  I’m sure the classes around us greatly appreciated that.  Since I had to cancel my p.e. lesson with them on Friday, I taught them two games which were both called ‘cat and mouse’ but I re-named to be ‘dragon and pony’ and ‘dragontrap’ making it very clear that the dragons were doing the trapping, not being trapped.  The first game was the one where most of the kids hold hands in a circle and let the mouse or pony through but try and stop the cat or dragon.  T’eo should be pleased to hear that the dragon got the pony every time.  The other was another tag game which the kids didn’t quite understand or play properly but they still had fun running round and making up rules as they went along.  Perhaps I could start a Calvinball tournament.

I couldn’t quite manage a cake so instead I had a woolworth’s Christmas pudding given to me by Mark LaPrarie.  It wasn’t exactly Delia Smith but wasn’t too bad and I didn’t even burn myself getting it out of the container after boiling it.  I refrained from lighting it with methylated spirits though.  I hope Bill doesn’t mind (See The Big Six). 

One of my students even gave me a gift which I’m sorry to say, I couldn’t quite keep.  One of my year 8s came and told me, ‘There’s one like a kookaburra in the class!’  I assumed a bird had flown into the classroom and was probably surrounded by shrieking students.  However, this was not the case.  One of my students had caught a bird the day before and thought I might like it as a pet.  I would like to take this opportunity to say that the bird in question was not injured in any way.  It was a very beautiful bird, which really didn't look like a kookaburra, and I thanked my student very much but explained that wild animals would be unhappy as pets and it would be nicer to let the little guy go.  Fortunately, he seemed to understand and did not appear unhappy or insulted.  I carried the little guy back to Samdinkha in its improvised carry case (a cardboard Druk lager box) so I could let it go near where it was found.  I’m not sure was species it is but it stuck out a very long tongue and kept pecking at the box so my wild guess is some sort of relative of the woodpecker.  For now I’m calling it a geleytenzini in honour of its finder.

Awwwww! I would like to stress that I washed my hands very carefully after the little one flew away.

The final thing I have to report is that the boys' football is over.  Sadly, Raven House lost the crown (which is a bit of a pun if you know about the Bhutanese kings) and came fourth but still played very well.  Cypress House was victorious and I continued my tradition of taking photos of people’s backs and ones that would be fine if they just weren’t so blurry.  Perhaps Pete and Dick could give me lessons (The Big Six once again).

"Help, the nasty football's attacking us! Hold me!"  "Only if you hold me!"

I'm not sure what game is going on in the foreground but they seem to be having fun.

He totally meant to do that

Hugs to All and curses to the wind gods for not being nicer to the James Craig on the recent Newcastle trip!

Sticky Geckos

The Ravens won their first game!  I shouted really helpful things like ‘Go Phub Dem!’ and ‘No, get the ball to go the other way!’ which I’m sure helped get them to a nil-all draw and then 4-0 win on the penalty shoot outs (I hope I’m using correct football, as in soccer, terms.  I don’t think any off side rules came into play but then I wouldn’t have noticed if they had).  Sadly, they lost their second game which was 1-0 to Takin House and, even more sadly, I wasn’t there to see it as I got a wonderful strain of the flu which kept me at home for a few days.  I’m sure they would have won if I had been there to shout more really helpful things.  I did manage to get a few pictures of the first match and a couple of them were hardly blurry at all.  I need mom to come and teach me how to properly use a camera.

The Ravens are naturally in white and the Blue Poppies in red because that's logical.  I'm not sure which team the dog was playing for.

The Ravens during half time.

A Raven poised to attack.  To be fair, this was probably taken when the ball rolled down the hill and had to be rescused which happen about every 2 and a half minutes.

Damcho did not push Sangay out of the way.  It just really looks like she did.

Along with trying to act like I knew something about football and being irritatingly ill, I had a stressful adventure after my desire to have a moth-free pantry went slightly wrong.  I brought with me some moth and silverfish traps which are a little cardboard tent-y thing with really sticky stuff on the inside (Apologies to any insect lovers out there but they drive me nuts.  Are silverfish insects?  I’ve never counted their legs.  Well, apologies to any arthropod lovers anyways).  Until last week I had totally forgotten that I had them but set one as soon as I remembered.  I got home from school and checked to see if the trap had been successful.  And while it had been successful in catching something it was about as far from something I wanted caught as possible.  A juvenile gecko was stuck fast to the pad and was obviously displeased with the state of affairs.  It had already dropped its tail which was also stuck fast but that hadn’t really helped.  I tried to unstick it with a spoon but the poor thing really was stuck fast and I was terrified of hurting it.  So I did the only thing I could think of.  I called my mommy.  She first suggested sprinkling flour (which I didn’t have but for reasons I can’t remember I did have icing sugar) on the sticky stuff which did help in stopping my hand getting stuck but had limited success on the gecko.  I managed to get its front half off the stuff but could not get its back half off and it was understandably not cooperative.  By now I was utterly in tears because I had a very distressed gecko and I really didn’t know if it was going to be ok.  Fortunately, my incredibly tolerant and patient mother asked the all-knowing Oracle of Google what the best course of action would be and it immediately answered ‘Olive Oil.’  This was generously poured over numerous things in the kitchen including the moth trap.  I’m happy to say that it worked almost instantaneously.  I had to give the little guy a quick bath before setting it free.  It did need a bit of persuasion to get off my hand but eventually ran off to a hopefully less sticky destination.  I hope it accepted my apology which I gave numerous times.  And I love my mommy very much and I hope the gecko does too.

We also had our school rimdro last Friday which did not include any fire dancers unlike last time.  Though they are fun to watch I was quite happy that nobody was there to throw a handful of kerosene soaked bark powder on me.  Of course, since I wore my kira many students insisted on having a photo with me but it is Bhutanese custom to not smile in photos which, since I did smile, led to some interesting photos.

Ecstatic

I swear they asked for the photo!

And since you are meant to wear a badge, I came prepared this year and wore this on my tego (blouse).  I didn't really try to explain it.

It's now a secret to everyone.

 And finally, last year I saw some young monks gaming in an internet cafe but was unable to give you a photo because the only one I took was a bit blurry.  Yesterday a couple of slightly older monks came into the same cafe and were happy to pose.

Ah, meditation

Hugs to all and have a strawberry on the 19th for T'eo's Birthday!  That really should be an International Holiday.  T'eo!