So today was an unbelievably random day.
I love sensible days, when it looks like rain and I grab my umbrella, and then use it. Days like that are fantastic. Especially with my umbrella, which is permanently borrowed from some unknown person. It's quite ridiculous, and that makes it awesome. It's black, and the inside is patterned with the ever-classy cartooned cosmetics (perfume, lipstick, mirrors, roses) the outside has a fluffy pink be-gloved hand spritzing some perfume into the air.
I love my students. You're probably saying, Janine, shut it, we know. I gush about them quite a bit. But today. Today, was special (and I'm not being sarcastic).
Let's start from the beginning. Because of my sunburn I've been sleeping funny, guh I'm an idiot. So when I woke up this morning, I was very confused. I did recognize the gray day, so I grabbed my umbrella and scooted out the door. My first lesson of the week is Monday mornings at 7:20 am, and it's always a bit hit or miss. They're great students, but sometimes I'm a questionable teacher.
But today we were on fire. We all had great weekends and lovely stories to tell. Then we began an in depth discussion of being economical with the truth. Which turned into the classic "lie of omission". The big one, was Jezisek. Jezisek (for you non-Czechs) is the Czech holiday gift-giver. Much like Santa Claus, he is believed in by children as the bestower of awesome Christmas goodness, until eventually you realize that it's acutally your parents and you realize that sometimes adults lie . . . the lie of omission or a white lie.
I got to thinking about when I realized about Santa Claus, and there was no big epiphany, or tragically scarring moment when I realized I couldn't trust my parents. I just began to understand, and I ask you, is this our fall from grace, our loss of innocence . . . ohhh I'm deep. Kidding.
But back to my awesome students. The title of today's blog comes from a gentleman who decided to play teacher today, and wrote an English word on the board that I did not know "weir"
1. a small dam in a river or stream.
2. a fence, as of brush or narrow boards, or a net set in a stream, channel, etc., for catching fish.
Later, we were playing the "liar" game, wherein each person writes an even number of sentences, half true and half false. The group then asks questions to convince the writer that all the sentences were true. I like to start out with "I'm fluent in Hawai'ian." This gentleman, however, chose "When I was young I would go to the circus twice a day everyday." And when we, was a class, erupted in laughter, he responded "It was very cheerful". His favorite act, the tightrope walkers.
Not sure why that was so funny, it just added to the strangeness of my day, which included reading a morbid Jack London short story (The Law of Life), being convinced to teach (after the lesson) one of my students words you wouldn't say in front of your grandmother, having cars drive through puddles and get me and my pants soaking wet, admiring my ridiculous sunburn, sitting under a bug-infested tree and remembering that today, is only monday.
Yeah, like I said, random.
Thus concludes the blog-stravaganza . . . I made up for lost time with these, now didn't I?
Monday, May 11, 2009
Konopiste and Folkovy Kvitek
I think as humans, we strive to not be average. I think it's important to a lot of people to be good at one thing, even if it's something quite some and insignificant, or something one might not be too proud of having a talent in.
For example, there was a time when I was great at French (then I tried it again in College). A time when I was quite skilled at the piano (then I heard other people play). A time when I had fantastic ability to negotiate in Human Rights courses, write last minute Music History papers and sing the heck out of an aria . . . but alas, that was college. I can type fast, though I make lots of mistakes. I was great at customer service, and then I got Lyme disease and also realized customer service makes you hate yourself. I was never very good at working at the bank.
I've come to realize that my highest talents lie in the less traditional skill sets. For example, I can fall down and do "almost no" to "quite ouchy" damage to myself. I can drop things, I'm fantastic at sleeping in and being the opposit of a morning person, I'm great at running into the wall. Oh and for some uncanny reason, I can sunburn like it's nobody's business.
This past weekend was another lovely one, weather-wise, in Prague. It rained a bit on Friday, so I went to see Star Trek (umm, Czech movie theaters are complicated!). And Saturday Marcela, Kate and I headed to Konopiste (near Benesov) to see a folk music festival called "Folkovy Kvitek" which means "folk blossom" according to an online dictionary.
The festival was on the grounds of a castle called Konopiste. It has been around since the 13th century, and was converted to its' current style by Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That's right, Archduke "I'm going go get myself assassinated in Sarajevo by the Black Hand and start World War I" Franz Ferdinand. It's now a museum, and though we didn't go inside, the outside is beautiful, has a bear in the moat (actually so do lots of Czech castles and my googling wouldn't tell me why) and some killer peacocks.
After we explored the castle we grabbed some bench space and sat down to enjoy some great Czech Folk music. Now this wasn't traditional Bohemian or Slavic Folk music, but folk, country, bluegrass etc. It was lovely! Very few songs were sung in English, but that's alright because we were able sing along to the melodies of some familiar songs (like The Rose) and hear some others that were really familiar but we couldn't quite figure out. The musicians were amazing, and there was a contest for kids, the 12 finalists played.
The festival provided me with ample time to pick up on a few Czech words that I know; and another thing I'm excellent at, people-watching.
Later, when Kate and I decided to head home, (Marcela, the awesome lady, stayed until 2 am!) we took a 2-3 km jaunt through the countryside (complete with fields of yellow flowers, not dandelions) and enjoyed a nice train ride home with a lovely view of Bohemia.
The sunburn comes into play with the deceptively scorching May rays, and me not taking Marcela's advice and using some of her sunscreen. Now I have raccoon eyes and some extremely strange tan lines on my back . . . like I said, I've got skills!
Check out these pictures and tons more that I just posted on my picas page, linked over there ----->
Gosh I'm a dork.
For example, there was a time when I was great at French (then I tried it again in College). A time when I was quite skilled at the piano (then I heard other people play). A time when I had fantastic ability to negotiate in Human Rights courses, write last minute Music History papers and sing the heck out of an aria . . . but alas, that was college. I can type fast, though I make lots of mistakes. I was great at customer service, and then I got Lyme disease and also realized customer service makes you hate yourself. I was never very good at working at the bank.
I've come to realize that my highest talents lie in the less traditional skill sets. For example, I can fall down and do "almost no" to "quite ouchy" damage to myself. I can drop things, I'm fantastic at sleeping in and being the opposit of a morning person, I'm great at running into the wall. Oh and for some uncanny reason, I can sunburn like it's nobody's business.
This past weekend was another lovely one, weather-wise, in Prague. It rained a bit on Friday, so I went to see Star Trek (umm, Czech movie theaters are complicated!). And Saturday Marcela, Kate and I headed to Konopiste (near Benesov) to see a folk music festival called "Folkovy Kvitek" which means "folk blossom" according to an online dictionary.
The festival was on the grounds of a castle called Konopiste. It has been around since the 13th century, and was converted to its' current style by Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That's right, Archduke "I'm going go get myself assassinated in Sarajevo by the Black Hand and start World War I" Franz Ferdinand. It's now a museum, and though we didn't go inside, the outside is beautiful, has a bear in the moat (actually so do lots of Czech castles and my googling wouldn't tell me why) and some killer peacocks.
After we explored the castle we grabbed some bench space and sat down to enjoy some great Czech Folk music. Now this wasn't traditional Bohemian or Slavic Folk music, but folk, country, bluegrass etc. It was lovely! Very few songs were sung in English, but that's alright because we were able sing along to the melodies of some familiar songs (like The Rose) and hear some others that were really familiar but we couldn't quite figure out. The musicians were amazing, and there was a contest for kids, the 12 finalists played.
The festival provided me with ample time to pick up on a few Czech words that I know; and another thing I'm excellent at, people-watching.
Later, when Kate and I decided to head home, (Marcela, the awesome lady, stayed until 2 am!) we took a 2-3 km jaunt through the countryside (complete with fields of yellow flowers, not dandelions) and enjoyed a nice train ride home with a lovely view of Bohemia.
The sunburn comes into play with the deceptively scorching May rays, and me not taking Marcela's advice and using some of her sunscreen. Now I have raccoon eyes and some extremely strange tan lines on my back . . . like I said, I've got skills!
Check out these pictures and tons more that I just posted on my picas page, linked over there ----->
Gosh I'm a dork.
You're making a camel out of a mosquito
I absolutely love idioms. Because they're fun. Because they're amusing. Because they make no sense. Because they give me an excuse to show Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch, a scene from Patch Adams and assorted scenes from my mother's and my guilty pleasure favorite NCIS (check out Ziva idioms, they're hilarious).
I have a few awesomely fantastic advanced student that are translators that do mostly scientific and legal translation work. So they want some general conversational English; cause, you know, legalese isn't really conducive to chit chat. Because conversational English all over the world consists of so much slang and idiomatic phrases, we thought this would be a fun, and entertaining place to start.
One of the students, in our first lesson, mentioned that she thought English was a logical language, to which I replied "wtf?". But she went on to conclude that the tenses, grammar and its usages made good solid sense. This hearkened me back to my French I and II classes, when conjugating verbs was like putting together a puzzle, before all that irregular mumbo-jumbo. She recently noted that idioms make things slightly less logical.
We recently covered proverbs, and I learned this gem "You're making a camel out of a mosquito" which is the Czech equivalent of "You're making a mountain out of a molehill". And in one of those awesome and insane moments, things from my work life, crossed over, directly, into my personal life.
You see, last Sunday evening I scheduled myself for some much needed "skype" dates with my parents and my good friend DRJ (whose blog is linked).
I had the window open to create a lovely breeze in the room. One of my "beefs" with Czech apartments is the lack of screens on the windows, meaning that a window left open lets in all sorts of things, beyond a breeze.
Not sure if many of you know this, but I have a thing . . . about bugs. Spiders, and the way they move, give me the creeps. Mosquitoes (aka Minnesota's second state bird) make me want to claw my eyes out. Ticks . . . well they give you Lyme Disease. Flys, well, they're just gross. I've blogged about them before (that's right, this girl's been out in the blogo-sphere hitting up the interwebs.)
Not sure when or how it started, maybe the neighbor boys threatening me with worms in the hair on rainy mornings at the bus stop. Maybe I had a tragic bug swallowing experience that I have since repressed due to trauma. Maybe watching Arachnaphobia with my Dad (bad move on his part . . . kidding!). Maybe it was going to camp for a week and my brothers hiding extremely detailed and life-like rubber bugs EVERYWHERE in my bedroom, like a terrifying welcome-home present. Regardless, whatever the reason, bugs and I, we do not get a long.
As past house-mates know, I generally shy away from shuffling rodents and insects off the mortal coil unless I actually have to, I leave that to the more manly or more logical and rational (ie Miss Madeline and not DRJ) people. Like recently the large spider that just "appeared" in the corner of my bedroom late one evening. I nearly died of fear, and allowed my lovely and awesome flatmate to bludgeon it to death with a nice black shoe.
On this specific Sunday I was not plagued by spiders, but rather insects of the mosquito-like flying variety. They came into my room, and stayed. Hanging out in high corners and flying around and around and around and around. At first, during my conversation with my parents, I thought they would leave. But they didn't. The bugs (we'll call them Pavel and Martin) decided they enjoyed the minimalist interior decorating that is Chez Janine, and wanted to stay.
Conversation with Mom and Dad ended, and I called DRJ on skype (which including an amusing moment where our internet freaked out and began skipping as he was mid-word, and didn't stop until I took the battery out). I tried to stay calm, but the bugs were still bothering me.
Nearly 3/4s of the way through our chat, I had had enough. I stood, placed my laptop on my dresser, turned up the volume and began to circle my room on the hunt. I was armed with only a flip-flop sandal, the dry sarcasm and schadenfreude of my skype-friend, and my wits. Needless to say it was an epic battle . . . but flip-flop willed out.
Eventually Martin (the little one) settled on a spot high above my desk. With some quick thinking I launched my flip-flop against the wall, effectively killing him dead as a doornail and adding some new shoe shaped art to my otherwise blank wall.
Later, Pavel, the pesky large one, proved to be more of a problem. After hours (probably twenty minutes) of circling, I felt I had exhausted my efforts. I tried waving him towards the window, turning off the lights, changing the lighting situation to see if he'd be attracted to something away from the ceiling. But nothing worked. I followed him around and around, as he flitted from corner to corner and wall to wall.
By this point, Pavel was exhausted and my neck was sore from constantly looking "up" at the ceiling. In a rare moment of luck for me Pavel took off from the wall, and headed right towards me. I'm guessing he was living on borrowed time and tired of keeping body and soul together, he knew the end was nigh. I like to thing he wanted to give me some satisfaction in his last moments (or he really was a vicious bug and wanted to kill me or something). Finally, with some dive-bombing (on Pavel's part) thwacking and flailing (on my part), Pavel dropped like the flying bug that he was, and died on my wall.
I like to think Pavel and Martin died good and heroic deaths fighting for dominance in a world ruled by humans terrified of something 1:1 trillionth (I made that up) of their size.
Now, though I sat under this tree today in the square and I feel like their are bugs crawling all over me . . . I think Pavel and Martin may be exacting their revenge.
I have a few awesomely fantastic advanced student that are translators that do mostly scientific and legal translation work. So they want some general conversational English; cause, you know, legalese isn't really conducive to chit chat. Because conversational English all over the world consists of so much slang and idiomatic phrases, we thought this would be a fun, and entertaining place to start.
One of the students, in our first lesson, mentioned that she thought English was a logical language, to which I replied "wtf?". But she went on to conclude that the tenses, grammar and its usages made good solid sense. This hearkened me back to my French I and II classes, when conjugating verbs was like putting together a puzzle, before all that irregular mumbo-jumbo. She recently noted that idioms make things slightly less logical.
We recently covered proverbs, and I learned this gem "You're making a camel out of a mosquito" which is the Czech equivalent of "You're making a mountain out of a molehill". And in one of those awesome and insane moments, things from my work life, crossed over, directly, into my personal life.
You see, last Sunday evening I scheduled myself for some much needed "skype" dates with my parents and my good friend DRJ (whose blog is linked).
I had the window open to create a lovely breeze in the room. One of my "beefs" with Czech apartments is the lack of screens on the windows, meaning that a window left open lets in all sorts of things, beyond a breeze.
Not sure if many of you know this, but I have a thing . . . about bugs. Spiders, and the way they move, give me the creeps. Mosquitoes (aka Minnesota's second state bird) make me want to claw my eyes out. Ticks . . . well they give you Lyme Disease. Flys, well, they're just gross. I've blogged about them before (that's right, this girl's been out in the blogo-sphere hitting up the interwebs.)
Not sure when or how it started, maybe the neighbor boys threatening me with worms in the hair on rainy mornings at the bus stop. Maybe I had a tragic bug swallowing experience that I have since repressed due to trauma. Maybe watching Arachnaphobia with my Dad (bad move on his part . . . kidding!). Maybe it was going to camp for a week and my brothers hiding extremely detailed and life-like rubber bugs EVERYWHERE in my bedroom, like a terrifying welcome-home present. Regardless, whatever the reason, bugs and I, we do not get a long.
As past house-mates know, I generally shy away from shuffling rodents and insects off the mortal coil unless I actually have to, I leave that to the more manly or more logical and rational (ie Miss Madeline and not DRJ) people. Like recently the large spider that just "appeared" in the corner of my bedroom late one evening. I nearly died of fear, and allowed my lovely and awesome flatmate to bludgeon it to death with a nice black shoe.
On this specific Sunday I was not plagued by spiders, but rather insects of the mosquito-like flying variety. They came into my room, and stayed. Hanging out in high corners and flying around and around and around and around. At first, during my conversation with my parents, I thought they would leave. But they didn't. The bugs (we'll call them Pavel and Martin) decided they enjoyed the minimalist interior decorating that is Chez Janine, and wanted to stay.
Conversation with Mom and Dad ended, and I called DRJ on skype (which including an amusing moment where our internet freaked out and began skipping as he was mid-word, and didn't stop until I took the battery out). I tried to stay calm, but the bugs were still bothering me.
Nearly 3/4s of the way through our chat, I had had enough. I stood, placed my laptop on my dresser, turned up the volume and began to circle my room on the hunt. I was armed with only a flip-flop sandal, the dry sarcasm and schadenfreude of my skype-friend, and my wits. Needless to say it was an epic battle . . . but flip-flop willed out.
Eventually Martin (the little one) settled on a spot high above my desk. With some quick thinking I launched my flip-flop against the wall, effectively killing him dead as a doornail and adding some new shoe shaped art to my otherwise blank wall.
Later, Pavel, the pesky large one, proved to be more of a problem. After hours (probably twenty minutes) of circling, I felt I had exhausted my efforts. I tried waving him towards the window, turning off the lights, changing the lighting situation to see if he'd be attracted to something away from the ceiling. But nothing worked. I followed him around and around, as he flitted from corner to corner and wall to wall.
By this point, Pavel was exhausted and my neck was sore from constantly looking "up" at the ceiling. In a rare moment of luck for me Pavel took off from the wall, and headed right towards me. I'm guessing he was living on borrowed time and tired of keeping body and soul together, he knew the end was nigh. I like to thing he wanted to give me some satisfaction in his last moments (or he really was a vicious bug and wanted to kill me or something). Finally, with some dive-bombing (on Pavel's part) thwacking and flailing (on my part), Pavel dropped like the flying bug that he was, and died on my wall.
I like to think Pavel and Martin died good and heroic deaths fighting for dominance in a world ruled by humans terrified of something 1:1 trillionth (I made that up) of their size.
Now, though I sat under this tree today in the square and I feel like their are bugs crawling all over me . . . I think Pavel and Martin may be exacting their revenge.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
