This is how it works....

When going to your new teaching job in a foreign country, this is how it works....


After flying for over 20 hours and changing into a new day with out knowing it you arrive sweaty, hungry and disheveled. A perfect time to meet your new boss and new co-workers, right? Yeah, not exactly but you don't have a choice. In our case we did no planning ahead, arrived and thought....huh I wonder what we are suppose to do? We pull out a handbook that we were given back in February and read that we should not attempt to go through immigration until we talk to someone at the school. Okay- so we waited and waited and waited and realized no one was here for us so we decide we should call but we have no one's number, hummmm. Okay we could email but our battery is dead and we are in a new world with new plugs that don't match ours. Hummmm again. After many many obstacles we got in touch with them and they had been waiting for us on the other side of immigration. Oh wait, the same immigration that the handbook told us not to pass? Yeah, that one.

Going through immigration, customs and bag check was pretty much no different than walking out your door of your home. Yeah no one really seemed to care about anything. Weird.

HELLO HEAT & HUMIDITY- we were slapped in the face with the most intense balmy heat and it was midnight. Wow.

Us and the four new couples piled in a bus, were dropped off in our new apartment and told that they would be back to pick us up for a meeting in the morning. No time to rest? Recoop from crazy jet lag. I guess not.

So here we are, in our new place it is dark and we have no idea where we are except when we landed during sunset on the plane it appeared as though we were touching down in the middle of a barren desert, which I suppose we were.

Basically the week consists of shopping- which I hate because I hate spending money and I am overwhelmed by the fact that we need to buy EVERYTHING.  We have to furnish, decorate, stock a kitchen,----whatever our house was empty, we had to buy EVERYTHING. That is A LOT of spending. First question - where is the thrift store? Not really an option.

So lots of shopping, lots of meetings, too many social events in the evenings. And to compare the transition to Colombia- it was the oppisite. We arrived in Colombia with 13 single girls in the begining of their teaching careers. We arrived here with three other couples who have taught all over the world and just seem to know WAY more about teaching than us, Smile and nod, smile and nod. Who are we kidding- the whole time we are hearing this mantra of WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING HERE, HOW DID WE GET THIS JOB?

Aaron made a great analogy and it is about football (American Football) which neither of us know shit about but it works. So somehow we, these two small midgets who know nothing about football, get drafted for the NFL. We have never met the team so the big boss, who says that we'll do great, flies us into the city to meet the team a week before the Super Bowl. We arrive to a team of good looking, high performing, type A personalities, who smack us on the back, welcome us to the team, tell us how hard we will work (we heard this about 100 times) and then handed us about twenty 5" binders with all the plays in it and basically said-- you'll do fine. See you at the game. Aaron and I look at eachother and think WTF!

Like I said, brilliant anolagy. We did arrive a week before school started, everyone at our school is insane- you know they are all ubber fit (even the ones who popped out a baby last month) and well read and spoken, they wake up at wee hours in the morning train together for iron mans, rewrite cirriculums and probably have time to volunteer at some NGO. So when we arrive they give us the cirriculum, all the plans for the year and the key to our classroom. Oh yeah, then they all leave for a week vacation.

Because, did I mention it was Ramadan. If you. like me, grew up in the states and know jack about this religion than let me tell you this is a MONTH holiday where you cannot eat or drink in public (even in your car) from sun up to sun down..which is really hard when you are touring around on a bus all day shopping. We would seriously go in the bus and duck under the seats to drink. Then after the ramadan is over - which oddly enough is not a set date but rather the whole world just waits for some special guy in Saudi to call it, they all go on a week vacation call Eid. Which is why we were alone at school preparing for the unknown and coming home each night asking ourselves yet again.....WTF are we doing here?

May I add that this is only our third year teaching.  And in Colombia (as much as I absolutely LOVED my school there) they were not so intense when it came to academics. And now we are working at this crazy school which, have I mentioned, is REALLY into pedagogy and the most current practices. (half of the staff was at PD over the summer)

It was a crazy start to our time here and really our main focus was school.

We did manage to get out and check out a little of the city:

We walked to the fisherman's warf:

We walked down the awesome, safe, well lit, well traveled walking path along the ocean.

We went swimming in the saltiest ocean ever (perhaps because they desalinize the water for drinking and just through the remaining salt back in...it really stings the eyes and other parts of the body as well.)

It was so humid and after my camera never adjusted to the heat- it just was fogged up- hence the fogy photo.

We went out with couch surfing to the most eclectic group of people I have ever dined with....including a South Korean, and Indonesian. a phillopino, a pakistani, an indian and us. We went out to an Ifkar, a huge meal to break the fast and it was so delicious. I must mention the food is amazing! Here we also smoked our fist Shisha- (flavored tobacco out of a hukka)

Well that was a lot of random thoughts. So I think I will go to bed and write more another day. Thanks for reading c:

Here are some photos of our place, a three bedroom three bath apartment located on the second floor of a 8 complex apartment.

This is the niest room of our house and the only one we are planning on decorating. We managed to find all this furniture second hand not including the bean bags we had made in Colombia (gracias Beatrice) Which if you have ever tried to fill a bean bag with those small white plastic beans- do yourself a favor and be very careful. I think I can honestly say trying to gather those statically litte f*rs, after a spill was the hardest I have ever done!

This is the flooring in the rest of the WHOLE house, which is ungodly ugly and why we are not even going to decorate the other rooms in the house.

View from the back (a little ghetto, especially the frion from the ac dripping in the alley way.

bedroom 

The best thing about our place is we have a bath tub - which words can't explain my bliss. I love baths and haven't lived in a house with a tub for 15 years!!!!!!!!