Tuesday 02nd May

Hey folks, how you doing..

I've just finished my second day at school. It's great but at the same time it's pretty dam terrifying. The kids are sweet but most of them are also tough little bruts, every day you're pulling kids apart, telling them to stop fighting and to play nice or get on with there work.

The school I'm teaching at is going to be closed next week so rather than having a week in the sunshine (how nice would that have been) I've decided to be a good lad and go work in one of the other schools. By doing this I'll stay in the flow of things and hopefully by the end of next week, I'll feel a bit more confident in the classroom.

To say I'm nervous about teaching would be an understatement. At the moment I'm kind of watching from the sidelines however I'm still very much involved in the lessons, break times and generally keeping an eye on the kids. Forgive me if I've gone over this in previously blogs but when you think I've only been here just over a couple of weeks my spanish isn't that great, certainly not to answer questions or hold a conversation anyway. When you have 8 kids asking you questions looking for the right answer it's pretty dam scary, I feel a right twit when I can't answer what is probably a simple question. Also as you might expect the kids have a radar that says, hey! here comes another one of those english guys that can't speak spanish! lets take the pi55 he'll never know!.. lords knows what it'll be like when I'm standing in front of the black board attempting to teach maths, science, art and personal studies... my only saving grace is that I'll be teaching alongside Jen who is both very lovely and a great teacher. I'm sure we'll be fine and that this is just pre match nerves.

So apart from all the teaching I played football the other night for the first time in about 10 years. A group of us played for about 1hr 15mins, we lost 10-8 against a bunch of guys we didn't know. They were pretty good so we did well to get 8 goals past them. We had gone out to go go carting but when we were told the carting was closed we opted for a game of football instead.. as we HAD planned to go carting, I decided a bottle of beer, some cream cheese on bread and 2 chocolate bars would be a good idea just before we headed out so after 5 minutes of football I very nearly brought the lot up.. lucky for me and the others I didn't. Since playing football I've been walking like John Wayne and my shoulder has been pretty painful again so I obviously still need to take it a bit steady.

We had another great BBQ on friday, we then went out for a few drinks, I got back home at 4am and the next morning woke with a headache but I took it pretty steady all in all so I was able to shake it off by 2ish.. me and a couple of friends, phoebe and kathleen went to a museum, ate ice cream then went out for a meal together on Saturday.. it was a really lovely day .

Right thats about it for now, not a great deal to report on that I can remember over this past week apart from to say although school is scary, i do love it and Arequipa is still great. I'm off home now to no doubt watch a re run of an old Friends episode and to have a ricey/potatoy/chickeny dinner..

take it steady folks.. x