It's been a long time, I know! Things have been going well lately... beautiful weather again ( low 70s every day; it had been in the 50s during the day which felt really cold!) and no sickness or losing of wallets. One of my students wrote in his homework, "Today is my unlucky day." Which was totally a mistake but it seems so apt- last week was my unlucky week.

Most of my classes are still going well. The CT definitely makes or breaks the class- the ones I click well with I have great classes with, and the couple I don't click well with I have terrible classes with. It's been a while since I've had a job where there is that level of cooperation and codependence- in the last few jobs I've had if I wasn't crazy about a coworker it was a minor annoyance at worst. I know a lot of it is the language and culture gap. But out of 11 classes I teach I really like 9 of them... so that's not bad!

My cute Level 1 class went to Level 2. Michael, the crazy kid, dropped out- the CT said his dad said he could barely get him to come in the first place and he would always cry when it was time to go to class. It seems weird to actively hate English class so much, especially when you're so young. But at least I know his hatred of English class pre-dated me. :)

Uncle Jeff asked about Oscar, the kid with the big ears and questionable English skills. He has gotten a lot better. He passed the final test and did really well in his oral test. I was very proud of him. His class was all going to the next level so we had games day on Friday, when we play English games and eat snacks. I got to try all the weird things I never buy at 7-11~ weird puffy snacks, seaweed-flavored potato chips (no, I'm not joking), things that looked like uncooked ramen noodles, and of course heart-shaped Doritos and Oreos. Why? I don't know. For Valentine's Day? Do they celebrate that here? I don't know.

I taught a couple of kindy classes last week, and a couple of "Winter Camp" classes for parents who don't want their kids sitting idle during their vacations. Those were kind of fun but kind of hard because I didn't really know what level they were at and there was no curriculum. I made a word search (online) for the younger kids and I told them when they were done they could draw on the back. This one girl turned it over and made her own word search and she was like, "You can do it, it's different!" And sure enough, she had hidden all the words but in different places and made different letters for fillers. I was like, dang, I barely had the patience to make one on the computer, and I don't think I'd have the patience to actually solve a word search ever. Some kids are just so crazily smart.

I work all this week- a little extra than normal, actually- but next Sat is Chinese New Years and we get a full week off for that. It's unpaid which is bad but I'm looking forward to it. I don't have the money to do too much but I should be able to go hiking a few days at least. Take the train somewhere. They say the big cities pretty much shut down during the week. Papaya Milkshake Man has already told me he will shut down :( but the 7-11s will stay open so I will not want for seaweed potato chips.